Yes, the title of this article is sensationalist and click-baity, so I'll get straight to the point: when "The Internet" was first invented, the word evoked this extraordinary sense of optimism, and endless possibility, and fun, in a way that is hard to convey in words to people who weren't there to see it. There was this prevailing sense that in the very future everything would change for the better. I remember at the time being convinced that I wanted my future career to be in software engineering and to be among the class of experts on the cutting edge of technology who bring the Internet itself into existence. That sense of overwhelming optimism and enless possibility evoked by the word "Internet," is now thoroughly dead. Now, the Internet is a utility, taken for granted, and loathed for the pressures it puts on people, like government-imposed taxation.
Although it may be dead now, those of us who lived to see The Internet still remember that sense of optimism and endless possibility with a sense of nostalgic fondness. We remember it like a beloved old friend who has sadley passed away before the had a chance to live up to their full potential. But I am actually not so pessimistic, I think as long as there are people alive who remember The Internet as it was before it died, we can make it live again. There are very large communities of consisting of aging experts like myself and younger kids who have a genuine desire to understand how these magical devices really work down to the atomic level, who are keeping the idea of The Internet alive.
We have label for these communities, like Retrocomputing, people who focus on simple and small computers, and try to preserve the computers of the 1970s and 1980s (and even older, sometimes). There are the Tildes, like where I host this very blog, who focus on simplified ways of interacting with computers, through interactive command line interfaces that eschew computer graphics. I would put the "Gopher Protocol" and "Gemini Protocol" communities under "Retrocomputing" because they are trying to maintain or improve upon old Internet protocols that lost the battle to HTTP (the Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol).
Then there is the Permacomputing community who think along the same lines as "prepers." They posit that when society inevitably collapses, the supply chains that make modern computers possible will be lost forever. And so the set of all computers that were built up until the collapse of society will be the set of all computers to ever exist at all. So preserving these computers as a valuable natural resource will become a valuable skill. Permacomputing also involves the idea of "optimizing," which means doing as much as you possibly can with with smallest, simplest computers that you can. There is a lot of overlap with Retrocomputing, because people who remember how simple old computers used to be still remember the necessity of optimizing computing resources, and still remember how to do more with less.
Finally there is the "Small Web," sometimes call the "Smolweb," where people use modern web technology but try to keep things as simple as possible. They avoiding web development frameworks that require large numbers of dependent software applications, and try to make do with only the software resources already availble to you in your pocket smartphone. You can have web pages with graphics, sometimes even cute JavaScript programs, but there is no login or e-mail requirement, no ads or tracking, just hobbyists and nerds talking about what they love. Most try to link only to other Small Web pages to keep users in the network of the Small Web.
Watching the Internet be born, and then die
I was born in the 1980s, I watched the world change completely as personal computers entered our lives (which happend in the "first world" starting in 1977), and I was a young teenager when "The Internet" became a household phrase. I remember all of my friends at school talking about it. I remember, being the son of a university professor who had Intenet access through a 2400 baud modem and had used a few bulliten board services (BBS), feeling proud that I already knew all about this thing that everyone was suddenly curious about, I felt a sense of privilege among my peers. So many television documentaries of that era explained the Internet and hypothesized about what it would be like in the near future, with everything you could possibly buy being available for purchase from the comfort of your own home, which largely turned out to be true.
An interesting asside: no one at the time could envision the details of what it would actually be like to do this online shopping, they usually showed people using a personal computer with a keyboard, or imagining some vague Star Trek like computer that sat invisible in the background and would respond to voice commands. What Internet shopping of the future would only become known after free market pressures would cause the personal computer to evolve into the shape of a modern smartphone. But I digress.
Now, the idea of "screen time" is a household phrase among parents, carefully rationing the amount of time their children spend using computers (I include smartphones and tablets under the umberlla term "computer"), with zero screen time pretty typcial among parents of children under the age of roughly six years old. The idea of "social media" is thought of as a necessary evil, which will let you "monetize" the things you do in your free time, stay in touch with old friends, and find a community of people who share your interests, but is also an addictive drug as bad as any opiate.
I can't remember a single bad thing said about "The Internet" by anyone back in it&'apos;s earliest days, except by people who were already just generally opposed to endless capitalistic growth — I remember an old "Calvin and Hobbes" comic in which Calvin asked his dad if he why they don't have the Internet, his dad replies simply, "Because it's bad enough that we have a telephone." I don't know if Bill Waterson was using Calvin's Dad as a conduit for his own personal opinions or he was more than half-joking. But baring that group of people, The Internet was overwhelming viewed a positive thing, as I recollect. That Calvin and Hobbes comic, however, turned out to be especially prescient, as a very large number of people nowadays would strongly agree with Cavlin's Dad. So that old 4-panel comic is more relevant than it ever was.
For many small businesses, the default mode of conducting business is through a smart phone. Even restauarnts, especially in large cities, now default to ordering ordering over your cell phone, they save money on putting tablet computers on every table by assuming every customer has a smartphone they can use to order their food. For the 0.1% of customers who don't have a phone, the waiter will take your order the traditional way. Even sending a package through a postal service requires an online account with your e-mail address to verify your identity. People think of these things as "conveniences," but if you decide you want to suddenly live your life without the Internet, you'll begin to see that the Internet is no longer merely optional for more and more things nowadays. So in this way, every single last thing you do is logged and analyzed, extraction wealth from records of human behavior begins to feel more and more like slavery, as though we ordinary consumers are natural resources to be consumed by machinery for creating wealth.
So what we are left with is something called "The Internet," which does not resemble the original "The Internet" in any way, shape or form. What we call "The Internet" is not a more-evolved form of the old Internet, it is a cancerous mutation of it. It is a machine of the purest form of evil capitalist exploitation. As the Internet and smartphones more often become a reqirement for anyone who expects to live in a technologically advanced society, you will find more and more people wanting to revolt against this expoitative machinery.
That's just human nature, I suppose. I don't think a revolution is necessary, as long as those old Internet enthusiast communities continue to grow and thrive, the Retrocomputing, Permacomputing, and Small Web people. If for some reason the powers-that-be decide to make it somehow impossible for those old Internet enthusiast communities to exist, then that will be the final nail in the old Internet's coffin. Modern age verification laws, which are lobbied for in governments by corporations like Meta (Facebook) may be the impetus that makes the existence of these communities illegal. Though that is a topic for a whole other article.