A love letter to the old internet

Does anyone else miss the old internet?

I don't mean the really old internet, when you got AOL discs in the post and had to boot your mum off the phone so the modem could dial up. I mean the one after that.

The one where people taught themselves HTML from library books and built their own websites, where we played browser games and read silly comics, and wrote each other emails that we logged in to check once a day (or week, or month). The one where your favourite bloggers introduced you to new recipes, or music, or art, and you didn't know what an algorithm was and didn't need to.

What happened to that internet?

It's not as though the people went anywhere. (If you're reading this: 👋 hi, talented people from the internet of the past, whose work I joyfully consumed. I hope you're doing great. It's been too long.)

So what changed?

Maybe it was the natural order of things. A digital version of biological succession, where plucky pioneer species prepare the ground for all of the other forms of life, for the wee beasties and the lumbering creatures and the giant trees under whose canopy they then shelter.

But when I look back, it doesn't feel like that. It feels like the internet was deliberately and fundamentally undermined, until the ground was no longer fertile for its original inhabitants.

I remember the rise of SEO, when search engine algorithms suddenly inserted themselves between website creators and anyone who might want to find their work. Algorithms too stupid to understand that - for example - the carbonara recipe you'd just posted was, in fact, a carbonara recipe, unless its title, headings and opening sentences repeatedly hammered that keyword.

So: don't bother writing a blog post titled "Nonna's Favourite Recipe for Broken Hearts" and then telling the story of how your first boyfriend dumped you at the school dance, and when you came home, Nonna made you a plate of her famous carbonara to mend your broken heart.

Nope. With the advent of search engines, it became essential to wangle "best carbonara recipe" and "carbonara recipe simple" and "carbonara recipe easy" into your article at every opportunity, because those are the highest-performing keywords.

What? You don't want to? Fine. Keep your story about your teenage heartbreak and your beloved granny and her genuinely beautiful carbonara recipe. But don't expect anyone to ever read it, because no one will find your website.

Then came social media. I think you only need to consider the advice that the platforms themselves give creators for one, solemn second to realise what an awful deal they offer. Make sure you're posting regularly. Consistency is key!

Ask yourself: why? Why would they care how often you post?

Each time you upload, your data lands on their servers. It costs them money to host it. Unless you pay for premium services, you don't pay for your account. So every time you post an image, a video, a piece of music, a scrap of text, you are literally costing them money.

So what's in it for them?

You're the product, I hear you chorus. Well, yes. Your eyeballs inside the platform are what they sell to advertisers. But if the platform only cared about keeping your eyeballs around, it could do what television networks used to do: commission people to produce content, and sandwich the adverts in between. That would cost real money, of course. Far better if there were a way to get high-quality, entertaining, educational, compulsively watchable content without paying a penny.

And there is. It's your content, that you upload, for free. The only risk is that you might stop uploading. You might get bored, or busy, or distracted by your actual life. No content means no eyeballs means no advertisers, and poof, the whole thing would evaporate.

But the platforms have this covered. All they have to do is incentivise you with digital metrics: followers, reach, likes. And oh boy, you deliver. Regularly, for free, in exactly the format they demand. Portrait, 1080 × 1920, under thirty seconds, please.

Sure, maybe one day you'll be able to leverage those followers into real money, or career opportunities you can use to pay your bills. But until then, and beyond then, you'll still be working for a social media company for free.

And now there's AI. Another brave new world with all the frisson and excitement of our AOL-on-a-CD days. I think, perversely, that it's that energy that has reminded me of the old internet and made me hanker for it now.

Part of me is optimistic. If AI disrupts the dumb old SEO I just railed against, and connects people to content more thoughtfully, more humanly, then maybe something good is coming. Maybe we get a second chance.

But when that content is written by AI too, to be scraped by AI, in an eternal loop that removes humans from the equation entirely, what then? What becomes of the internet I and so many others loved?

Here is what I keep thinking about. In biological succession, the pioneer species don't just disappear. The mosses, the lichens, the first fragile orchids: they're still in the ecosystem, still growing, still doing their quiet, essential work. But they are easily missed. The canopy above them has grown dense, and very little light gets through.

That is what the old internet feels like to me. It's still there, in pockets. People are still writing blogs, still making odd and beautiful things, still putting pieces of themselves online with no strategy, no analytics dashboard, no content calendar. But the canopy of platforms and algorithms and AI-generated noise has grown so thick above them that you could walk the forest floor and never know they were there.

I don't want to be naïve about this. You can't reverse succession. You can't cut down the oaks and expect the orchids to flourish as they once did; the soil itself has changed. But you can decide what you value. You can choose to step down from the neatly curated wooden walkway. Get down on your hands and knees, to part the undergrowth, and to look.