The internet feels dead, doesn’t it?
Capitalism killed it.
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 it felt 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.
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 capitalism. Where we once had a thriving bazaar of ideas, we now have a never-ending stream of staged videos, malformed AI art, bots, so many fucking bots, and regurgitated Substack opinions (like this one), all packaged neatly for maximum engagement and minimum substance. The internet has become one giant, inescapable advertisement, every click tracked, every preference cataloged, every moment of attention ruthlessly monetized (by the way, you should definitely become a paid subscriber to Beneath the Pavement).
Are you not entertained?
Enshittification
This is the enshittification of the internet, ladies and gentlemen, to borrow a term from Cory Doctorow. Platform decay. It’s the slow, inexorable process by which the delightful chaos of the early web is tamed, sanitized, and repackaged for mass consumption. The quirky, homespun charm of GeoCities pages, MySpace profiles, and niche forums has been replaced by the sleek, corporate minimalism of Instagram or Reddit, a style choice that reflects the hollowness within.
Remember when YouTube was a place for genuine, unfiltered human expression? Now it’s an endless sea of reaction videos, drama vlogs, and thinly-veiled product placements. Overproduced, meaningless, shit. The algorithm, that mysterious and all-powerful arbiter of attention, rewards not creativity or originality, but engagement at any cost. And so we’re fed a steady diet of manufactured outrage, fake controversies, and vapid “content” designed to keep us clicking, watching, and scrolling. It works magnificently.
Dead internet theory
Some have even suggested that the internet is already dead, that what we're interacting with now is little more than a convincing simulacrum populated by bots and AI (how could you tell that I am real?). It’s a rather chilling thought, but one that’s hard to dismiss entirely. After all, how much of what we see online these days feels truly authentic, truly human? The uncanny valley of AI-generated text and images is rapidly disappearing, and it’s becoming harder and harder to distinguish the real from the fake. Soon, it will be entirely impossible. It probably already is.
This is not some accident of technology, but the logical endpoint of a system that prioritizes profit over people at every turn. The internet was once a commons, a shared space for collaboration and creativity. But as Shoshana Zuboff warns in her work “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” it has been enclosed by private interests, fenced off, strip-mined for data. Our every interaction, our every intimate thought and feeling, has become raw material for the machine, fuel for the engines of targeted advertising and behavioral prediction. Another corporate tragedy of the commons.
Capitalist takeover
In short: capitalism, in its endless quest for growth and profit, has swallowed the internet whole. The platforms that dominate our online lives — Google, Meta, Amazon — are private fiefdoms, answerable only to their shareholders and the bottom line. And as they’ve grown, they’ve used their wealth and market dominance to gobble up potential competitors, stifle innovation, and bend the very fabric of the internet to their will.
Even supposed bastions of independence like Substack — despite incessant claims to the contrary — are far from immune. Though pitched as a way for writers to break free from the tyranny of the algorithm, it’s rapidly becoming just another playground for the well-connected, a space where success is determined not by the quality of one’s ideas, but by the size of one’s existing audience. (I say this not out of spite, at least not entirely.) Unknown writers, in general, will remain unknown no matter the quality of idea and skill.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Internet or real life
Perhaps most disturbingly, the internet is no longer a reflection of real life — no, real life has become a reflection of the internet. Our (boring) offline world is increasingly shaped by the priorities and incentives of the online attention economy. Politics has become a series of viral moments and hashtag campaigns, substance sacrificed for shareability and outrage. Culture is reduced to a never-ending series of memes and vibes and challenges, each more ephemeral than the last. Even our interpersonal relationships, to a degree, are mediated by the logic of likes and follows, our sense of self-worth tied to digital clout.
We are living in the shadow of the machine, every move tracked, every desire predicted and packaged for sale. The internet had its golden age, and we forgot all about it. We took a collaborative miracle and turned it into just another tool; handed over the keys to the kingdom, now reaping the bitter rewards.
A better internet
Perhaps not all is lost. Even as the internet of olden times recedes into the murky shadows of ancestral memory, there remain glimmers of hope, pockets of resistance against the all-consuming logic of capitalism. In the rise of decentralized technologies and peer-to-peer networks (I love torrents, “Arrgh, matey!”), we discover the potential for a new kind of internet, one that returns power to the hands of users rather than corporations. In the growing demand for data privacy and algorithmic transparency, we see perhaps the early stirrings of a public awakening, a recognition that our online lives have consequences that extend beyond the screen.
The internet is not dead, but it is broken. To fix it, we must first recognize the depth and scale of the problem. We must confront the fact that the very business models that dominate the web — the relentless monetization of attention, the strip-mining of personal data, ads, so many fucking ads — are fundamentally incompatible with a healthy and thriving digital, and hence analog, public sphere. We must demand a new deal for the internet, one that puts people and communities first. Substack, in some ways, had the right ideas while almost entirely failing in execution. Same for Reddit. I cannot accept that a Google search gives you fifteen sponsored ads first.
This will not be easy. The forces of surveillance capitalism are deeply, very, very deeply, entrenched, and they will not relinquish their power willingly. But the stakes are really fucking high. The internet is not just a tool or a pastime — it is, in some ways — though not to overstate its significance — the nervous system of the 21st century, the connective tissue that binds our world together. It creates inter-subjective realities far more powerful than the ones we had before (like religion or the nation-state). If we lose the battle for the internet, we risk losing something fundamental indeed.
Reimagine what online life could be — a true commons, a space for genuine connection and collaboration, for creativity and community, and the free exchange of ideas without succumbing to the free-speech-also-means-hate-speech fallacy. Let us build an internet worthy of the utopian visions that birthed it, an internet that brings out the best in us rather than the worst. How? I don’t know, man.
I just know that we cannot let this be our legacy. The internet may have lost its way, but it’s not entirely too late to chart a new course. Soon, everything will be AI, and if we do nothing it will be so very, very boring.
Well, thanks for reading.
Antonio Melonio
Video version of this essay:
This article captures my feelings exactly, the internet used to be a wonderful place that fostered creativity and the exchange of ideas. Now, much like you said it is a hyper-invasive almost fascist entity that aims to dictate and shape our real world experiences. I very much miss the Frutiger Aero aesthetic and cultural relevance that it came with. We'll never see the old internet, because we'll never slow the capitalist machine down until our planet can longer support that economic system.
Shit, son. I remember when chat rooms were THE thing. My mom, who had no idea what the internet was, got hooked on a specific chat room on AOL. She still talks about it to this day, wondering what happened to all those people she talked to.
I was a member of a forum called Killthechildren.com in the early 2000s. The type of conversations there definitely aren't happening now, or I'm just older and cranky and nothing is new anymore.