Internet is fine. You are broken.

2026-05-18
Every few months, someone declares that the internet is dead. The web failed. Corporations ruined it. Algorithms poisoned it.

The old internet was free, authentic, alive, unlike today's sterilized digital wasteland. Nostalgia makes this story sound profound.

It's also nonsense.

The internet is not broken. You are just trapped inside five websites.

What once required expertise, money, hardware, and weeks of effort can now be done by a teenager in ten minutes. For free.

Twenty-five years ago, creating a website, running your own server, or hosting your mail required privilege or serious technical advancement. Today? Anyone who wants to can do it. There is nothing you could do twenty years ago that you cannot do today. The difference is that now it takes minutes, not weeks. And it costs almost nothing.

You can launch a website before your coffee gets cold. You can register a domain instantly. You can host your files, blog, community, own code, your media. Reach millions from a laptop held together with stickers.

What was privilege 25 years ago is now default. Free operating systems, programming languages, frameworks, editors, design software, hosting, CDN, fonts, databases, tutorial, documentation, media.

People accidentally built the greatest publishing and communications infrastructure in history and then convinced themselves it was oppressed because some corporate social network became annoying.

The internet did not become worse. Content just mirrors people.

To prove how absurd this is, consider Plan 9. The operating system created by the same people who built Unix, released over twenty-five years ago. Today, a 25-year-old copy of Plan 9 can still connect to the internet. It can serve a website. It can send and receive email. It can connect to an IRC server. Yes, it can even browse the web.

How is that possible if the internet is "broken"? Because the foundation never changed. A TCP connection over HTTP still works exactly as it did twenty years ago. The simple HTML website served over HTTP is still completely accessible to an ancient machine.

The reason your browser breaks on old systems isn't because the internet failed. It's because people chose to bury the web under HTTPS mandates, tons of CSS, endless JavaScript, and tracking junk that disallow ancient browsers from reaching it.

Masses demanded convenience. Synchronization. Infinite feeds. One-click identity. Smart recommendations. Algorithmic entertainment. Frictionless everything.

The same people declared that the internet is broken and dead.

No. The shopping mall is broken. The casino is broken. The algorithmic feed designed to harvest your attention is broken.

The internet works beautifully. I got single board computer, plugged it into fiber internet, installed linux and wrote this article on it. Published. You read. Nothing is broken here.

The tragedy is that most people no longer want the open web, some free land, where others are allowed to do their own things too. They want a landlord. Some entity who will hold their hands, manage everything and clean up the mess for them. They got it. They are wiped out periodically as promised. That happens if you built your house inside a casino owned by advertisers.

Some romanticize personal websites while posting exclusively on apps designed by trillion-dollar companies.

The barriers to entering the internet are lower than they have ever been in human history. What disappeared was not capability.

It was willingness, the standard consumer behavior. Exchange autonomy for convenience.

A single person can now build systems that once required corporations or big organization.

Most people have willingly become products. They expect that some multi-billion dollar corporation will create their community garden for them, on their platform. They believe that connection can be made only over Reddit, X, or Bluesky. They accept that YouTube is the only way to share video, and that a personal mailbox must sit on Google's servers. When those commercial services inevitably decay, when the algorithm changes, when the feed goes sour, when the extraction becomes too obvious, they declare that the internet is broken.

But it's not the internet that is broken for them. It's just the corporate hotel they decided to live in.

Why did this happen? Comfort. Convenience. The psychological surrender of autonomy for an easy life of consumer. It's cultural drift.

Humans are constantly looking for belonging, confirmation, validation, labels, and a tribe. They demand that somebody out there, some corporation or government, will serve everything as a whole, frictionless package. Running your own mail server requires responsibility. Building your own community requires effort. Maintaining your own website takes a tiny bit of sustained attention. It is far more comfortable to outsource your digital existence to a platform that handles the mess for you.

Subscribe, hit the button, click the icon, follow, order, pay, scroll. The services were built for the exact level of passivity people were willing to offer. But that is not the internet. That is just business.

The obstacles and harms that exist online are not there simply because some company decided to impose them. They are there because people accepted them, promoted them, and traded their online sovereignty for them. It doesn't matter what Google writes in HTML specifications or that some corporation decides a new encryption standard is the default. Nobody is forced to use the nonsense. But people want the nonsense, because the nonsense comes with the comfort they crave. So they suffer.

The pipes are open. The protocols work. The tools are free.

The internet didn't fail you. You just walked out of the wild, handed your keys to a landlord, and now you are complaining that the rent is too high.