Do you remember the magic of the early internet, and do you understand why it was magical? Those of us who were there still talk about the good old days, when the web was a high-IQ, largely Western frontier built by and for nerds, thinkers, and builders. Sadly many Zoomers have no idea what this was like, but ask anyone who was there and they’ll tell you it was incredible.
I spent endless hours locked in real debates on phpBB forums, learning how to build arcade cabinets, trading ideas, and clicking through obscure websites someone casually dropped into a thread. It was discovery, craftsmanship, and shared curiosity in its purest form and it was beautiful.
I miss it dearly.
The internet of today bears no resemblance to that world. It no longer nourishes us. It drains us one endless scroll at a time. I can’t watch things like Reels and by the grace of God I’ve never installed TikTok.
This rapid short form slop turns my mind into mashed potatoes and I’m left feeling physically and spiritually ill after consuming it. It’s no wonder our young people are a mess. They’re flooding their minds with dopamine-addled drivel for hours a day.
I’ve watched this decay from the inside while building tools at Gab to defend freedom and preserve even a faint shadow of what the internet once was. Being on the frontlines of dealing with the growing problem over the last decade I want to let you in on a little secret: it’s going to get worse.
We’ve all felt the shift in internet culture and quality that has rapidly deteriorated. The web was already fractured of course with Twitter’s echo chambers and Facebook’s family fights, but at least it had a rhythm.
Then came the flood. Hundreds of millions from the third world logging on for the first time. Billions, really, if you count the ripple. Places where electricity was a luxury yesterday were now wired up with cheap smartphones and data plans subsidized by global corporations hungry for eyeballs.
India, Nigeria, Indonesia. Scammers hawking fake crypto from Lagos call centers. Agitators stirring pots from afar, paid by who-knows-what state actors to sow chaos. Spammers blanketing feeds with bot armies that drown out the signal.
This is the new internet. I hate it. You hate it. We all hate it.
Is this not the ultimate debunking of the globalist dream? Shove disparate tongues, faiths, and hungers into one space, and you don’t get the utopian vision we were promised by progressives. What we got instead was fragmentation, noise, destruction and chaos.
Another issue is that AI-generated garbage is flooding every corner: surreal cat soaps on YouTube, shrimp-Jesus memes on Facebook, poverty porn stock photos cranked out by Indian hustlers.
No one can tell the difference anymore between what is real and what is synthetic. Someone can spend hours working on something only to have someone truly and sincerely believe that they used AI to make it even when they didn’t. Why not just use it if everyone is going to claim you are anyway?
The internet of today is soulless. We have algorithms churning out content optimized for clicks instead of truth or beauty. Ghibli-style memes posted by government official accounts. What are we even doing here? It’s a flood of uncanny valley crap. Hayao Miyazaki, the genius Japanese animator, called it an insult to life itself and he’s right.
The internet’s signal-to-noise ratio has tanked. It’s all just noise now.
It’s getting worse because the incentives haven’t changed. Tech giants only care about chasing growth at all costs. More users, more data, more ads. Users are incentivized for the same. More clicks. More rage. More monetization dollars.
AI tools lower the bar so low anyone with a laptop in Ukraine or Kenya can pump out “content” farms and 930 YouTube channels at once if they’re desperate enough. Platforms reward engagement over quality, so the slop rises and it will continue to.
It’s also poisoning minds and further eroding trust. The great joy of the early internet was that it used to spark ideas and creativity. Today’s internet breeds apathy, addiction, isolation, but maybe all of this will lead to a good outcome after all.
More people will be logging off the big networks entirely, that I can tell you. I’ve seen it in my own circles with friends ditching Instagram for good, getting minimal or “dumb” phones, and spending less and less time online. The biggest hit at CES this year wasn’t some crazy new tech innovation, it was a new Blackberry-like minimal phone designed solely around communication instead of endless scrolling. I preordered one.
I also believe that many more will flock to the fringes: niche communities, high-trust pockets where admission isn’t free-for-all. Membership-only platforms, invite-only forums like the old days, and yes smaller social networks like Gab. Places where you know people share your values. Places where you know some third-world scammer isn’t allowed at an IP level.
What keeps me optimistic is that we’re seeing the rise of digital network states. Walled-off digital realms that are sovereign in their own right. China saw it coming decades ago. They built the Great Firewall early, corralling their net into WeChat and Weibo. It’s State controlled, yes, but protected.
For all the posturing against the Great Firewall over the years, you have to admit they cooked with that idea. No Western liberal degeneracy and atomized individualism. No third-world multi-cultural slop. No OnlyFans. No foreign scammers. A beautiful homogenous internet experience for their people. You can’t deny they protected the minds of their people from the decay of the outside world.
Nothing stops us from doing the same as independent actors. At Gab, we’ve been living it for years. We banned just about every third-world nation a few years ago. We have no more scammers flooding inboxes, spammers hijacking threads, foreign agitators stirring division. Our community tightened up, real conversations flourished. We have a lighter load on moderation and support tickets down. It was the best decision we ever made and frankly I wish we did it sooner. It turns out borders work online too.
So yeah, the internet sucks right now, a bloated beast devouring its own heart. It’ll worsen before it gets better: more slop, more strife, more souls lost to the feed. But we’re not helpless. We’re going to build our walls, our network states, one community at a time. Gab is just the start. Join us, or build your own. In this digital mess, the faithful remnant from the old internet endures.
Let’s reclaim it.
