The Dying of the Internet

Spending time on the internet today is a quietly depressing experience. It’s not the trolls or the arguments, but the crushing blandness of it all. Over the past three years I’ve started finding the experience of going online deflating. There’s nothing new, nothing worth getting excited about. I now scroll and part of my mind is incessantly pestering me with the question; ‘what are you doing here? It’s all shit. The same shit as last time, and the time before that.’

Where ten years ago every link seemed to deliver a new idea, or a novel way of seeing the world, today everything online resembles everything else. It is nothing more than people following formulas to gain attention. Videos, business sites, blogs, social media feeds – it’s all a thinly veiled exercise in people trying to get attention. It’s vain, indulgent, superficial and strangely pathetic.

The internet is dying. We’re watching the last vestiges of what we’ve known as the online world become a shell of what it was and a shadow of what it promised to be. New sites, concepts and ideas are being forced to conform to whatever is deemed to already be successful. Substack is a perfect example of this trend. What once promised to be a platform for thoughtful dialogue is now just another clone of the social media formats it sought to replace.

Photo by Tyler Donaghy

Websites all imitate one another. Site developers, conversion rate optimisers and product owners all look at what is ‘working’ on other sites and then imitate and facelift their sites to be an amalgamation of everything else out there.

Even people wanting to build a new site are being forced into preconceived notions of what an online experience should be like. Think about it; WordPress, Square, Wix; they all offer ready-to-go, templatised site structures based on what is relevant to your business or goals.

Content

Then, along with templatised copies of site structures we get ‘content’. The words and images we fill social media feeds, blogs and websites with.

Having worked for many brands over the past few decades I can honestly say that very few companies genuinely care about the information they post on their sites. They’ll usually have a junior copywriter fill a sites’ pages with little oversight or editing input. Legal departments are involved but usually to sterilise anything that might be controversial. Sometimes content would be copy-and-pasted from old brochures. The unwritten assumption is always; nobody is going to bother to read this—don’t spend too much time or money on it.

Then there are individuals on social media or people who write blogs. These are people who create content with the sole hope of growing a following, be it for themselves or an organisation that hired them.

If you want to learn how to build an audience and to join the ‘creator economy’ (a bullshit term referring to people who make money by filling the internet with drivel that hopefully seems profound or useful) you can spend a small fortune listening to the gurus eager to take your money and feed you formulas like this:

• Post consistently.

• Shorter posts such as tweets and notes need to happen daily, twice daily if you can.

• Long-form posts, such as Substack or blog posts, at least weekly. More often if possible.

• Use content from your longer posts for your shorter notes/tweets.

• Post consistently, stay within your niche/topic.

• Being able to string a sentence together helps, but this may no longer be a prerequisite for success.

• Focus on short pieces.

• Write simply with short paragraphs that seamlessly deliver a reader from one section to the next.

• The headline is the most important element of any piece.

• Use bullet points and make sure you’re writing for someone with a reading capability of a third grader.

• Use compelling images and video where possible – minimal relation to the written copy required.

• A combination of video and written content across platforms is preferable.

That’s how you build a following. You must consistently fill the void.

The ‘creator economy’ is nothing more than a euphemism for the exploitation of creativity. It’s not about fostering meaningful work, but rather commodifying attention and sacrificing artistry for profit.

In marketing, social media teams called it ‘feeding the beast’. Each day, you must come up with something to post that is tangentially relevant to the brand, client, or sponsor paying you. You needed fodder to feed the social media algorithm so that your audience kept you top of mind and the algorithm rewarded you for consistency.

We no longer share information online to inform or enrich; we share to be seen, to accumulate followers, to monetise attention. The goal has shifted from sharing knowledge to merely ‘filling’.

Apparently, according to the gurus, that’s what it takes to be an artist, a writer, or a director.

It’s like using the same crayon, over and over again, to fill in a colouring book. The task becomes mechanical, thoughtless; a means of covering empty space.

Crayons

When our kids were small, my wife and I used to read to them. One book that stood out was The Day the Crayons Quit. In it, various crayons write letters to their owner, Duncan, complaining about how he uses them.

The most overworked crayons were red and blue. The red one was constantly having to colour in "fire engines, apples, strawberries, and everything else that's red," while Blue Crayon was "stumpy and needs a break from colouring all of those bodies of water."

