You remember the sound of the dial-up modem. You remember the raw, chaotic energy of the early web—the ugly GeoCities pages, the obscure IRC channels, the feeling that you were exploring an unmapped frontier. Back then, the internet felt like a secret club you had to earn your way into.
Today, that club has been replaced by a sterile, surveilled shopping mall. We mindlessly click ‘Accept All Cookies,’ we pass endless Captchas to prove we aren’t robots, and we hand over our behavioral data just to read a single article. We blame hackers, scammers, and malicious actors for ruining the internet. But we’re blaming the wrong people.
The internet didn’t become a hostile place because bad people showed up. It became hostile because computing got too easy.
In the 1990s, computing was hard. If you wanted to build a website, you had to learn HTML. If you wanted to join a community, you had to understand the niche social norms of a specific bulletin board. That friction acted as a filter. It meant the people online were generally curious, invested, and willing to collaborate. Trust was the default because the barrier to entry ensured everyone spoke the same language of curiosity.
Then, we decided to commodify it. We built smartphones, frictionless apps, and one-click sign-ins. We wanted everyone online. We got our wish, but we lost the soul of the web in the process.
When you strip away the friction of learning, you don’t just make technology easier to use—you make it easier to exploit.
When computing became a black box that anyone could use without understanding, the mutual trust broke down. You can’t have organic trust when half the participants don’t know how the system works. To protect the masses from their own lack of digital literacy, we didn’t build better education. We built guardrails.
Enter the era of security theater. Two-factor authentication, biometric scans, algorithmic feeds that ‘curate’ our reality, and walled gardens that lock our digital lives away from the open web. We are constantly surveilled, tracked, and categorized. We aren’t protected; we are pacified.
We didn’t build a safer internet. We just built a much larger prison and convinced everyone it was a luxury resort.
The hacker spirit is dead. The playful experimentation that birthed the web has been replaced by a sterile, sanitized experience designed to maximize engagement and minimize liability. We traded our curiosity for convenience, and our autonomy for the illusion of safety.
You can’t have a digital playground without a few scraped knees. By demanding an internet where a toddler can tap a screen and buy something in seconds, we killed the very exploration that made the web meaningful.
You cannot engineer trust. You can only build the conditions for it to grow. By paving over the wild internet to make it safe for everyone, we ensured it belongs to no one.
FAQ
Q: Isn't it a good thing that computing is easier and more people can use it?
A: Accessibility is great, but not when it's achieved by turning users into passive, exploitable products. We prioritized frictionless consumption over digital literacy, which required massive corporate guardrails to prevent chaos.
Q: How do we get the old internet back?
A: We can't go back to the 90s, but we can start rejecting the walled gardens. Support decentralized platforms, learn how the tools you use actually work, and accept a little friction in exchange for digital autonomy.
Q: Are you saying we shouldn't have any cybersecurity?
A: No, I'm saying the current system is security theater. We're mass-surveilling everyone to protect them from the consequences of not understanding their devices, rather than educating them to protect themselves.