The Rose in the Cesspool
I Can't Seem to Let The Graystones (and a Few Others) Go. And Why They Matter More Than Ever
The internet used to be... (name your sunshine)
...✨
...💜
...fun
...useful
...inspiring
...liberating
...connecting
…collaborative
…revolutionary
...democratizing
...a goddamn miracle
Now it's a revolting cesspool... (pick your poison)
...💩
...💰
…A rage mill
…A groom den
…A giant slot machine
…A disinformation refinery
…A bot-infested nightmare
…A behavioral conditioning system
…A surveillance apparatus disguised as a town square
…A corporate extraction operation masquerading as community
This once glorious internet has curdled into a system built to capture and hold you, where your attention is the product and your well-being is negotiable.
That shift wasn’t accidental. It reflects the incentives. When profit is tied to stimulation and scale, the outcome is predictable. The experience degrades because degradation is the gateway drug that keeps you hooked.
All the goodness that used to be there—the weird forums, the genuine connections, the rabbit holes that actually taught you something, the vibrant communities built around shared passions—has been replaced by systems designed by people who answer to Wall Street first and users last. Over time that hierarchy bleeds everywhere. In the interface, in the policies, in the procedural indifference to harm. This is the predictable outcome when profits outrank people. What once felt careless now carries the weight of contempt. And they don’t bother disguising it anymore.
They think we're marks (we are). Suckers (guilty). Engagement metrics with credit cards (check). Dopamine-starved lab rats they can condition to click and scroll and rage (yep). They've learned we'll swallow any amount of AI-generated pablum as long as it's served with enough sex or venom (we do). They think we're too stupid, too addicted, too captured to do anything about it (correct). They think we’ll just keep coming back as the experience thins out and the quality drops. As the feeds get louder and emptier. As the extraction becomes obvious. They assume we’ll shrug, adapt, scroll (we will).
We are.
We do.
We will.
We are trapped. We are the product. Proof the system works exactly as designed.
We do keep coming back. We doomscroll even when we know better. We participate in the derision and public shaming rituals and just… stay.
We will tolerate worse. We will find reasons to justify it. We will keep scrolling because where else can we go? Because everyone else is there. Because FOMO is real. Because they've built the most effective behavioral conditioning systems in human history and deployed them against our Stone Age brains.
It's infuriating. Devastating. A betrayal so complete it's almost funny, except it's not funny at all—it's just really, really fucked up.
It's the undoing of everything the internet once promised. Everything America once was but stopped pretending to be decades ago. We had something genuinely new in human history. A technology so profoundly shape-shifting that could connect people across distance and difference, democratize information and creativity and opportunity, let weirdos find their people and outsiders build their own spaces and marginalized voices reach audiences they never could have before.
We had a commons. A frontier. A space where the old gatekeepers were pushed aside and new possibilities surfaced every day. Where you could wake up and stumble onto something you didn't know existed and have your world cracked wide open in ways you couldn't have planned or imagined. Ways that expanded you instead of extracting from you. Where curiosity could lead you somewhere real instead of trapping you in an algorithmic rat trap designed to keep you alone and twitchy and clicking until your fingers turn blue.
That's mostly gone now. Torched by money-grubbing desperados and sociopathic platforms that discovered our attention was more valuable than our experience. Refined and packaged by companies that learned how to monetize every flicker of human impulse. Enshittified and rotted beyond recognition until what’s left looks less like the frontier we built and more like a once-thriving Main Street after decades of financial extraction, the storefronts dim, the community thinned, the value siphoned off to the shareholder class who never set foot there.
The people running this show don’t even pretend anymore. Their incentives are written directly into the product. We are revenue streams with nervous systems. Eyeballs to capture, habits to reinforce, impulses to monetize. The tools no longer exist to serve; they exist to retain. Community is secondary. Utility is optional. What scales is agitation, so agitation gets engineered. What was once promiscuous exploration and possibility is now a corporate wasteland where everything interesting is ground into content paste, everything human is processed into profit, where every genuine moment is monetized or manipulated or memed into meaninglessness.
