[rchaud]

I am embarrassed to admit it, but getting broadband/high-speed internet in the early 2000s kicked off an Internet addiction I am yet to resolve. Dial-up forced me to wait between page loads, or anticipate a connection breakage that would keep me grounded in the offline world. High speed changed all of that. We talk about smartphone addiction, but years before that, many of us were likely addicted to their laptops.

Getting acclimated to the information firehose was probably a net negative. For the first decade, I at least enjoyed high-quality online writing for free. The second decade devolved into half-formed, 140/280 character hot takes, videos and paywall popups, and yet I was still reading a lot of it. The algorithmic, SEO-ified consumer internet now has gotten so bad that I am finally scaling back my reading, but am still online due to FOMO on important events (although usually I end up realizing they are rarely as important as I think them to be).