the internet is rotting. can we save it?

on watching a library of alexandria being lost and building a new one

This edish of Culture Vulture was written by SYSCA bestie Sacha Judd. If you want to pitch something for our culture vulture newsy, email me at luce@shityoushouldcareabout.com xxx

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Lately, I’ve been thinking about nostalgia. Luce has written about this a bit in the SYSCA daily newsy – about how soothing it is to cosplay as our teen selves and re-embrace the things we loved when we were younger. At the same time I’ve been reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, and the main characters are going through college at the same time that I did, and at the beginning, Sam is trying to work out how to make contact with Sadie who he suspects is not able to check her college email over the break. It threw me right back to the early internet, when going online was 56k modems at home, or the university computer labs between classes (yes I’m very old). 

Right now the internet seems to be gradually decaying around us as we watch. As a petty billionaire drives Twitter into the ground (I’ll use its new name over my cold dead body), a Library of Alexandria is being lost. The alternatives feel like half-hearted imitations. Our social infrastructure has become overrun with harassment and hate and people hell-bent on bad faith interpretations. And with that comes wave after wave of nostalgia. People reminiscing about a time in the past when the internet was Good, Actually. The sentiment feels universal, regardless of when you came online. “Things were better when we had blogs.” “We should all go back to the days of Livejournal.” “Wouldn’t it be cool if Flickr was like it was in the beginning?” We know that the web is broken – that it’s all about extractive capitalism. It’s everything that’s wrong with the walled gardens, with Facebook and TikTok, with not owning your own content, and not being paid appropriately for your creative endeavours – or worse, doing something absolutely meaningless in order to be paid at all.

But increasingly I think what we’re seeing here is not just a nostalgia for the tools and the platforms and the idealism. Nostalgia for the early web is nostalgia for a different scale. It’s a longing for a time when there were just fewer people online. The reality is we weren’t made to be in a community with this many people at once. It’s become dehumanising - this many people online. We don’t think of them as real people – we say things we’d never say if they were sitting next to us. And so we need to seek out alternatives to the noise and the crowds and the hate. We’re drawn back into smaller private neighbourhoods. Social discords and slacks (or Geneva groups). Group chats. Substack commenting threads. Ask people where their favourite place on the internet is now and it’s going to be an obscure private Facebook group about a podcast they like. People are returning to older platforms, like Tumblr, for this very reason: it’s chronological, no algo, no influencers, barely any current events.

I hate the idea that we’re giving up, though. That we’re ceding our public square to the nazis and the trolls. I’ve thought a lot about things we can do to fight for those common spaces. But I also think we can focus on building great neighbourhoods, instead of giant vc-funded platforms. Places where we share the things we love online, not for clout or influence or likes or clicks. Luce and I often say that sharing our favourite things is a love language. Sitting around in front of the tv showing each other our favourite clips on Youtube. Our platforms and social infrastructure should feel like that.

The truth is none of us is only part of one community. We’re part of rock climbing groups and improv troupes and choirs. Writing workshops and gardening groups and dog parks.

And I firmly believe that the online networks and spaces that we’re part of that are healthy and inclusive and happy places to be, have to show up the places that are toxic and broken to the point that people won’t want to be a part of them any more. 

I believe that our good neighbourhoods can influence the bad. The thing I love most about the internet is its ability to bring us together. Vibrant communities of engaged people connecting around the things they love. Let’s try and make those spaces of choice the real internet for the future, instead of longing for the past.

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