What is the internet and why is it following me around?
To cure the patient, first we must identify the disease.When we talk about fixing the internet, we’re not referring to the physical and digital network infrastructure: the protocols, the exchanges, the cables, and even the satellites themselves are mostly okay. (There are problems with some of that stuff, to be sure. But that’s an entirely other issue—even if both do involve Elon Musk.) “The internet” we’re talking about refers to the popular kinds of communication platforms that host discussions and that you probably engage with in some form on your phone.
Some of these are massive: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, X. You almost certainly have an account on at least one of these; maybe you’re an active poster, maybe you just flip through your friends’ vacation photos while on the john.
Although the exact nature of what we see on those platforms can vary widely from person to person, they mediate content delivery in universally similar ways that are aligned with their business objectives. A teenager in Indonesia may not see the same images on Instagram that I do, but the experience is roughly the same: we scroll through some photos from friends or family, maybe see some memes or celebrity posts; the feed turns into Reels; we watch a few videos, maybe reply to a friend’s Story or send some messages. Even though the actual content may be very different, we probably react to it in much the same way, and that’s by design.
The internet also exists outside these big platforms; it’s blogs, message boards, newsletters and other media sites. It’s podcasts and Discord chatrooms and iMessage groups. These will offer more individualized experiences that may be wildly different from person to person. They often exist in a sort of parasitic symbiosis with the big, dominant players, feeding off each other’s content, algorithms, and audience.
The internet is good things. For me, it’s things I love, like Keyboard Cat and Double Rainbow. It’s personal blogs and LiveJournals; it’s AIM away messages and MySpace top 8s. It’s the distracted-girlfriend meme and a subreddit for “What is this bug?” It is a famous thread on a bodybuilding forum where meatheads argue about how many days are in a week. For others, it’s Call of Duty memes and the mindless entertainment of YouTubers like Mr. Beast, or a place to find the highly specific kind of ASMR video they never knew they wanted. It’s an anonymous supportive community for abuse victims, or laughing at Black Twitter’s memes about the Montgomery boat brawl, or trying new makeup techniques you learned on TikTok.
It’s also very bad things: 4chan and the Daily Stormer, revenge porn, fake news sites, racism on Reddit, eating disorder inspiration on Instagram, bullying, adults messaging kids on Roblox, harassment, scams, spam, incels, and increasingly needing to figure out if something is real or AI.