Online
On what the internet was, is, and could be
The internet has lost its juice.
It used to be the place of places, a room so big it could fit anyone. Its doors opened to hobbies and questions, worries and confessions, art and love, experimentation and failure. This room seemed built to stoke your curiosity. In ICQ and AIM chats, BBSes and forums, and within the endless flow of weirdos's websites, you saw a menagerie of people brave enough to declare themselves to the world. This self-expression was limited by GeoCities or HTML, but such tension was a cause for play and pleasure. There was in the early internet an aura, a solidarity, created by a large group of people embodying the epochal fact that any person on Earth could commune with any other person. We were finally breaking the curse of geographical narrowness: no longer were you born to die in a private corner of the broad Earth. The internet let us escape our hamlets and get antic with strangers. And this strangeness could also be a source of charm and experimentation: usernames were an expression of a nerdy and nascent selfcraft, serving to simultaneously hide and reveal the person behind the keyboard. With tech tips and fanfic, arguments and hyperlinks, we became a cacophonous ad hoc orchestra—its music our new infinite dreamland.
The internet used to be cool.
But this is no ode to lost grace. Nor is it an exercise in superficial nostalgia. I want us to describe what the internet once was in order to say what it now is—and imagine together what it might be.
The early internet felt like a magical panoply. Dialing up and logging in was like traveling to a hub world; it was like sitting on the center of a spinning wheel with a million spokes. By way of weird sounds and signals, you entered a reality under construction. Chat programs and forums let you try out different identities,1 adopt new names, and make shit up ribaldly. Before catfishing, it was standard to pretend to be older, richer, hotter—or, more elementally: different. That was what the internet was: a place wherein you could actually be strange; boundlessness was part of its promise. Yet such pretending was as common as an unrivaled honesty—earnest confessions of one's limitations, fears, and desires were as common as Cooler Person larping. As you can infer, people used the early internet without much concern for being watched. There was a sense that every post was an experiment viewed neutrally by passersby. This freedom from judgment made creating a personal website feel like crafting a sacred object, a totem with whom others could talk only if they knew its name. To use the tool of the internet was to test—and redefine—its limits.
The early internet seemed like a public space, a commons—a verdant park in which people let their weirdness rip. Everyone's attention had not yet been economized. Accordingly, there was an ethic of care and courtesy among early users, a patience with which many sat in chat rooms and helped strangers navigate tricky problems (be they mechanical or spiritual). There was a quiet sense that we, the internet's early users, were part of a revolution. The early internet felt like a tool with which we could make an entirely different future; it was a stimulant for one's imagination, a conduit to real difference. Crucially, it was a public space in which the influence of money was rarely registered. It cost money to access it, sure, and more to use supporting software, but the early internet still felt like a DIY affair in which corporations were regarded as no more interesting or powerful than some faraway utility company. The internet was once a shared space intended to help people articulate their desires and find like minds. It was a technology with which you could talk to any kind of person—and thus a precursor to the most honest kind of democracy. The early internet was the premier extension of an active and curious mind.
The internet today is a place wherein you wade through ads for fake shit, people promoting themselves as products, AI summaries taken on faith, and pay-to-play links plastered above and before any useful information. Our internet is a cop- and slop-filled shopping mall that can only be entered through a few narrow doors. Social media sites, once an exercise in simple egotism and/or staying in touch with groups to whom one already belonged, are now conduits to paychecks, proofs of one's normality, or weapons with which you can explode someone's life. But such uses are incidental. The main purpose of social media is to induce in its users the disease of addiction, and thus to mint the most lucrative kind of customer. One no longer wanders around the internet; instead, it is used to "stay current"—to be literate in the lingua franca of posts, ostracisms, atrocities. Staying current means staying obliterated. Alternately, if the internet is not your primary source of fear or pacification—if you dodge the doomscroll or binge-watch—it is the tool by which you keep your side gigs afloat, managing passwords and juggling emails and trying desperately to make rent. The internet today is a series of boring structures crafted by billionaires who do not give a fuck about you. It is increasingly a place where thinking sensitive people go to die.
The old internet was about experimentation; the new internet is a means of control.
What was once a wilds is now a hedge maze.
When people talk about the internet now, I see in them a certain hopelessness. A resignation. A mood marked by knowing that the internet is a caricature of a broken promise. Its original public purpose2 was to connect people all over the world and help them organize themselves around their interests. It is now meant to funnel people into profitable and predictable behaviors.3 This mood I'm describing is a consequence of knowing that the internet, a tool once made for people, is now used against them. It is what happens when the constancy of greed and cruelty extinguish nascent fires of idealism.
The good news is that people of all ages and backgrounds are realizing that using the internet regularly is making them lonelier, dumber, and sicker. It is funny and good that AI is rising in inverse proportion to our desire to use it. Even the call to use friendlier versions of fascist propaganda networks is being rejected.4 The internet's monopsonic masters need to know that we can use other, better, older drugs.5 These dorks need to know that we can gladly stop stuffing their pockets and keeping their dipshit surnames in the news.
But is opting out the best response? We have invented the ability to quickly speak and work with people across the world. Given the potential of this ability, we are invited to treat its production, maintenance, and exercise as a right. Today, that right is mined as if it were mineral. In treating the internet as an extractive tool, we sabotage our ability to flourish. To walk away—to touch grass; to return strictly to the local—is to answer prematurely the question of whether or not we can learn to use our machinations wisely.
What would it look like to improve the internet? Practically, this would mean: more weirdo websites and less centralization; more honorable losses and fewer profitable ventures; more private communication and less grandstanding; more artful anonymity6 and fewer reactionary trolls; more rabbit holes and fewer hubs; more archives and fewer dumps; more libraries and fewer shops; more gifts and fewer fees; more seeking and less subscribing; more randomness and fewer algorithms; more exits7 and fewer transactions; more relationships and fewer masks; more experimentation and less judgment.
The internet should not be a cop-filled mall you must visit to make a wage, numb your pain, or both. It should complement and engender the incalculably complex frictions, contexts, and opportunities of IRL interaction, not preclude or disempower them. The angry rich losers who seek to control the internet do not deserve to shape the most emancipatory social technology our species has yet devised.
The internet should be a place you visit voluntarily, a big branching locale whose many customs stubbornly resist the desire to maximize shareholder profit. The internet should be a beautiful strange layer of animal8 reality. Using the internet could help us imagine all that is yet to be done and all that we are yet to become.
The proliferation of self-expression in the form of new concepts (particularly in the realms of gender, sexuality, and psychology) has risen in tandem with the use and growth of the internet. Perhaps not a causal relationship, but at least a strong correlation.
Versus its initial DARPA-approved private purpose.
We needn't wonder why cops love the internet; each user voluntarily and freely builds their future prosecutor's case.
See: Bluesky vs. X.
Like IRL activity, including but not limited to: exercise, sex, partying, food, friendly competition, etc.
Thanks to A., S., and W. in the mutual Discord for help with this one. Love y’all.
To the realm of IRL interaction, a ground out of which life-altering generosity can easily bloom.
Animal (noun): that which will always exceed the machine.