It's easy to be nostalgic for a time before pornographic AI deepfakes and Nick Fuentes.
And a lot of discourse (mine included) lately seems to be about the old internet, the golden days, a time we look at with a mourning for the good thing we once had.
But you know what they say about rose-tinted glasses? When you’ve got them on, red flags just look like, well, flags.
When I think about it honestly: was the internet really a better place back in my early teens? Tumblr 1000% gave me years of disordered eating and food anxiety. AskFM taught me that the veil separating real life harm and online harm was incredibly non-existent.
However, the harm that can be done now when the internet is used as such a tool seems increasingly dark and unprecedented.
Douglas Adams once observed that "anything invented before you're born is normal, anything invented between 15 and 35 is revolutionary, and anything invented after 35 is against the natural order of things."
This speaks to how our perception shifts as we age, suggesting that our willingness to adapt to new innovations diminishes over time. Is that what's happening here? Or is the internet genuinely a much more terrible place to be right now?
I think both things might be true, and that's what makes this question so philosophically interesting.
I’m going to start with why it actually might be worse (of course, do you know me?)
It’s no secret that the architecture of the internet has fundamentally transformed.
Early internet spaces were more like libraries or town squares you actively chose to enter. Now the internet is ambient. It's always-on, algorithmically curated to maximise engagement, which often means outrage, anxiety, and envy. We're no longer customers; we're the product. There’s no escaping that at this point.
This shift has profound implications about agency and consent. What are we actually participating in when we're "online" anymore?
Then there's the problem of scale and speed.
The harms I experienced on Tumblr and AskFM were brutal but localised; contained within specific communities or platforms. Now we're dealing with damage that operates globally and permanently.
A rumour that once would have spread through a school goes worldwide in hours. A photo that would have lived in someone's drawer now exists forever, searchable, remixable. The harm has transformed into something qualitatively different.
We've moved from peer-to-peer cruelty to the professionalisation of harm: state-level disinformation, organised extremist recruitment, AI-generated content at industrial scale. It gives me the shivers just thinking about the scale of it all.
Perhaps most destabilising is the erosion of context.
Early internet had boundaries because you were in a forum, a chat room, a specific space with its own norms. Now everything bleeds together.
Your employer, your grandmother, your high school bully, and strangers on the other side of the world all exist in the same undifferentiated feed. This is psychologically fragmenting in ways we're still trying to understand. Personally, I can’t even wrap my head around it.
But here's where the Douglas Adams observation matters: every generation experiences technological vertigo.
Our parents had genuine concerns about what the internet was doing to us as teens, just as we have concerns now. That doesn't invalidate all worries. But it does mean we should hold our judgments with some humility. The question becomes: how do we distinguish between "this is new and scary to me" versus "this is genuinely harmful"?
First, by creating intentional friction. By actively building in the pauses and boundaries that used to exist naturally. Not as nostalgia, but as self-preservation.
Second, by developing real literacy. Understanding the incentive structures, the design choices, the ways platforms shape behaviour beneath our awareness.
Third, by asking hard questions about community accountability. How do we rebuild the kinds of norms and social consequences that existed in smaller online spaces without recreating their insularity or toxicity?
And finally, we face the question of retreat versus engagement.
Is the answer to leave these spaces entirely? To stay but differently? What do we lose either way, and who gets left behind when those with resources and awareness simply opt out?
The internet probably has gotten worse in specific, measurable ways, yeah.
But recognising that doesn't mean surrendering to despair or retreating into generational finger-wagging. It means acknowledging that we're all navigating genuinely new problems while also being aware of our own limitations in perceiving change.
That double consciousness—critical but not paralysed, concerned but not nostalgic, might be the most honest position we can take. Idk, food for thought x
-Sophie Randell, Writer
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