Internet is dead. We killed it.
Not with a bang, but with a million tiny clicks, endless scrolls, and the quiet, insidious surrender of our attention and agency. The vibrant, chaotic, hopeful frontier we logged onto decades ago – the one buzzing with discovery, genuine connection, and raw, unpolished human expression – has been paved over, strip-malled, and trapped inside walled gardens optimized for profit, not people.
Remember the feeling? Dialing up, that screeching modem heralding a portal to something new. Exploring Geocities pages dripping with animated GIFs and personal passion. Arguing fiercely (but often thoughtfully) in niche forums. Discovering obscure music on LimeWire or Kazaa (legal grey areas aside!). It felt wild, unowned, unpredictable. We built it, page by messy page.
So what happened? How did we become the architects of its demise?
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The Enshittification Engine: We embraced convenience. We flocked to sleek platforms promising connection – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. They offered ease, reach, and community. But their business models weren’t built on our well-being; they were built on engagement at any cost. Algorithms evolved not to inform or connect meaningfully, but to addict. To harvest attention. To monetize outrage, envy, and the deepest recesses of our psyches. We fed the beast with every like, share, and minute spent doomscrolling.
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The Commodification of Everything: Every interaction became data. Every friendship became a “connection” to be leveraged. Every meme, every heartfelt post, every moment of vulnerability became potential fuel for targeted ads or training data for corporate AI. Authenticity became a brand. Human experience became a product. We traded privacy for cat videos and personalized ads, little realizing the sheer scale of the surveillance we enabled.
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The Rise of the Algorithmic Overlords: What we see isn’t chosen by us, or even by human editors with some semblance of ethics. It’s chosen by opaque algorithms designed to maximize one thing: time on platform. This breeds polarization (outrage keeps us hooked), misinformation (the sensational spreads fastest), and a suffocating sense of performative reality. Our feeds became funhouse mirrors, reflecting distorted versions of the world designed to keep us anxious, angry, and scrolling.
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The Death of the Open Web: Remember hopping from one quirky independent site to another via webrings? That decentralized spirit is gasping. Search is dominated by SEO-optimized sludge. Discovery is funneled through app stores and platform recommendations. Independent voices struggle to be heard above the algorithmic roar and the sheer financial muscle of Big Tech. The web feels less like a sprawling city and more like a series of heavily policed, corporately-owned theme parks.
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We Stopped Building, Started Consuming: Passive consumption replaced active participation for the vast majority. Why build your own website when you can just post on Instagram? Why join a small forum when you can yell into the Twitter/X void? We outsourced our digital homes and public squares to landlords whose interests are fundamentally opposed to our own. We became tenants, not citizens.
Is there a pulse? Flickers remain. Niche communities persist on Discord or tucked-away forums. The indie web and the Fediverse (Mastodon, etc.) offer glimpses of the old ethos. Some creators fight the algorithm, prioritizing authenticity. But these feel like small campfires in the vast, algorithmically-manicured desert the mainstream internet has become.
We didn’t set out to murder it. We were seduced by convenience, dazzled by connection, and blinded by the sheer speed of it all. We clicked “Accept” on Terms of Service we never read. We traded wonder for efficiency, serendipity for predictability, and genuine connection for quantified “likes.”
The internet we knew – the wild, open, user-built frontier – is dead. We starved it by feeding its corporate successors. We silenced it by amplifying the algorithmic noise. We paved its gardens and built shopping malls on its graves.
The question now isn’t “Is it dead?” It’s “What will we build in its ashes?” Can we reclaim agency? Can we support decentralized alternatives? Can we be conscious consumers and, more importantly, active builders again? Can we demand better?
Or will we just keep scrolling, adding another brick to the walled garden, mourning something we helped destroy with every passive click?
The requiem is playing. It’s time to decide if we just listen, or if we pick up the tools and start building something new.