The first time I ever used the internet was in 1996. The year before my dad had bought us a shiny new, black desktop PC from Compaq, which ran Windows 95 and included the ‘Weezer’ video, which was probably the first video I ever saw on a computer screen!
In those days I had no real clue what the internet actually was, except that it seemed like a huge encyclopedia, stored somewhere on a telephone line, where you could find information on almost anything you wanted.
Back then 16‑year‑old me was totally into Formula 1 and my idol was Michael Schumacher, so the first thing I did when the modem finally dialed in and Netscape Navigator popped up was look up pictures of the Ferrari F1 car he was driving that year.
I remember that dial‑up was terribly slow: the screeching noise of the modem, sometimes needing more than one try to actually connect, and it could take two or three minutes before a link was finally established. During your time online nobody in the house could make a phone call because you literally had to plug the phone line into the Compaq to ‘surf’ online.
The Ferrari images I managed to download took forever to render, and therefore I ended up with only two or three pictures. Apart from pictures and text there wasn’t much you could do online anyway, so I wasn’t really interested in it.
Fast‑forward to 1997 in high school and then 1998 at university. The internet was becoming more and more of a “household” thing now, and we sometimes used it to look up study material (saved on a 1.44 Mbs floppy disk!) or to test the websites we’d built in Macromedia Dreamweaver, full of tables and loads of Flash (CSS was still in its infancy back then).
I think the first time I really started to use the internet was around 1999‑2000, when I finally figured out what that weird ‘@’ symbol thingy was, that people used to send each other messages. I quickly opened a Hotmail account and used it for many years to send and receive emails between friends, family and fellow students.
The late 90’s and early 2000’s was the era of AltaVista, GeoCities, Yahoo, Hotmail, online forums and ‘weblogs’, which later became ‘blogs’. It all felt very liberating to me. I had this illusion that the internet would keep growing into an open, free space where people could discuss stuff openly, share ideas and exchange information for the benefit of everyone, all done in a polite and respectful way.
Of course, in hindsight that was a big dose of naïve idealism on my part.
Around 2005—and increasingly throughout the 2010s—social media networks began to dominate the internet. The once‑perceived “free, unregulated web” quickly faded. As Marc Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and their peers built ever‑larger empires, they were soon joined by YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. What had started as a relatively open network with no gatekeepers morphed into a massive, omnipresent, and largely monopolistic operation.
Social platforms became the de facto rulers of the internet: algorithms steered public discourse, and these new social media sites wielded enough influence to even affect the rise and fall of governments—all while prioritizing profit and their own interests above anything else.
Because of those algorithms, freedom of speech—as we once understood it—has now been reduced to “the freedom to be potentially heard under the condition that you toe the approved narrative, and the algorithm likes you.”
When opinions are filtered, ranked, or amplified by opaque recommendation engines, true free expression disappears. When only pre‑selected, pre‑ranked voices receive the spotlight, social media ceases to be “social” at all.
This method of filtering and steering public discourse mirrors the old communist regimes of Eastern Europe, except the “Politburo” has been swapped out for an algorithm.
Social media doesn’t point a gun at you; it lulls you into compliance through the algorithm acting as the catalyst—“Hey, we know what we like and we think you should like it too!”
In earlier eras, oppressed peoples rose up against their oppressors, sparking revolutions in the name of free speech.
Today, it seems to me that far too many people have lost the habit of questioning “accepted” narratives and of thinking—or speaking—critically about them.
Often, there is no discourse at all, just blind acceptance, as if we’ve all become a horde of numb‑headed zombies. Either we surrender to passive conformity, or we plunge into a level of polarization that the world has never seen before!
It’s weird.
And if algorithm driven social media hadn’t already crushed my hopes for an honest and open internet, the next monster showed up in 2021‑2022: AI.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m not anti‑AI. It can be genuinely useful in many contexts. What worries me is that big‑tech now controls it, intent on powering the entire internet with AI—a development unfolding before our eyes. Look at any modern search engine or app; they all have AI baked in. Even when there’s no clear added value, AI is everywhere because it’s the hot trend and everyone and their mother feels compelled to include it.
And yes, when it comes to the internet I see that AI can sift through and organize information far faster than any human—perfect for the impatient society we’ve become. No more endless scrolling through irrelevant search results, no more wasting time on misleading content; the right answers arrive instantly. I get all that.
In my view, AI is draining the soul from the “inter‑connected” network that was originally built by and for humans. Back then, people operated the machines that ran the internet. Now we’ve flipped the script: the machines are beginning to run us, and I’m not sure I like that.
I believe AI is rapidly de‑humanizing the internet. Sooner or later it will turn into nothing more than an ultimate, machine‑controlled answering‑machine—appearing to know everything while merely regurgitating data fed to it by other algorithms.
Humans, meanwhile, are losing both the interest and the brain capacity to generate original ideas and share them.This is similar to the thesis that smartphones have made us more stupid ever since they hit the market in 2007, which I tend to agree with.
To me, the marriage of big tech and AI—purportedly to make the internet a better place —leaves a pretty, pretty sour aftertaste.
Frankly, it makes me laugh.
How about I just call it hypocrisy?
How about I wish I was back in 1996 behind my Compaq, watching the Weezer video or the Ferrari of Michael Schumacher?
