In my newfound time without most social media (and my urge to scroll YouTube fading to but a speck of history), I've been reading a lot more blog posts. It's wonderful to read long-form content that doesn't require me to commit to reading a book (or require me to ask my friends in academia to smuggle a PDF past a journal paywall).

I don't have any specific blog I like to read (though I do check in with Pivot to AI regularly [it's anti-gen-AI, the blog is named ironically]), nor do I have any specific subject matter I like to read blog posts on. In fact, I think a diversity of topics is better than hemming myself in to whatever "one thing" has my attention at this moment.

So I've read posts on programming philosophy written in the early 2000s, book reviews, environmentalist arguments against climate engineering, transhumanist arguments for the complete dispellation of suffering (which always sound good in concept but quickly turn highly ableist in practice - more on that another time). But there's one sort of blog post I stumble on very frequently: "The old internet is dead."

There are a couple of good ones that I found earlier this year, but it frustrates me to see the idea reiterated so frequently. Admittedly, there's a bit of recency bias here - I am reading dozens of posts eulogizing the pre-Facebook internet in the span of a couple months. They were written over the course of the past two decades, from 2006 up until just this year. If it feels like a lot, that's because it's been twenty years since Facebook started the chain reaction that would pull millions of internet-surfers into its orbit.

I would still be frustrated, though. I argue that the 'old internet' never really died - the fact that people were blogging about it is evidence of that. Personal sites remained up, new ones formed, and the world outside the garden walls continued to grow. It has exploded recently to be sure, what with neocities and nekoweb and the like catering to waves of surfers looking to escape the diminishing pull of social media's original riptide - but that's not the resurrection of the old web. It's a casting open of the gates, so that more and more may see that the world beyond the garden walls is still there and always has been.

Mixing my metaphors here. You get it, tho. The Old Web, like the Old Magic(k), is here and has been here and will be here, waiting for us to come back.

I understand the lamentations - it sure felt like a few big tech companies had killed the internet, that personal sites had been fully devoured by social media profiles, that all individuality and creativity was squashed into the pipeline of advertiser-friendly terms of service through family-friendly slot-machine UI. It felt that way because those companies benefited from us believing the walls were the extent of our digital reali- ah fuck. Shit. It's Plato's allegory of the cave again. God dammit.

Anyway, convincing us the old internet was dead was a marketing tactic. It was a lie, told continuously over two decades, to give power and control and money to the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos (yes, Amazon is included here) and whoever the hell owns Pinterest. Imagine the money you could make on cabbages if you convinced everyone that all the other vegetables had gone extinct. Yes, yes, onions were wonderful - lament them all you need to - you're eating sauerkraut tonight.

Cabbage can be pretty good. I love me an okonomiyaki or some red cabbage slaw, but I wouldn't want cabbage to be the only nutrient source in my diet. And anyway, nobody would want to be near me. Cabbage makes you gassy, and unless you are used to the smell of cabbage-gas, you don't want to be around anyone stinking up the place. I don't need to convince you of the parallels to social media, here, do I? Dewire yourself from the mentality of Reddit and Twitter and you'll see what I mean.

I digress again.

You cannot excise the polypolistic internet without excising the internet itself. It's there, it has been there, it will be there, so long as this great big web of servers exists. People will make personal sites. They will blog their thoughts and feelings. They will display extremely niche collections and build shrines to personally-influential media. It's too easy to scratch up a website in basic HTML for anything else to be the case. You, yourself, can do it right now.

Welcome back to the internet.