The insidious part is that it feels like choice. In reality it’s the result of billions spent studying and shaping our impulses. A/B tests. Behavioral engineering. Psychological research. The line between lived experience and someone else’s profit margin has never been thinner.
We didn't help matters. We invited the surveillance state into our homes, our families, our pockets and beds. We gave it permission to listen while we sleep, to track everywhere we go, to read our messages, to watch our kids, to know what we buy and what we want and what we fear. And now it has a firm, blood-sucking hold on every corner of our lives.
The ratio of signal to noise has collapsed so completely that finding anything real feels like panning for gold in a river of sewage. We've voluntarily handed over our attention, our relationships, our inner lives to extraction operations that make Lumon Industries look subtle. Our wanting has been curdled into anxious restlessness. Our desires have atrophied into lackluster boredom. And what do we do? We swallow it. We rationalize. We come back. We tell ourselves we don’t have a choice. And, ka-ching, ka-ching, we stay.
Call it what you want, but it's still death by a thousand tiny cuts—administered so slowly we stopped noticing years ago. Websites that make you create an account just to read a single article. Web pages so cluttered with ads and pop-ups and auto-play noise that you spend more time hunting for tiny X buttons than actually accomplishing anything. Unsubscribe links that lead nowhere. Free trials that quietly convert while you’re busy living your life.
And when you forget to cancel? That $12.99 is gone. Keep it. A small tax for the privilege of existing.
We used to live our lives.
To make memories.
To do things.
Ordinary, unmonetized, unremarkable things.
We rode bikes with friends for hours on end, talking about everything and nothing until our voices went hoarse. We drove around listening to cassette tapes we made ourselves, pulling over to rewind the good parts with a pencil. We played pickup basketball until the streetlights came on and someone’s mom yelled that dinner was ready. We read books in parks and looked up occasionally to watch strangers pass by, wondering about their lives.
We knew our neighbors’ names, and the names of their parents and their cousins and their dogs. We cooked elaborate meals for no reason except that someone we loved would be sitting across from us eating it. We built things with our hands in garages, bookshelves that leaned, go-karts that barely worked, repairs we figured out together through trial and error and cursing. We wrote letters. Actual letters. On paper. The kind you composed carefully because they might be kept in a shoebox for years.
We sat on porch swings and watched the evening arrive, talking until the dark made it easier to say true things. We called friends and talked for hours about nothing important.
We got lost on purpose. We sat with discomfort. We sat with each other.
We just sat.
There was no revenue model attached to any of that. No data harvest or algorithmic optimization. No one was tracking your location or logging your conversations or building a psychological profile to sell to advertisers. You weren't a user or a metric or a conversion opportunity. You were just a person. Living and connecting. Being human with other humans.
You just... lived.
That's mostly gone now. We don't live anymore. We perform. We posture. We fall in line. We compete. We consume.
And what makes it so hard to fight back is that we're stuck. Aware enough to feel the wrongness of it all but not empowered enough to escape. We've been so thoroughly conditioned, so systematically captured that logging off feels impossible even when we know staying on is killing us.
It makes you want to stop remembering.
But I can’t.
Because every time I think it’s finally been hollowed out beyond repair, I run into something that feels intact. Someone building carefully. Someone listening. A small pocket of people doing the work because the work matters to them. It isn’t loud or desperate for attention. It just exists. A reminder that the internet isn’t finished yet.
And when I find it, I go back to it. Again and again.
There's a rose in every cesspool.
Not everywhere. Not evenly. But it's there. Something breathing in the sludge because a few people cared enough to keep it alive.
You won’t always see it in your feed. It doesn’t fight for attention. It lives in basements and backyards and borrowed rehearsal spaces. In group texts that never go public. In friendships that don’t need documenting. In projects that would continue even if the Wi-Fi cut out for good.
That’s the part they haven’t figured out how to kill. Yet.
If you want to stay sane here, you train your eyes for it, you learn to notice it. You protect it. You make a habit of returning to it.
Because the cesspool is real.
But so is the rose.
You don’t outlast it by pretending it isn’t there. And, you don’t outlast it by soaking in it either. You outlast it by building something that doesn’t resemble it. By putting your hands on work that doesn’t rot in the light. By becoming the kind of presence the system doesn’t know what to do with.
