I did not intend to write a third blog in a row complaining about technology, but here we are, in 2026 in the days of the slow internet. Lots of sludge getting in the way of getting work done. I have had to bring on social media managers for one of my non-profits and the advice in 2026 is you need to get the information out 5-7 days in advance if you have any hope of it finding its way into people’s feeds by the time of the event. Yes, you can “boost” it, which means making it an advertisement. Advertisements are the only part of the current technology ecosystem that works. Mostly.

Let’s say you want to read an article. You need to plan on 1-2 minutes of embedded, pop-up, banner and border ads for every 2-3 minutes of reading time. Thanks to their advanced design, you will accidentally click on one in every 25 or so interactions, and be brought to a horrible place you don’t want to be. If I read an article in a magazine or newspaper, I will read it about 40% faster because the ads are stationary.

The internet is slow. It used to be faster. That’s because of the ads.

Now, if I search in a browser for something, I FIRST get their branded AI bot, which gives you 80-85% accuracy of a middle of the road mediocre sampling of the issue in its most frequently discussed form. That is kind of fast, and somehow doesn’t have ads but I usually skip right to Wikipedia, which reads like an actual printed thing and gives me more information faster.

Advertising is the only aspect of technology where efficiency is maximized. Everything else – especially information – is much slower nowadays BECAUSE IT NEEDS TO BE so the advertisement ecosystem can function at highest efficiency.

My favorite aspect of the slow internet of 2026 is when your phone spies on you, hears you are looking at something – POS system, refrigerator filter, slide scanner, matcha or whatever – and then gives you five to ten thousand ads for that thing. Even after you already bought it. They haven’t figured that part out yet. Maybe they can sell you six.

Many of these ads are designed to put you to work for them. I have these FB ads for POS systems that have morphed into surveys – the original ad is blacked out and all it wants to know is how much I bill per year, and it won’t even give me a proper ad until I agree to go to work for them. I call it the GAG economy.

The POS system argybargy is quite hilarious because I realized today that I have two completely separate sales reps trying to sell me the same POS system, which was recommended by ANOTHER system (that is basically advertising) since they did not work with the billing system we are using. The most humorous part of this unending sales pitch is that I only agreed to talk to them because we are currently using four different systems for ticketing and donations and memberships. I wanted to reduce that number. Turns out, REDUCING THE NUMBER OF APPS you need to use is NOT part of the ecosystem. You need to buy more. Feed the machine. And 75-100 companies are selling one of them. But not all of them.

The inherent value of capitalism is its efficiency, but it has lost that in the internet era. All it can do is whomp you with more and more ads, because that feeds the machine the money it needs to run. But it is running very inefficiently. Like sludge.

The other HILARIOUS thing about contemporary inefficiency is that even ad-free apps COPY the sludgy rhythms of the advernet. I tried to open an email just now and lost 10-15 second because the email app has to send me a notification of the new email. So I have to WAIT for that notification to go away so I can finally open the email. 15 seconds gone and I don’t get that time back because even the app wants to advertise itself. At the expense of efficiency.

Every app wants to send you notifications, which would add an UNBELIEVABLE amount of time to every online task. You have 100 apps and they each want to be your one and only true love. And they are psychotic loves who don’t know when to let go or stand back.

And no one can figure out a better system that MORE ads and MORE texts and MORE notifications? Any engineers here, or are we dependent on MBAs who only know how to SCALE and not how to get things done?

Oh, and this blog thinks I can’t write. Not because I can’t, but because they want to sell me Yoast SEO. But that would slow me down. Why would I want that?

Giddyap!

LINKS to my last two blogs: AI SLOP and ARE AI THE SEA PEOPLES?

WEDNESDAY UPDATE:

This is how bad the algorithms are now that AI is driving everyone to the same lane on the same road. I’m in Google News curious about how the Chicago Cubs are doing in the wild-card race in MLB with only a few games left. Google provides me with a grid of FORTY EIGHT (48) articles, every single one of which is about how the games will be rescheduled due to the Nor’easter coming this weekend. That is the ONLY STORY. The one I want – which would be easy to find in an analog newspaper – does not satisfy the large learning model. How dumb.