When was the last year that the internet felt good to you? I think everybody has different answers to this. Mine, I think, go fairly far back, maybe to the heyday of blogging —— “Words and getting up to 40,000 hits on his blog a day ——” at least before the moment when Twitter and Facebook went algorithmic. “What we’re trying to do is give everyone in the world the best personalized newspaper we can.” But whatever your answer to it is, I have not found many people who think 2026, right now, this internet, with all of its anger and its outrage and its A.I. slop, this is what we were promised. “A glitch spread graphic, violent videos to unsuspecting Instagram users.” This is living at the technological peak. When I was a larva on the early internet and I saw things that sucked, I would think: Someone’s going to fix this, and maybe it could be me. And now, when I see bad things on the internet, I’m like, this is by design, and it cannot be fixed because you would be violating the rules if you even tried. But even if there is this growing consensus that something went wrong with the internet somewhere, and that it is driving our society somewhere we don’t want it to go, there’s not really a consensus of what to do about it, what to do about these giant platforms increasingly spammed up with ads and sponsored results, boosting content that will keep us hooked and angry, isolating and dividing us into rearranging our politics or making a few billionaires ever richer. Held up by an army of low- wage workers in warehouses and on delivery bikes. We’ve had this kind of hands-off, we cannot try to direct things in a positive direction. I think that has been a giant mistake. So first, I would say we have to even try to make the decisions. How would I do the trade-off? I mean, I guess I would start with the most unredeeming, toxic stuff and ban that first and then see if we can — I mean, that’s maybe easy, but we haven’t been able to even do that.
