Petition to End the Net
It's a Sunday afternoon and you're in for a little treat. Your plum cake is baking — 34 minutes in the oven — but you forgot the exact time. Was it 35? 37? Time is running out. This is a Code Red situation. You grab your phone and type "plum cake baking tiem" into Google, typo and all. While you fix it, the cake is already at 35 minutes. Your heart is pounding.
Google spits out dozens of sponsored links. You know better than to click the first few — those are fake recipe farms written by bots for SEO ghouls. So you go rogue and click the 5th link.
Cookies. Always the cookies.
Because you're a responsible adult who doesn't want to be tracked by FAANG's pedo-reptilians, you click "Manage Preferences." That means clicking "Decline All," which means getting redirected to a paywall. You panic, open the link in Incognito Mode like the 21st-century digital ninja you are. It's now 36 minutes in. The plum is screaming.
Suddenly, a pop-up:
"Subscribe to our newsletter?"
You just landed on this website. You don't even know its name. You don't want updates. You want to not burn your cake. You click "No," only to be immediately slapped with another window:
"Hot plum cake enjoyers in your area want to meet you!"
What the hell? You're trying to bake a dessert, not descend into an algorithmic hellscape of soft-core pastry erotica.
Finally, the article loads.
First line: "If you're reading this, there's a good chance you want to cook a plum cake."
No shit, Sherlock.
You scroll past a life story about the blogger's dead grandmother, a quote from Virginia Woolf, and a paragraph about the socio-political history of raisins.
"What is a plum?" the article asks you.
You don't know anymore.
You don't know anything anymore.
It's now 37 minutes. Your plum cake is burnt. Your Sunday is ruined.
And for what?
We were told the internet would make our lives easier.
We were promised connection, knowledge, community.
Instead we got:
* Cookie banners that read like a GDPR fever dream
* Pop-ups on pop-ups
* Newsletter spam from sites we visited once, by accident
* AI-generated sludge with all the soul of a wet napkin
* Endless doomscrolling, brainrot, thirst traps
* And articles that need a Pulitzer to tell you when to flip your damn pancakes
We were sold convenience. We bought a prison.
Once, the internet was an oasis for weirdos, misfits, and beautiful minds.
Now it's a hyper-monetized, ad-riddled, dopamine-draining funhouse of suffering.
So I say enough.
Pull the plug.
Unplug the routers. Smash the Wi-Fi. Torch the servers.
Let the plum cake burn in peace.
Talk to your neighbors.
Carve some wood.
Touch some grass.
Make eye contact with a stranger and tell them about your day.
Do something illegal but poetic.
Just live in the moment.
And yes — I admit it.
I'm bitter. I'm angry. I want to ruin the fun for everyone.
But deep down, I know: this isn't fun anymore.
It's not connection. It's digital heroin wrapped in a UX flowchart.
Sign this petition to end the internet.
Bring back boredom.
Bring back humanity.
Bring back the plum cake.
Google spits out dozens of sponsored links. You know better than to click the first few — those are fake recipe farms written by bots for SEO ghouls. So you go rogue and click the 5th link.
Cookies. Always the cookies.
Because you're a responsible adult who doesn't want to be tracked by FAANG's pedo-reptilians, you click "Manage Preferences." That means clicking "Decline All," which means getting redirected to a paywall. You panic, open the link in Incognito Mode like the 21st-century digital ninja you are. It's now 36 minutes in. The plum is screaming.
Suddenly, a pop-up:
"Subscribe to our newsletter?"
You just landed on this website. You don't even know its name. You don't want updates. You want to not burn your cake. You click "No," only to be immediately slapped with another window:
"Hot plum cake enjoyers in your area want to meet you!"
What the hell? You're trying to bake a dessert, not descend into an algorithmic hellscape of soft-core pastry erotica.
Finally, the article loads.
First line: "If you're reading this, there's a good chance you want to cook a plum cake."
No shit, Sherlock.
You scroll past a life story about the blogger's dead grandmother, a quote from Virginia Woolf, and a paragraph about the socio-political history of raisins.
"What is a plum?" the article asks you.
You don't know anymore.
You don't know anything anymore.
It's now 37 minutes. Your plum cake is burnt. Your Sunday is ruined.
And for what?
We were told the internet would make our lives easier.
We were promised connection, knowledge, community.
Instead we got:
* Cookie banners that read like a GDPR fever dream
* Pop-ups on pop-ups
* Newsletter spam from sites we visited once, by accident
* AI-generated sludge with all the soul of a wet napkin
* Endless doomscrolling, brainrot, thirst traps
* And articles that need a Pulitzer to tell you when to flip your damn pancakes
We were sold convenience. We bought a prison.
Once, the internet was an oasis for weirdos, misfits, and beautiful minds.
Now it's a hyper-monetized, ad-riddled, dopamine-draining funhouse of suffering.
So I say enough.
Pull the plug.
Unplug the routers. Smash the Wi-Fi. Torch the servers.
Let the plum cake burn in peace.
Talk to your neighbors.
Carve some wood.
Touch some grass.
Make eye contact with a stranger and tell them about your day.
Do something illegal but poetic.
Just live in the moment.
And yes — I admit it.
I'm bitter. I'm angry. I want to ruin the fun for everyone.
But deep down, I know: this isn't fun anymore.
It's not connection. It's digital heroin wrapped in a UX flowchart.
Sign this petition to end the internet.
Bring back boredom.
Bring back humanity.
Bring back the plum cake.
people already signed the petition.