The Internet Is Dead... But Is It Really, Though?
With the proliferation of automated content mills and sanitized, performative behavior online, you see this phrase a lot:
"The internet is dead now; it's not the same as it used to be."
And I don't agree, especially given that "the internet being dead now" is not a new idea.
I hosted a livestream on YouTube, where we took a mini-tour of the indie web. Someone came on who was new to the concept. They didn't grow up with the old web, so they were just learning about webrings and personal web pages that operated outside of social media network algorithms. Soon, they came across a tough concept that still plagues the indie web to this day: Some sites just die, and dead links don't always get cleaned up.
It's an ever-present bottleneck with discovering new sites and services. Sometimes whole webrings will lay dormant, filled with dead links, and you won't notice it right away. Pre-AI, this is what had people claiming "the internet was dead", even back in the old web days that we all yearn to return.
Regardless, I still disagree with the statement for one main reason:
The tech never left. The infrastructure still exists.
Yes, over time, general internet use became a lot more compartmentalized between a handful of services that are typically polluted with AI slop, so the internet feels smaller, but the broadcast functionality is still the same. It didn't sunset just because people stopped using it. Whether you're building websites or just being a participant in the community, it's still possible to help create the internet that you want. You know: think globally, act locally.
On the ØɄ₮₴łĐɆ webring, I'll have the crawler intermittently fetch member sites to make sure they're active. There have been a few times where member sites went dead, so they got nixed from the ring. I'd personally check every so often to see if they've come back, so they could get readded. Once, I noticed a site went live after a week of inactivity, and I added them back in. One time, a member site added themselves back in once they were active again. It's easy to do when the system is mostly automatic.
My point is, with how I design my sites, I'm creating the kind of internet that I'd want to inhabit. I'm very vigilant about dead links, everything is in perpetual dark mode, and if you were so inclined, you could view this website from a command-line web browser legibly (I recommend w3m or lynx).
"But what about whole blogs that seem to only exist for gaming SEO algorithms?"
Well, I got news for you: Those existed in the old web, too. While the old web might have made it harder to discover new sites, it also made it easier to overlook slop. So no, the internet isn't dead, so long as we give it life.