Big Banner, or, if 1984 was a Website
22 July 2025
- Libreboob Adventures, aka The Best Web Comic on the Internet
Article published by: Leah Rowe
Date of publication: 22 July 2025
The excellent Cory Doctorow calls this Enshittification, because that’s exactly what’s going on.
I’ve discussed this topic myself on IRC, among several of my peers. I also posted about it on my Mastodon account, pointing to the Debian project website as an example - yes, even they are guilty.
Basically, I have observed the following:
- Modern websites contain a lot less text than before; a lot of it is now visual, and videos, with an emphasis on social media.
- Modern websites generally do not have as much substance. For example, if you go to any major political party website in the UK now, you’ll be hard pressed to learn what that party believes in.
- There is a lot more advertising on the web.
- A lot of websites now don’t contain any information whatsoever, but basically link to the owner’s YouTube account (as one example); there is a more human aspect, where the host interacts more closely with their audience, but they aren’t hosting anything.
- Most people these days only use a handful of big Web sites.
- People are generally more sensitive too, and don’t appreciate nuance as much; you see this especially on social media (including the Fediverse).
- A lot of modern Web sites seem to be more emotive in nature, seemingly designed to make someone feel good but not challenge them in any way…
The modern internet is ELI5. Every website now is made for five year olds. I would even call some of it Newspeak, hence 1984.
Yeah. Some of us are still real. Other people have pointed to the Dead Internet Theory; I wouldn’t quite go that far, but I will end this by saying:
The modern internet is a steaming pile of crap.
It’s almost like humanity is somehow being prevented from thinking. I don’t know why or how this happened, but the words and subjects we talk about are increasingly limited. What we see is also limited (major search engines these days often only show a handful of the same Web sites e.g. WikiPedia, YouTube, big news sites - much of it AI-driven). How fitting then that we use 1984 as an example.
I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy (this isn’t a conspiracy theory); one possible and also simple explanation could be that because we have much faster computers these days and we have so many of them (and they’re much easier to use e.g. smartphones nowadays are pretty decent), people spend more time inputting their lives into it than really thinking. This is especially true with smartphones, which are designed to make you tap, tap, tap, tap, swipe, tap; you can’t really type that fast on a phone, so you can’t convey your thoughts efficiently, and the screens are so tiny as to be useless except for casual reading; most people only use smartphones these days.
Personal computing is dead. Everyone has their head in the Cloud.
I would also not say though that our world is 1984. It’s more like Brave New World, but I digress.
I call this phenomena Big Banner, because that’s what the modern Web is: an ad.
Big Banner has your number.
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