the internet is becoming increasingly hostile towards VPNs
Last week, I installed OpenVPN on a server I was already renting for file backups, so I could "surf the seas" and download some music from a retired Myspace musician that doesn't offer his music for sale and is only available through Spotify. Maybe this is wrong on my part, but seriously, if you have a product that I would gladly pay money for, and only offer it through a subscription service, then fuck you I'm finding other means. I also have this beef with Pimsleur, a subscription-based, language-learning audiobook site. I could either pay an egregious monthly fee, or find their audiobooks at my local library and rip them from there. Just offer the audio files as a product I can purchase and own! What is so hard about this!
Anyway, that's not what this blog is about.
I decided to keep the VPN installed, even though I was finished using it. I figured I would just leave the VPN enabled on my personal laptop and phone and see how I liked it, but it turns out, browsing the Internet is impossibly difficult these days with sites taking a full-on offensive approach towards bot-like traffic, for obvious reasons.
I can't access most popular websites, which I thought was annoying at first. I usually like to read the r/ExperiencedDevs subreddit to commiserate with other people in my industry who are also experiencing AI fatigue. I don't post or comment, but I like to read the horror stories.
reddit blocks me to due "network security" reasons
But after a few days of this, I'm thinking that this might be a good thing. Reddit fucking sucks and is full of humans using LLMs to draft their posts and actual bots making bot posts. And I think it's a net positive for my brain to not go looking for content that makes me feel bad. Having the VPN enabled gives me some time to think about whether I actually care about reading Reddit or if I'm just bored. It only takes a second to disable the VPN, but it's enough friction to keep me away from the site entirely.
However, it's not just slop social media I can't access. The blocking also applies to useful things like Imgur, the image hosting site. Whenever I'm on the VPN, I can't see most images that people post online because many of these image hosting sites are trying to protect their bandwidth. Which is completely understandable, but is frustrating when trying to read a blog or article where the images are a required part of the reading.
imgur gives me a generic 403 Forbidden error
Personally, I think some of the arguments people make against AI are completely performative such as "AI is killing the planet." Most of the people who die on this hill probably don't give a fuck about any other environmental issues, like Tijuana dumping sewage into the Pacific Ocean and making the water toxic and un-swimmable for residents of Southern California as one example. But here's an argument that I genuinely care about: AI is bad for the open Internet and is especially bad for users who are trying to protect their own privacy online.
Having a VPN is becoming more and more popular these days. So many YouTubers are sponsored by VPN providers such as NordVPN, and I think it's great that there's more education available about protecting yourself online. But if half of the Internet is virtually unusable to people who are just trying to anonymize themselves, then I think there are some dark days ahead.
Or maybe I'm totally wrong and this will usher in a golden age of people retreating back to the indie web, and we'll reclaim the Internet through personal websites and blogs once again. Who knows.