So what does that look like?
We wake up.
We wonder.
We notice.
We listen.
We imagine.
We dream.
We desire.
We doubt.
We hope.
We trust.
We try.
We fail.
We refine.
We try again.
We make.
We draw.
We cook.
We write.
We build.
We invent.
We connect.
We share.
We gather.
We belong.
We protect.
We cooperate.
We feel.
We heal.
We laugh.
We grieve. \
We grow.
We plant.
We harvest.
We survive.
We begin.
We begin by making something.
Not “content.” Not output. Not something calibrated to survive twelve distracted seconds on a screen. I mean something that would matter even if the power went out. Something you would still make if no one ever saw it.
A song played in a living room with the windows open. A meal that takes too long and dirties too many pans. A table that wobbles but holds. A paragraph you wrestle with at midnight because it won’t let you go.
When the work is the point, something shifts. You disappear into it. The ego quiets. Hours pass without announcement. You’re not curating yourself. You’re not performing your life. You’re living inside it. You’re building something that can stand up without you narrating it.
That used to be ordinary.
Somewhere along the way, making quietly gave way to performing constantly. Craft started answering to a calendar. The work began circling the audience instead of the other way around. Being seen slowly became more important than becoming good.
You can feel the difference in your body. One kind of work leaves you steadier. The other leaves you jangly and scanning for a response.
But every so often you come across people who never made that trade. They’re still building shoulder to shoulder. Still listening. Still disappearing into the thing itself. Still working in conversation with each other instead of shouting into the void.
And when you see it, it hits you in the chest. Because it reminds you that none of this is fixed. None of it is final. But every now and then you find the ones who are still doing it the first way. Still building together. Still listening.
Because it reminds you that none of this is inevitable.
They’re out there.
You just have to know where to look.
Start with Parcels.
Five high school friends from Byron Bay, Australia who found their way to Berlin together and became one of the most effortlessly cool live bands on the planet. They make glossy, disco-infused pop that feels like Daft Punk wandered into a sunlit beach club. Their aesthetic is deeply '70s-influenced—Steely Dan, Chic, Earth Wind & Fire—but without a single trace of pastiche. They record everything to tape, giving their sound that warm analog quality that somehow feels both 1978 and 2028 simultaneously.
Watch their NPR Tiny Desk Concert and you’ll understand. No ego gymnastics. Just airtight harmonies and a groove so perfectly locked in you can’t help but smile. Five friends serving the music.
Then there's Spanish drummer Jorge Garrido, El Estepario Siberiano, the Siberian Steppe Dweller. The self-taught, relentless stick-slinger started posting videos in 2017 and took off during the pandemic. Now he’s often called “the most famous drummer on the Internet.” Fair enough.
Garrido is often called “the most famous drummer on the Internet,” and for good reason. His hands move with ambidextrous, polyrhythmic precision that makes seasoned players rewind the video just to understand what they saw. But the speed isn’t the point. What makes him different is the reverence. The way he talks about the drummers who came before him.
His devotion to Neil Peart borders on sacred. He’s performed tributes that feel more like study than spectacle. He speaks about Bonham, Copeland, Vinnie Colaiuta with the respect of someone who knows he’s standing on their shoulders. Danny Carey, in his telling, is less a man than an event.
Watch him break down Danny Carey's legendary drum solo in Tool's "Pneuma" and you'll see it. The chops are absurd. Yes, the coordination seems inhuman. But what stays with you is the joy. At one point he laughs and says, “Danny made a deal with the devil. We don’t know what Danny got, but the devil got drum lessons.” That’s Garrido. Not peacocking. Not angling for applause. Just a drummer in awe of drumming, stepping into a lineage he clearly loves and trying to add something worthy to it.
These are roses. Real ones. Not the airbrushed Instagram kind. The actual growing-out-of-concrete, refusing-to-die, defiant-as-hell kind.
They’re proof that craft still matters in a world that keeps trying to flatten everything into content. That making something with other people still works in a culture that trains us to compete alone. That devotion—to the music, to the craft, to the lineage—still carries weight, even when the louder message says none of it does.
