One day, no different from any other, I was searching the internet to find an article for a class. A simple process like this, I expected only to take a handful of minutes, oh, how wrong I was. After two hours of scouring the internet, I came back empty-handed from my endless Google search queries and acquiesced to the woes of the modern internet. This led me to ask a seemingly simple question: Why is the internet like this now? For as long as I can remember, the internet just seemed to work. When I needed to look something up, Google would simply direct me to the most relevant resources, and it would end there, leaving me satisfied and educated on whatever topic I chose to learn about. Now this doesn’t seem to be the case, as the internet has become increasingly monetized and our attention increasingly sought after, it seems as if a sheen of friction has been added to nearly every digital exchange there is. Going back to my desperate search for an article, no less than fifty times did I open a site, promising to have a .pdf file available of the article, only to be prompted to subscribe to a monthly subscription for a website I only intend to use once in my entire lifetime–despite the article being available in the public domain. This proceeded to irritate me, then I begrudgingly continued with my search; why is the internet like this now? Why has this sheen of friction been added to nearly every single little thing on the internet? I’m not the only one who feels this way, publications from National Public Radio to The Atlantic seem to share this same sentiment. For me, much of this deterioration can be attributed to ontological paradigm shifts in global sentiments. As the endless corporate war for efficiency campaigns further into our individual lives, it increasingly seems to achieve the exact opposite of its intended goal; from AI illusions within search overviews to paywalls for useful services, these all seem to act contrary to the seeming efficiency these companies continue to chase, leading to everything simply feeling worse by the end of the day. While it’s true that if you are simply looking for an overview of information, the efficiency wars are ultimately playing for your favor, if you want even the smallest modicum of depth to that information rather than a mere oversimplification, you will find yourself harder pressed than ever before to actually find any relevant information. Nearly every resource of depth is now seemingly paywalled or monetized in such a way that it creates a pandemonium of advertisements blocking any useful information you could’ve actually ascertained from the source. All of these factors make researching any given topic hell, with you having to sift through thousands of paywalled or AI-generated resources to ultimately reach actual information regarding the given topic. There is an actual technical term for this process: “ensh*tification”(crapification), as coined by the Canadian author Cory Doctorow, is the process by which a company offers initial quality to their product only to degrade over time as said product is increasingly monetized in order to prioritize shareholders over users. While many see this process as inevitable, and that the populace must simply acquiesce to the inert nature of a capitalistic society, by which shareholder profits are held before all else; there is a rather easy fix to this vicious cycle of corporate profit; simply break the loop. While plenty of resources have been hijacked by corporate greed over the past few years, you don’t have to interface with these resources. Instead of going to ChatGPT to explain something to you, look up a Wikipedia article regarding the subject. This simple process of refusing to expedite your thinking to a larger body helps you to actually ascertain a greater understanding of the actual subject matter rather than a less-than-reliable summary of relevant information. Simply moving to organizations not motivated by corporate greed, and instead to institutions dedicated to providing education to thousands of people whether or not they choose to support them, is essential in fighting the crapification of the internet as we know it today. If we let corporate greed remain unchallenged we will simply be playing to our own deficit, by normalizing these predatory business practices, and manufacturing our own consent to be exploited. Now in an effort to help to combat said crapification, I will suggest some resources which I constantly use, that seeming break this new norm of corporate greed: for general information I use Wikipedia, a nonprofit organization aimed at creating a world in which truthful information is easily ascertained; for news I use either National Public Radio, PBS News Hour, or the Associated Press, all of these resources are minimally monetized and will simply ask for donations at most to sustain themselves, whilst providing phenomenal reporting from around the world; and for articles (in the public domain) I use the Internet Archive, a resource which categorizes millions of articles from thousands of different publications helping to make the information landscape far more easily accessible. Going back to my initial search for that article one last time, while Google disappointed me in my search by providing me with paywalled resources and AI-generated overviews, when I finally came out the other end I found the article not through Google, but through the aforementioned Internet Archive, finally satiating my search for knowledge. Overall, as this labyrinth of corporate greed increasingly seems infinite, there is an escape; we just must forge our own path. Escape this reality engulfed by the obsession with shareholder profit, and refuse to acquiesce to a reality in which individual experiences are an afterthought.