The metaphor struck me. When I was a kid, I used the red, blue and green crayons to fill space. I used them to eradicate blank space and to finish the picture. My skies were uniformly blue, my grass that was monotonously green, and my apples were all rendered in the same red. It was a thoughtless exercise of back-and-forth with a crayon between fingers that were growing tired; a chore I hoped would end soon.

This is what most people who regularly publish online do. They rely on superficial ideas, or rehash flat, generic content just to have something to say. And, just like using a single crayon for the whole sky, we flatten the world into sameness.

We’ve templatised the outline of what a site should look like and then coloured in each site with flat content—relying on volume over quality. And we get away with it because we know most people won’t read or care about the rubbish we share. After all, the internet and algorithms don’t reward research, clarity or depth.

Don’t think, just publish.

What We Lose

This process of filling the same outlines with content that is created on a schedule instead of when we have something valuable to share, means that we lose detail.

Online content (and think about how horrible the word ‘content’ is—content is what finds its way into a medical specimen jar) is flat, singular, lacking in nuance. More and more of us come online to learn and realise that finding anything valuable is too hard. We’ve buried great ideas, invaluable insights, in a barn full of brown straw, and the effort required to sift through the dross for the nuggets of gold is no longer worth it.

It is no longer a place to learn or understand what is going on in the world. Instead, it’s become something we use to fill time. The same way we fill the internet with flat, pointless ideas, so we use those flat, pointless ideas to fill the blanks in our lives—all the while lying to ourselves that this is valuable.

Discernment and Taste

Yuval Noah Harari has said on several occasions that he’s sceptical of short-form writing. Harari argues that short-form writing distils complexity into nothingness. And the internet has perfected this process, reducing ideas to soundbites and tweets.

I believe it goes further than this. For many to keep up with the schedule of filling the online space, and keeping their ‘beast’ fed, means grabbing the nearest thought and repackaging it so that it can be easily consumed and then forgotten. In many cases, I find people who post incessantly don’t fully grasp the idea they’re trying to share. They’re being intellectually dishonest, and they exacerbate our inability to truly see the world as it is.

Most of what’s online today is nothing more than digital pollution.

Today I distrust short writing that happens on a schedule, that lands in my inbox weekly. I’m suspicious of the ideas these creators share. I see their work as entertainment, distraction. And, at best, maybe a starting point.

What we’re missing are the people whose job it was to filter the dross from the gold. Before the age of the internet, we had editors and publishers who were the gatekeepers of what made it to the public. And while they limited the creative prospects of many talented and insightful people, they ensured that what we read and saw met a standard that had been agreed upon as worthy.

When it became clear what the internet could become, I remember so many artists and creators rejoicing at the fact that arbitrary standards and self-important gatekeepers could no longer stop them from making the art they wanted to make and share it directly with an online audience. And in the heady first decades of the internet technologists and artists worked together to push the frontiers of what the internet could do.

And the more people saw that they could become famous by just being ‘online’, the masses drowned out the geniuses and the artists. For a long time, I believed that great ideas would and could still bubble to the surface and be noticed. But, today, I no longer believe this to be true. This is because there is so much inane content that any genius disappears along with everything else that’s pointless. And this has been going on so long that I’ve become conditioned to not expect anything worthwhile from the act of going online. Even if I came across the work of the next great intellectual of our time, I have no doubt that I’d scroll past it.

TL;DR.

So, I’m all for bringing back gatekeepers. Bring back magazines and newspapers. Let’s have news that doesn’t rely on advertising and outrage to turn a profit. Let’s invest in publications that bring us information that’s helpful, insightful and educational.

And let’s not only bring back the gatekeepers. Let's also have people with taste and intellect tell us what's worth reading and watching. Never has it been more helpful to hear what people who actually know what they’re talking about tell us where they go to be informed. We need guides to tell us where to look, what is worth our time and what might be interesting. And each of us needs several of these people to help us find the gold that’s out there. The more input from a broad base of people, the more varied our thinking and the more curious we are about the world.

This is where GenAI can play a role. I use AI to discover philosophers I hadn’t heard of. I use it to find sites and essays that might answer some of the questions I'm wrestling with. GenAI is my online librarian who helps me find things I couldn't find on my own.

AI could be the key to reviving the internet. It doesn’t have to be a tool for feeding the ‘algorithmic beast’. If we use it to curate meaningful online work, it could help us reclaim the internet as a space for intellectual discovery.