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, subscriptions, celebrity, and the decay of the internet's early promise. Laid out like a field map-from a functional society to anti-propaganda to the actual politics of money-its authority is firsthand. Apple founded r/trees and r/gonewild and lived in the engine rooms of the platforms he now indicts. That keeps the book from becoming a rant: it knows how these systems actually work. Angry in the useful way, funny where it needs to be, and precise about what fear protects, this is protest poetry with receipts.