I recently came across this gorgeous piece of writing: The Boring Internet, by Terry Godier.
It's worth every moment of your time, and then some. I've been musing over it for a while now, and wanted to talk it through with all of you.
The internet you grew up on isn't dying.
A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.
I'm in a Facebook group that's pretty much the only location of its kind — incredibly valuable, genuinely irreplaceable information lives there. Two years ago, when Facebook got really, really squirrely from a UX perspective, I begged the group moderators to let me set up a forum, completely offsite. They agreed. A few of us pitched in and built it.
And then a really, really weird thing happened. Most people didn't understand how forums work, despite the fact that the entire social internet started in forum frameworks. Platforms have trained us to be passive consumers of the feed, so thoroughly that people have forgotten what it's like to go out and curate their own content. I found myself coaching grown adults on the old ways of being on the internet. It was a deeply weird feeling.
Reading Godier's post, I'm pretty sure he gets me.
Enshittification
Since the lovely Cory Doctorow coined the term, we've all gotten better at naming the phenomenon: software that used to be a solid product you bought once has become a constantly shifting, not-always-for-the-better subscription. Nobody's happy about it. But somehow, nobody remembers that there's a whole other internet underneath the cruft and the venture capital; one where the actual spirit of the thing still exists, still making good stuff for the betterment of everyone.
The layer where every human activity became a venture-backed destination, every destination became a feed, every feed became ad inventory, and every ad market became a machine for producing more things to interrupt you with.
Underneath that layer is another internet: older, slower, less polished, harder to monetize, and much harder to kill.
Ownership
Our right to own our own technology has been getting chipped away at for a really, really long time. Digital Rights Management (DRM). Software as a Service (SaaS). Terms of Service so dense and one-sided no mere mortal could reasonably agree to them with full understanding. And don't even get me started on the shitshow that is Right to Repair — people buy things, from computers to tractors, and then discover they can't fix them without voiding the warranty and eating a penalty for the trouble.
Not that long ago, Amazon decided not to support really old Kindles, and bricked them. The outcry was predictable.
So was Amazon's reasoning: profit, not sustainability or customer loyalty. So they made a bunch of genuinely sturdy devices obsolete on purpose. If we'd been listening to Cory Doctorow and EFF.org's rants against DRM all along, we'd have seen it coming, and we'd have made different choices. (Like keeping our libraries in Calibre, a lovely piece of software that's been quietly doing the needful, with zero fanfare, this whole time.)
Most of these protocols were designed from the 1970s through the early web era by small groups of people solving immediate problems.
"How do we send mail between machines?"
"How do we ask who is logged in?"
"How do we move hypertext across a network?"
"How do we synchronize time?"
"How do we publish a stream of updates?"
"How do we broadcast audio?"
They were built mostly by nerds with no business plan, no venture capital, and no permission.
Turns out the old internet was built by enthusiasts, for other enthusiasts — and it's still here. You don't actually need platforms, techbros, or a monetization strategy. The old internet is still within reach of all of us.
The self-curated world
When you press play on a SomaFM stream, your browser does not ask a social graph whether the song is relevant. No algorithm decides what plays next because it predicts you are likely to remain engaged for another seven minutes. No advertiser shapes the rotation. No platform tries to convert the moment into a growth loop.
A person makes choices and broadcasts them.
You tune in or you do not. That's the whole transaction.
Things made for joy feel different from things made for profit. I think we all know that, instinctively. And I think we can all feel the slide from shiny to enshittified picking up speed. That's part of why Europe is moving away from American SaaS altogether.
Psychologically, though, especially where platforms are concerned, we've become the people on the ships in Wall-E. And passive consumption of content is a very different animal from intentional consumption. Social media just throws a stream of stuff at you, and you passively absorb whatever rolls through. We at the 'Tea have argued strongly against letting it do that to you. Intentional consumption means reaching for what you actually care about and letting the noise fall away. It makes room for deep focus. It lets you build nuanced thinking about the things that matter to you — the exact thing social media is designed to erode.
The learning curve
Part of why the world moved to the new shiny is that it's designed to be easy. There's not much of a learning curve to Facebook, the way there is to IRC (Internet Relay Chat: basically a very old-school, very unglamorous way to chat in real time, with none of the bells and whistles). But is dodging that learning curve worth the price of your autonomy, your data, your privacy, your ownership, all the other costs of platform life?
[IRC is] not fashionable. It's not welcoming in the way modern software tries to be welcoming. It has commands. It has norms. There's a culture and a learning curve. You can absolutely enter the wrong room, say the wrong thing, and discover that nobody there has any interest in making the experience smooth for you.
And yet it remains one of the few places online where chat still feels like chat instead of a workplace surface.
A learning curve can feel like gatekeeping. It's actually the opposite. When you put in the work to understand how something really works, nobody can take that from you. And — this is the part that matters — nobody can monetize your ignorance, manipulate you with propaganda, or profit off data you never meant to hand over.
Right here, right now
You don't have to wait for someone to save you. Godier's point is that the boring internet is right there, sitting beside all the platformery you use every day. The difference between the enshittified internet and the boring one is just the choices we make. And we get that chance daily.
You do not have to wait for someone to rebuild what you lost.
You are standing in it.
So next time you catch yourself doom-scrolling a feed you didn't choose, remember: there's a door right next to you, and it's not even locked.
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