You wake up, grab your phone, and immediately feel a dull, familiar exhaustion. You aren’t looking for connection anymore; you’re bracing for impact. The internet we were promised—a gleaming digital frontier of shared knowledge and borderless community—has been gutted. We are left navigating the wreckage, wondering where it all went wrong.
We didn’t break the internet by accident; we built an economy that rewarded breaking it.
It’s comforting to blame the algorithms or ‘social media.’ But as one commenter rightly pointed out, you don’t complain about roads and gutters just because idiots drive on them. The internet isn’t the problem. The internet is just pipes. The problem is what we decided to pump through those pipes: an economic system that turns human attention into a tradable commodity, rewarding whoever can scream the loudest or exploit the fastest.
We are living with the profound grief of a utopian dream that was systematically co-opted. We believed that if you gave everyone a voice, the best ideas would naturally rise to the top. Instead, we gave bad actors a megaphone and a financial incentive to cause chaos. We keep waiting for a software patch to fix this, but this isn’t a bug. It’s a feature of human nature. When you build an open system, the people willing to exploit it will always outpace the people trying to build something beautiful.
Absolute freedom and absolute safety cannot coexist on the same network. One must die for the other to live.
And this brings us to the terrifying part. We are currently barreling toward Artificial General Intelligence, dreaming that it will solve our deepest problems. But if AGI arrives under the exact same economic structure that ruined the internet, it won’t be a renaissance. As one astute observer noted, there won’t be a decades-long grieving process this time. It will be short, if we even realize what happened.
AGI won’t democratize progress; it will just hyper-accelerate our exploitation. The internet was just the rehearsal.
So yes, you have every right to feel digital fatigue. You aren’t experiencing a software glitch; you are experiencing the inevitable outcome of human nature weaponizing open systems for profit. Stop waiting for the platforms to fix themselves. They are working exactly as intended. The internet didn’t fail us. It just showed us who we are when there’s money to be made.
FAQ
Q: Isn't the internet just a tool? Why blame the system instead of individual choices?
A: A tool is a hammer. The internet is a global economy that pays you to swing the hammer at other people's kneecaps. Individual choices don't matter when the entire financial incentive structure rewards exploitation over creation.
Q: If the internet is fundamentally broken by human nature, what do we do now?
A: Stop expecting platforms to self-regulate. Delete the apps that make you feel like a product, support independent creators directly, and treat any new technology (like AGI) with extreme suspicion regarding who profits from it.
Q: You're saying AGI will just accelerate exploitation. Isn't that too pessimistic?
A: It's not pessimism; it's pattern recognition. If you introduce a superintelligence into a capitalist system optimized for extraction, you don't get utopia. You get perfectly optimized extraction.