The Internet Is a Net Negative

I'm usually an optimist about things.

That outlook has served me well in life. It's helped me build open source projects that millions of people use. It's helped me see possibility where others saw obstacles. It's helped me maintain hope through mental health struggles that could have consumed me entirely.

But optimism without honesty becomes delusion. And I can no longer honestly say that the internet—this thing I've dedicated my career to building upon—has been good for humanity.

The Promise We Were Sold

I came of age during the internet's adolescence. We were told it would democratize information. That it would connect humanity across borders. That it would give voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless.

And for a brief, shining moment, it seemed like that might be true.

Wikipedia emerged as a genuine miracle—humanity's collective knowledge, freely accessible, maintained by volunteers who believed in something bigger than themselves. Open source software proved that strangers could collaborate to build cathedrals of code. Blogs gave everyone a printing press.

I believed in this future. I built tools to make it easier to access. I still believe in those tools.

But somewhere along the way, the dream curdled.

Democratization Became Commercialization

The "democratization of information" was always a lie we told ourselves. What actually happened was the commercialization of attention.

Every platform that promised to give you a voice was actually harvesting your engagement. Every service that offered free access was actually strip-mining your psyche for behavioral data. Every tool that connected you to friends was actually optimizing for the kind of connection that generates the most ad revenue.

The internet didn't democratize information. It commodified it. And in doing so, it created the most sophisticated system of psychological manipulation ever devised.

Power Systems Don't Dissolve—They Evolve

We imagined the internet would flatten hierarchies. Instead, it created new ones that are harder to see and impossible to escape.

The old power systems—governments, corporations, media conglomerates—didn't disappear. They adapted. They learned to use the new tools better than we did. They bought the platforms, captured the regulators, and wrote the algorithms.

Now five companies control most of what humanity sees, reads, and thinks. Their algorithms decide what information spreads and what dies in obscurity. Their content moderation policies—opaque, inconsistent, unaccountable—function as a private legal system with more power over speech than any government.

This isn't democratization. It's feudalism with better marketing.

The Attention Economy Consumes Everything

I've written extensively about this. The algorithm eats virtue. It eats language. It eats love. It eats democracy. It eats reality. It eats time. Eventually, it eats itself.

But it's worse than I initially understood.

The attention economy doesn't just consume our time. It consumes our capacity for deep thought. It consumes our ability to be bored—and boredom is where creativity lives. It consumes our tolerance for complexity, training us to expect everything in digestible fragments.

It consumes our relationships, reducing friendship to performance and intimacy to content. It consumes our politics, selecting for outrage over understanding. It consumes our sense of reality itself, as algorithmic feeds create billions of personalized universes that share less and less common ground.

We are being optimized into something less than human.

The Infrastructure of Manipulation

Every convenience the internet offers comes bundled with surveillance. Every "free" service is subsidized by the systematic exploitation of your psychology.

Your phone knows where you are, who you talk to, what you buy, what you search for at 3 AM when you can't sleep. This information flows to data brokers who build profiles so detailed they can predict your behavior better than you can.

And this infrastructure exists not to serve you, but to manipulate you. To show you the ad at the exact moment your defenses are lowest. To recommend the content that will keep you scrolling past your bedtime. To surface the political message most likely to activate your tribal loyalties.

We didn't build a communication network. We built a manipulation machine and then invited it into every moment of our lives.

What We've Lost

Before the internet, there was friction. It took effort to publish, to broadcast, to reach people at scale. That friction was frustrating—it kept voices out who deserved to be heard.

But friction also served as a filter. It gave us time to think before we spoke. It created space between stimulus and response. It made local community the default and global connection the exception.

Now we live in a world of zero friction and infinite reach, where every thought can be broadcast instantly to millions and every moment can be documented for an audience. We've optimized for connection and accidentally eliminated solitude. We've maximized information and accidentally drowned wisdom.

The quiet spaces where the soul regenerates have been colonized by notifications.

The Honest Accounting

If I'm being honest—genuinely honest, in the way that hurts—I have to ask: Has the internet created more human flourishing than suffering?

I think about the teenagers whose self-image has been destroyed by Instagram. The democracies destabilized by targeted disinformation. The concentration camps enabled by social media surveillance. The mental health crisis that perfectly correlates with smartphone adoption. The loneliness epidemic in the most "connected" generation in history.

I think about the hours—billions of cumulative human hours—spent scrolling through feeds optimized to be unsatisfying enough to keep you scrolling. All that time, that irreplaceable human attention, fed into machines that convert consciousness into quarterly earnings.

And I think about what we might have built instead. What we might have become.

Where This Leaves Me

I still build things on the internet. I still believe in the potential of networked technology to serve human flourishing. I still think open source represents something genuinely good—proof that we can collaborate across distances to create shared value.

But I no longer believe the internet, as it actually exists, is making things better.

The optimist in me wants to say we can fix it. That better regulation, different business models, conscious technology design could reclaim the promise. And maybe that's true.

But the realist in me sees the incentive structures. Sees how much money flows from keeping things exactly as they are. Sees how the companies that profit from manipulation have captured the political systems that might constrain them.

I don't have a solution. I'm not sure there is one that doesn't involve burning it all down and starting over—and even then, the same dynamics would likely reassert themselves.

All I have is this honest accounting: I helped build something that has, on net, made the world worse. And I don't know what to do with that except name it clearly and sit with the weight of it.

The Recursive Tragedy

Here's the final irony: I'm posting this critique of the internet on the internet. You're reading it through the very systems I'm condemning. The algorithm may have surfaced it to you. Your engagement with it feeds the machine.

There's no outside anymore. No clean position from which to critique. We're all inside the system, using its tools to question its existence, our very resistance recuperated into content.

Maybe that's the deepest tragedy of all. Not just that the internet is a net negative, but that it's become so totalizing that we can't even imagine alternatives anymore.

The optimist in me is still here. Still hoping.

But he's a lot quieter than he used to be.

Written in the dark, wondering what we might have built instead.