My Internet is Dead

My internet is dead.

I don’t mean the Wi-Fi is out or a router needs rebooting. I mean my internet, the one I grew up without, then discovered, then watched bloom into something miraculous, no longer exists.

I was born in 1974. I grew up in a world where information was scarce, slow, and precious. If you wanted to know something, you went to a library. You trusted encyclopedias that were already out of date the moment they were printed. You learned from teachers, magazines, newspapers, and whoever happened to know more than you. Knowledge required effort, curiosity, and time.

Then the internet arrived.

At first, it felt like magic. Dial-up tones screeched like a spaceship warming up, and suddenly the world cracked open. Information that once took days or weeks to find was now available in minutes. Communities formed around obscure interests. People shared knowledge freely, not for clicks, not for growth hacks, but because they were genuinely excited to connect and help. The internet felt human.

That was the golden age.

It wasn’t perfect. It was slow, messy, and chaotic. But it was alive. You could feel the people behind the words. Blogs were personal. Forums were opinionated. Search results felt like treasure hunts instead of sales funnels. You weren’t being optimized, you were being invited.

Today, the internet is no longer a novelty or a frontier. It’s infrastructure. Like electricity or running water, it’s just expected to be there. And when something becomes a basic necessity, it stops feeling special. It stops feeling personal.

Worse, it stops feeling real.

The modern internet is increasingly synthetic. Content is produced at scale, optimized for algorithms, engagement metrics, and monetization strategies. Articles exist not to inform, but to rank. Videos exist not to teach, but to retain attention for 30 more seconds. Social feeds are shaped less by people and more by systems designed to maximize output.

And now, AI has entered the picture.

Much of what we read today is generated, summarized, rewritten, or amplified by machines. The words are technically correct. The tone is polished. The structure is optimized. But something essential is missing: lived experience. Friction. Perspective earned through time rather than computed in milliseconds.

That’s not an anti-AI statement.

The tools are powerful. They’re useful. They’re here to stay. But they amplify the direction we’re already headed: more volume, less texture. More information, less experience. More certainty, less wisdom. The internet I loved rewarded curiosity. The internet we have rewards velocity.

I don’t think this is a temporary phase. I don’t think we’re just in a messy transition before everything balances out. When something becomes infrastructure, when it becomes necessary for work, commerce, and identity, it stops being a playground. It becomes a machine. And machines are optimized for efficiency, not humanity.

My internet is dead.

Not because the cables were cut or the servers shut down, but because the spirit that animated it has been industrialized. Scaled. Monetized. Automated.

We didn’t lose access. We lost the feeling. And I’m not convinced we’re getting it back.