The internet used to make the world feel big.
Not an “endless feed” kind of big, where endless scrolling might as well be life moving fast, and eventually right past you. Like you are The benevolant observer looking through a one-way mirror. The main charactor of your own fantacy world. A god in your own image (literally, you). At first, without any power. Without any way to affect the world.
And then came the attention economy (and eventually, enshittification). Here came the “influencers.” But even they we’re just pawns of the men behind the curtains… the tech bro nerds-turned-capitalists-turned-billionaire-fascist parasites. They sucked the life out of those frozen in motion by their rented little glass rectangles. Their black mirrors. Always reminding you of your lonliness and inevitable doom.
No, the old internet was more like… you could just see farther, and also within. If that makes sense. You’d fall into weird little corners and find people and discover information you that didn’t know existed. You could learn new and different things that hadn’t been sanded or censored or watered down yet. It felt like opening a giant window into the world. It was sunny and also raining goodness. No cloud(s) required. If anything, clouds were a part of the beauty, not a part of the problem (yet… foreshadowing…as vast as the cloud’s shadows are endless).
Back then, “content” didn’t feel like something you consumed. It was like something you wandered into. I remember getting lost in Wikipedia rabbit holes at night because one article led to another and curiosity kept opening doors. Blogs felt like rooms you were allowed to sit in quietly. Flickr felt like peeking into someone’s eye, not their brand. Tumblr felt strange and personal and unfinished in a way that was comforting.
Looking back it’s refreshing how little was being asked of people, who weren’t being prompted to react, perform, or optimize themselves. People weren’t being “measured.” They could engage without thinking about how they appeared to others. Plus, time passed differently then. Hours slipped by and somehow that felt good, not draining.
The internet was a small town. It was Wikipedia, Google (when it was ‘better’), Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Blogger (why did everything end with an “r” lol), Digg, Pownce, FriendFeed, Facebook (when it wasn’t as shitty… jk, it was always shitty), Instagram before it got bought and turned into attention slop, YouTube before it became an ad delivery system, and so many smaller “Web 2.0” and ‘small web’ sites.
You could feel the potential of it all. Inspiring. Genuine. Kind. Wholesome. Communal. Intimate. Messy. Meaningful. Open-source-y. Liberated. Even more so in the 80s and 90s, from what I’ve read. Well it all lasted for a while, anyway.
Now the internet feels like a giant fucking city, a giant busy fucking city. Traffic jams (server overload), outages, outrage, chaos, crowds, comments, conflict, crime (#notallcrime #piracy), size, density, disarray, distraction, overwhelm, misinformation, propaganda, bullshit, bots, spam, slop, noise, disconnection, etc. etc. etc. It has all the same problems as real cities (at least US cities), just abstracted, accelerated, and piped directly into your nervous system.
There are just… so many people and things and bots online. Everyone is talking all at once, or performing, or optimizing themselves, or fighting for attention because attention is the thing now, not care or understanding. Just attention. And more attention. And infinity attention plus one. (fuck, wait, does this blog count as attention? whoah, meta […not that Meta, eww]).
And I don’t even think the now internet is a moral failure. It’s all corporate, all structural (literally, the internet is a series of… wires… and obviously computers), it’s all systemic (the system is a propritary walled-garden OS [“operating system”], after all). As usual… always has been. The system rewards being seen, not being decent. Loud vs thoughtful. Fast vs careful. Extremes vs nuance. So of course people hoard attention like “likes” or “subscribe”s… or Bitcoin. Sadly, it’s become how you survive in a place like this. Let’s not forget how fucked up that is. But it doesn’t have to be like this.
What still fucks me up is how “connection” got rerouted, hijacked, stolen, sidelined… pick your verb. It was said that the internet would connect us to each other, which at one point it did (pre-2010s). Instead, now, it mostly connected us to platforms, brands, feeds, metrics. Capitalism wearing a fake friendly face while quitely guarding/maintaining the walls it builds between people, reality, and meaning.
Capitalism couldn’t cure loneliness, no, it just got packaged differently and sold back to everyone (again). Like it’s a personal flaw instead of the obvious outcome of how things evolved (or more accurately, devolved).
Of course, the current internet is not a complete world (despite its name, “world wide web”). It’s definitely not as beautiful as the real world. But the internet is dense enough to live inside, hollow enough to fall inside, and lonely enough inside, with enough time. Sometimes more lonely, because you’re surrounded but still feel invisible.
The current internet feels as big—or bigger—than the actual world because it’s all scale and no intimacy. It’s big tech but small thinking. It’s endless presence (and not that kind), but very little being met. It’s infinite content, but shallow meaning. Everything got hollowed out.
So yeah, I miss the wholesome wide web, not because of nostalgia, but grief. The old internet used to make the world feel big because it revealed depth.
Sometimes I wonder: if you could reset the internet, which version would you choose? The sprawling, optimized, expensive, always-on city we live in now—or the smaller, messier thing it used to be, where getting lost felt like discovery instead of disappearance.