Hello, this is not the web we were promised.

The internet didn’t just evolve—it was rewritten without our consent. It’s time we understood how, and what’s at stake.

May 29, 2025

Once upon a time, I loved the internet.

It was full of promise: a place to share ideas, make things, build a little audience, maybe even earn a living doing what you love. I watched people I admired go from obscure bloggers to full-time writers, from Etsy artists to thriving brands.

But somewhere along the way, that promise got twisted.

Big Tech is eating the web

Now, too many of us feel like we’re shouting into the void.

Creators feel like we’re trapped in a rigged game, one where we don’t know the rules, but the platforms do. The algorithm changes, and your reach disappears.

So you do what they want: post more, promote harder, pivot again. Somehow it’s still not enough.

You can’t win because it’s their game, and they change the rules without warning.

This affects us all

The internet used to be how we kept up with friends, explored new ideas, and checked in on the world. Now those same platforms feel more like noisy shopping malls than communities.

What was once connection has become manipulation. What felt like freedom now feels like a funnel.

We didn’t agree to this. And yet, here we are.

I started this Substack because I want to understand what happened. Not just to me but to all of us.

It’s not just broken, it’s polluted.

Search has become a mess. It's harder than ever to find real answers, let alone trustworthy ones. Results are flooded with junk content, malicious spam, or links that loop back to Google’s own properties.

And now, AI-generated overviews sit at the top of the page often without citations, nuance, or context. Rather than pointing us to sites where we can learn, Google now seems to believe a reworded summary is all we deserve.

We used to search the web. Now we get handed an AIO directive that tells us to eat rocks.

Our feeds, once filled with people we chose to follow, are now crowded with ads, bots, angry trolls, and algorithmically-juiced outrage bait. And it’s all designed to keep us scrolling just a little longer, giving up moments of our lives for their profit.

We deserve answers.

Why does it feel like the web turned against its own creators?

Why does every interaction turn into a privacy invasion?

Why does everything feel watched, ranked, commodified, and hollowed out?

It’s time to connect the dots.

I intend to explore questions about power, freedom, consent, and the value of human work in a machine-optimized world.

And while there are plenty of think pieces about AI, surveillance, and platform policy, most feel disconnected from the real, lived experience of being online in 2025. So this is my attempt to connect those dots by answering the questions we should all be asking.

Who am I?

I grew up in what’s now called Silicon Valley. My father was an early VP at Intel and later at Sun Microsystems, so tech wasn’t something I discovered, it was part of the air I breathed.

I fell in love with personal computers in the 1980s, built a data-entry business in college, and created my own knowledge base long before anyone called them wikis.

I designed game content for AOL and ran a BBS during law school.

I passed two bar exams using study systems I’d coded for myself. I built databases to run my law practice, before most lawyers even knew what one was.

In the decades since, I became a stay-at-home mom and widow who supported my autistic son by blogging and creating content online.

I danced to Google’s tune. I contorted myself to please the social media platforms.

And they destroyed my business overnight.

Why am I doing this?

The internet is different now and I don’t just mean more complex or more populated.

What started as a way to connect individuals so they could share their knowledge and perspectives has stopped being about connection at all.

Now, it’s about commodifying every aspect of our lives — far more than most people realize, and infinitely more than most of us ever agreed to.

So I’m writing again. Not just to create but to investigate and make sense of it all.

Who is this for?

I’m writing for the creators who feel like the platforms have broken them.

I’m writing for the people who don’t yet understand how the system works and that it is turning every inch of their lives into data for the tech companies to profit from, regardless of their personal consent.

And I’m writing in the hope that understanding it might give us new ways to resist, subvert, or even escape it.

“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”
— W. Edwards Deming

I’m tired of the internet using the best of us against ourselves. I’m tired of big tech ruining the connection and authenticity that once made the web worth logging into.

So, in this Substack, I’ll explore how this consentless economy feeds an algorithmic machine that’s destroying us as individuals and as a society.

Eff the algorithm.