The Internet Feels Dead, Doesn’t It?

From punk rock to adult contemporary. (And back again?)

Photo by mikoto.raw Photographer

Remember the early days of the internet? (I was born in 1992, so I do.)

It was a wild, untamed frontier, brimming with possibility. A digital punk rock revolution, where ideas flowed freely, relatively unencumbered by the suffocating grip of corporate control. It was beautiful, chaotic, and so fucking alive. (Sure, once in a while you saw things nobody should ever see, especially no twelve-year-old — I vividly remember a story of two girls and only one cup — but that didn’t cause me any lasting harm, did it? Did it??)

We were explorers, pioneers, setting out to map uncharted territories of the mind. The very architecture of the internet seemed to promise a future of radical democracy, of communities bound together by shared passions rather than geography or social class:

The Future Once Seemed So Bright. What Happened?

Jesus fucking Christ, how far we have fallen.

Today’s internet is a hollow shell of its former self, a once vibrant ecosystem now strip-mined by the insatiable appetite of surveillance cap…