I am no longer the internet

From Nerd to Just Another Visitor?

We got our first family computer in 95, and the internet in 97. I fell in love immediately, spending an unhealthy amount of time in front of the small by today’s standards monitor. Our shitty dial-up connection wasn’t good enough for online gaming, so I spent my time mostly browsing and chatting. Whenever someone in real life talked about something they’d seen on the internet, chances were that I’d already seen it.

Yeah, I definitely saw myself as «being the internet».

Then something happened. The media started writing about some woman with a big fake butt breaking the internet. Her name was Kim, and I barely knew who she was.

The internet is about celebrities now?

While I was an early adopter of the internet, I was slow to get into smartphone apps. This was even though I worked part-time in a cell phone store in 2008 and 2009. The stationary PC I’d built myself was the portal, but for most people the smartphone was a superior option. Smartphone apps brought a whole lot of new people to the internet, people that seemed to be more interested in celebrity culture than flash videos and gross-out humour.

In January of 2025, the second most followed person on Instagram, after Instagram themselves, is Christiano Ronaldo. 644 million. He is one of the best soccer players in the world, however, his page isn’t filled with cool soccer tricks, or how to’s. It’s pictures of him, often with his shirt off. A couple of videos from his matches, and ads. So many ads! He even has ads for Binance on his profile. Ronaldo, how much money do you need?

It feels like most of these social media profiles aren’t made for the love of it, they’re merely sales funnels. Remember when Jennifer Aniston «broke the internet» by joining Instagram? It wasn’t about connecting with her fans, it was to promote a product.

Identity lost

I just read yet another one of those «this celebrity broke the internet» news articles. Yes, those articles annoy me. It feels like I’ve lost a part of my identity. I still spend a whole lot of time on the internet. More than I used to when I proclaimed to be the internet. Times have changed, and so has the internet. While it’s still fun and weird, it has grown a lot since the nineties. As a nostalgic old man, that naturally fills me with anger. I miss the time were I felt like an outsider and a nerd. I can’t list «the internet» as one of my interests anymore. People will think I doomscroll on TikTok all day. And I’m not! I don’t even have TikTok. I’m on Instagram, I guess daily. And YouTube. A lot of YouTube. Scroll Reddit. Online newspapers… Wait.

Am I still the internet?

Never were, never will be

The internet was already too vast to be an identity even back in the early 2000s. It will always annoy me that the media focuses mainly on the celebrity side of it, but I understand why. Celebrity news will always get more clicks than stories about toilets with heads.

No, the internet isn’t any one thing, and it doesn’t belong to any one person, no matter how much time they spend on it. It’s a mirror, constantly shifting, reflecting back whatever the world decides to feed into it. I was never the internet. None of us are. We’re just visitors, passing through its infinite hallways. We find the corners that speak to us until they, too, change or disappear.

Still, can’t believe that Kim was mentioned in the Wikipedia article about Skibidi Toilet.