We Thought These Were Modern Times

Political poems for the age of enshittification, from someone who helped build the internet and then watched it turn. We Thought These Were Modern Times is Shaun J Apple's clear-eyed survey of the platforms we now live inside and the slow rot underneath them: propaganda, death by subscriptions, celebrity, and the quiet decay of the internet's early promise. Laid out like a field map, the collection moves from a functional society through anti-propaganda and the actual politics of money. Its authority is firsthand: Apple founded major online communities and lived in the engine rooms of the platforms he now indicts. Angry in the useful way, funny where it needs to be, and precise about what fear protects, this is protest poetry with receipts. For readers of political and protest poetry, and anyone paying attention to what the platforms are doing to us.