We Thought These Were Modern Times

By Shaun J Apple

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HH8MS9FR
• ISBN13: 9798170415175
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 58 Pages
• Weight: 0.23 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 5.5" x 8.5"