Now that I’ve reduced my daily intake of images on the web, it’s become apparent to me how much better a text only internet (or one where images and videos are differently managed) – could be. It solves seeing anoying stock photos everywhere. It solves a lot of types of ads (plus ad blockers obvs). It solves hours of mindless scrolling (and not really finding anything). It solves much of the shock value of things like fake news, deepfakes, ____fakesnamedujour. No more stupid memes. No annoying pop-up autoplay videos. It solves seeing screenshots at the top of reddit threads designed to trigger some kind of emotional reaction. It simply vanishes all those things. It’s weird at first. And modern browsers don’t handle it well unless you like messing around in the Terminal (which I decidedly don’t). I couldn’t find anything except Gemini browsers for Mac (like Jimmy) – I like Gemini but I don’t know where to go to look at anything and I don’t understand how I can blog there like I do in this universe. I will keep looking I guess, but I just wanted to share this dream of like a modern text-only internet. Sounds crazy, but join me, you’ll see.

Just say no to images on the web.