For a long time I’ve used an acronym, PRE, to encapsulate my sense of humanity’s relationship with the greater world: People Ruin Everything.

If you are old enough, you may remember the excitement of the early Internet days (understood here is a sort of ‘general use’ sense of the ‘net: if I were being scrupulously ackurit I’d specify ‘WWW’ — this in contradistinction to ‘early Internet days’ being understood as, say, the years when the Arpanet, et al. were growing in use): even though early (mid-1990s) websites were fairly crude, there came a bracing breath of limitless possibilities for knowledge sharing, and all kinds of Commie stuff like that there. It was, or sure was going to be, a brave new world.

Naturally, things started to go violently south once commerce got its carrion claws in: HTML, limited in itself, got bent and bloated out of all recognition, partly from the creative desires of developers to make websites more interesting but mostly from the desires of commerce to make the whole thing more profitable. I used to write web pages with a text editor … have you “viewed source” on any “modern” web pages and cast your eyes over the glutinous stew of HTML, CSS and Javascript and who knows what else that make a website able to not only shadow forth content (well, if you’ve signed in) but irritatingly keep you there, insist that you watch advertisements which begin auto-playing whether you want them to or not, insist that you sign up for email notifications, insist that you not only sign in to your account (though the site will confusingly greet you BY NAME, BEFORE you’ve signed in) but get a one-time code (and believe me, you WILL have to do this more than once!) to ensure that it’s really really you, because you deleted your browser history to save disk space and now the website thinks you’re coming in from a new device — and if you ask the powers-that-be why they’ve made this all so fucking irritating, they’ll send you a form response explaining that your security is so so important to them?

So I don’t wonder why I am retreating more and more to paper books. When I open them, they open: I don’t need an account. They don’t beep at me. They don’t track me. No videos start playing. When I put them down, they stay down. The writers don’t find me and bug the living shit out of me.