Parcels. Garrido. And countless others doing the work. Not chasing applause. Not manufacturing urgency. Just building something solid together.
But the one I keep coming back to—the rose of roses, the one that won’t leave me alone—is The Graystones.
They’re my favorite internet discovery of 2025. Maybe of the last decade. And maybe the clearest reminder I’ve found in a long time that people are still capable of making beautiful things together for the right reasons.
I’ve written about them twice now. Once in my year-end best of piece Socks, Geniuses, Gangsters, and again in a feed post last November when I stumbled onto them during a rough stretch. And here I am again.
Because their YouTube channel has become the place I go when the noise gets too loud. When the internet feels swollen and sour. When I need proof that something clean can still grow here.
I’ve said some of this before. I’m saying it again. Some things are worth repeating.
The Graystones are a group of 11- and 12-year-old musicians from California who are, without exaggeration, the greatest kid band I’ve ever seen. Roll your eyes if you want. Then press play.
It wasn’t even the music that hit me first, though the music is absurd. It was the scene. The crew hanging out at a friend's house after school in their socks. Their sneakers kicked off in a loose pile by the front door. Instruments sprawled across the living room. Boys and girls settled in like they belong there. Familiar but not careless. At ease but attentive.
Before I heard a single note, I was grinning ear to ear.
These kids were friending the old way. Not a single phone in sight. No performative cool. No anxious self-monitoring. Just that old, almost-forgotten rhythm of you and your people maxing around a shared obsession, getting lost in it together, getting better at it together, the hours disappearing because you're actually present with each other.
It feels almost subversive.
Then the music starts.
They play covers of '70s and '80s tracks with a precision and commitment that makes you forget how old they are. Rocking classic cuts from Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles, Supertramp, Toto. Not as some retro novelty act or cosplay nostalgia trip. And with zero hint of performative cleverness.
You can hear the hours. The patience. The choices. The care.
The drummer and bassist sit in the pocket like they’ve lived there for years. The guitarists weave around each other without crowding. The vocalists inhabit the songs instead of impersonating them, finding their own tone inside someone else’s architecture.
They aren’t just “good for their age.” They’re good. Period. So good that Stevie Nicks has reached out. So has Don Henley, Bobby Kimball, and Roger Hodgson. Imagine being in sixth grade and getting a note from the people whose songs you just covered in someone’s living room.
But the talent and the songs are not what keeps bringing me back. It’s the togetherness.
The way the band matters as a band. The way the friendships feel real. The music isn’t a vehicle for visibility. It’s the adhesive. The reason they’re there.
Yes, they post videos. Yes, they have a channel. But the internet feels like a window, not the point. You can sense it immediately. This would keep happening even if the internet disappeared.
And that’s the part that gets me.
At a time that feels loud and fractured and permanently on edge, discovering The Graystones gave me something uncomplicated. Joy without irony. Evidence that kids can still gather around something hard and get better at it together. Proof that friendship and craft still reinforce each other instead of competing for oxygen.
They remind me why I fell in love with the internet in the first place. Not for what it’s become, but for the possibility of stumbling onto something wonderful and being able to share it.
So here I am again.
Not because I have a new thesis. Because I can’t stop returning to what they represent. Their channel has become an antidote I reach for when everything else starts to feel synthetic.
If you’re tired, go home for a while. Turn it off. Sit in the quiet long enough to feel your own thoughts again. Let boredom do its slow, restorative work. Your attention isn’t renewable. Your nervous system wasn’t built for constant alarm. You’re allowed to protect the parts of your life that don’t perform.
Then see what draws you back in.
Spending time with what The Graystones have built together changes the way I think about what’s possible. About what matters. About where to look.
If you want to understand what I mean, take your smile out of the closet and press play.
Watch and revel in The Graystones playing Toto's legendary "Hold The Line"
Here they jam Supertramp's equally legendary "The Logical Song"
Watch those videos and tell me you don’t smile.
Maybe that’s the point.
Find your roses. Tend them. Return to them when the noise swells. Let them remind you what you’re protecting.
The Graystones are one of mine.
I hope they become one of yours too.