When did the internet get so ick?

Maybe it’s an age thing, but I swear this internet was never this gross.

I was born back in the 80s so I grew up without the internet. When it did slowly arrive by the time I was doing my A-levels at college, it was a clunky slow mess. It was a pain in the arse to connect to (“Muuuuuum, get off the phone, I’m on the internet!”), everything loaded like it was taking its dying breath and it felt pretty bare. More importantly, it was entirely optional.

As it grew, it became a place for nerdy niche things: online games, forums, IRC and of course memes, slowly catering more and more to shopping. It still felt slow and unstable. But in a good way. Work and communication were undeniably faster with the advent of email, but you never really put faith in things like a stable connection or pages loading in a sensible amount of time.

And so, it hung out on the fringes. An extra thing you did in your spare time – whether that was posting lengthy forum posts and anxiously awaiting the reply, playing a few online games with buddies and making terrible jokes over Ventrilo or delving into the weird worlds of blogs on WordPress and Tumblr.

Social media was still limited to MySpace and early Facebook (where we posted status updates preceded by a colon so it looked like a weird third-person account, “Bill: is feeling like hot garbage today”). Trolls were obviously still a thing because society will always have its share gutterscum empowered by the invincibility of anonymity, but the phrase “Don’t feed the trolls” was common knowledge. Plus, most people weren’t online enough for it to really matter too much.

Of course, this is rose-tinted but it was still, definitely simpler. Fast forward to now and the internet is no longer optional – it’s a necessity. It’s a lifeline we now depend on. And sure, it lets people like me work remotely and reduce my human interaction by a spectacular degree. But it’s simply everywhere. It’s so ubiquitous it’s fallen into the background like a supply of electricity or running water. Because it’s all-encompassing, it also feels like the primary source of communication and access to wider society.

And so, it’s a now bloated, hyper-commercialised monster that's basically unavoidable. It’s bursting at the seams with thousands of companies and individuals screaming for your attention. Your loyalty. Your cash. It feels gross. Icky. Every site I go to, every app I use, slaps me in the face with “limited-time offer” or some twat on YouTube yelling, “SMASH THAT LIKE BUTTON” while reeking of desperation. Every first visit is a slog through “Hey, we’re going to track you around the internet – that cool?” Manage privacy. Accept essential only. Reject. Reject all.

Even places that used to feel ad-free and pure have sold their souls. You go to read a recipe, and – assuming you get through the autobiography – it’s hidden under a wall of pop-ups and autoplaying videos. Trying to enjoy the internet now feels like walking through a shopping centre where salespeople stalk you with megaphones screaming “BUY BUY BUY! DON’T FORGET ME OR WHAT YOU WERE LOOKING AT (Because we won’t…)!” while a grubby-looking bloke in a cheap suit stuffs discount coupons in your pockets.

Social media is the worst offender. It turned from ‘sharing junk with friends’ to ‘everyone’s a brand and you could consider yours’. The internet sells the lie that success is just a post, a hustle or a viral video away. But the reality that’s so stark now is people are building highly curated, fake representations of their lives while companies mine our data and push ads. Everyone’s dancing for attention and validation – it’s like living in an endless, dystopian circus. It makes me feel like a cow trapped in the perpetual ‘right now’ to keep me distracted while my life juices are milked from my teats – milked for money, attention and data, and when there’s nothing left, they ship your sad carcass off to... Facebook Marketplace or something.

What’s mad is that it’s also become inescapable. You have to be online for almost everything now – your job, your bank, your video games, your social life, your bloody thermostat. Even shitbags like HP sells you a fucking subscription for printer ink that you need to be online to use because if you switch ink providers, it knows and turns your goddamn printer off! I mean, no one liked printers in the first place but now they can get fucked. The subscription model itself is especially depressing because we no longer own stuff, we just rent it from billionaires until they decide we can’t play with that toy anymore. It all feels so transient. I used to own and upgrade software, but now I have to sub to everything. We’re just drip-fed this litany of apps and tools we now – depressingly – need for most of our working life.

And the reason for the internet ick is money. Money is absolutely the reason. Once companies realised the internet wasn’t just for nerds – because all of a sudden, the whole world was there – they knew they could also sell you crap in increasingly creepy ways, lock in another loyal customer and drip feed you the access you crave.

Ads, subscriptions, influencers, microtransactions – it’s like they found every single way to monetise human interaction and decided to weaponise it. Even things like nostalgia and counterculture get churned through the corporate machine to sell you a T-shirt with a ‘vintage’ logo on it.

The irony (hypocrisy?) of my writing all this to publish online isn’t lost on me. The reality is the internet has done brilliant things. Wonderful things. Like I said, I get to work from home and write for a living (actually contributing to the ad problem… what a cunt…). And I still like a lot of online places and games. But when you look at the internet as a whole, it just leaves me feeling filled with ick. It’s like that slimy feeling when you’ve been sold to by someone called Trevor at a car dealership – you know it’s all gross bullshit, but you still need it.

Part of me would love to go back to the days of a simple internet – an optional internet. Hit the reset button, pop back to 1997 and pull back the blanket of slimy business cockwombles smothering it. But it’s not going anywhere. We’re stuck in this sticky, ad-riddled mess, wading through clickbait and subscriptions just to get through life. Maybe with the advent of AI and the realisation that everyone is churning out the same old shit without a shred of humanity, people will start to realise and withdraw. I’m not suggesting everyone will go off-grid and take up wild living (although that sounds great), but just that we’ll hopefully step back a bit. That we’ll slowly start to value things that are a little slower, a little more human and a little less ick. Or maybe we’ll just get another subscription for ‘life appreciation’, too.

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