‘The internet hasn’t made us bad, we were already like that’: The mistake of yearning for the ‘friendly’ online world of 20 years ago

In the visuals of María Escarmiento’s concerts, as in those of many other figures of the urban scene, iPods, Blackberry phones and screenshots of Fotolog, Messenger or Tuenti appear often. A large part of the public is too young to have used these technologies, but they know what these devices and websites were used for. Even they associate them with a time when virtual spaces were more welcoming, fun and habitable. Such is the force of the Y2K aesthetic or Flow 2K, one of the latest revivals that, as in all artistic disciplines, entails revisiting and reinterpreting the designs and interfaces of electronic devices from around 20 years ago.

It’s the umpteenth nostalgic twist of a culture obsessed with retromania. Millennials have been adults for years, and they might now be making up for lost time by evoking hours spent chatting on MSN Messenger (they weren’t all that exciting: you used to talk to your classmates right after you’d been with them) and looking up movies and songs by Evanescence, Green Day and Eminem on eMule (they often sounded bad and the noise of the computer, running all night, caused nightmares). Furthermore, as academics such as Grafton Tanner (author of The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech) point out, the internet, with its archival form of storing information, fits particularly well with nostalgia. As such, this entire movement of vindication and archaeology (which dusts off material from the golden days of IRC and Habbo Hotel all the way to the early years of Facebook, just before the Cambridge Analytica scandal) is a perfect excuse to relaunch products or produce viral content without too much effort.

But Flow 2000 could also mean that we miss the old internet (if such a thing ever existed) or, at the very least, that we need a network on a different scale and speed, one that is more human and kinder. Recently, the cultural critic Kyle Chayka wrote in The New Yorker about “cozy tech,” one of the latest fantasies being spread by platforms like TikTok. “Cozy tech” is the label that groups together content about users sipping from a steaming cup, browsing leisurely or playing nice, simple video games on devices with smooth, ergonomic designs. It’s a more powerful image than it seems because it conveys something we lost at some point in the last decade: a sense of control; the idea that it is possible to enjoy technology in peace again.

Over the past few months, several essays have been published in Spain that explore this desire (nostalgic or projected into the future) for a better internet and propose different collective solutions to escape this degraded internet in which the platforms have won the battle against users, where hatred has surpassed support networks, where data extraction and the desire for profit dirty every corner of the web, and where entertainment is poisoned. Along the way, they debunk some technophobic myths and warn against the rhetoric of gurus in the pay of big technology companies. These books also contain many of the possible answers to the two questions that we so often remember lately: Has the network changed or have we lost our innocence? Bottom line: When did the internet go bust?

A truncated utopia

The most pessimistic among us consider that the history of the internet is the story of a great failure: another enormous collective disappointment because the last credible utopia (a horizontal and free network) fell by the wayside. In her essay Las redes son nuestras (The networks are ours), Marta G. Franco explains that the history of the internet is marked by successive thefts or forced expropriations, and that the third and last of these thefts occurred eight years ago. The first was completed during the leap from the nerd network of the 1990s to the dotcom bubble; the second, when Web 2.0 emerged and users gained prominence, but also became producers of free data; and the third and most recent, when the forces of the far right (what she calls “the International of Hate,” formed by politicians like Donald Trump in the U.S. and Javier Milei in Argentina) transformed “the platforms that helped us find and organize ourselves into a minefield of unpleasant experiences.” However, the author is not pessimistic (“if we were robbed and lost three times it is because a short while before, for three times, we were winning”) and she believes that the internet can still change for the better.

Mayte Gómez Molina (known on social media as Ingrata Bergman), a digital artist, poet and researcher, points out that it is necessary to ask who the internet has disappointed: “Although we cannot imagine it now, it could have taken many forms. Many pioneers and artists of net art in the 1990s and 2000s explored the creation of directories, other search engines and how to take the structure of the network to the limit, creating interfaces full of ramifications. Then the search engines recovered unidirectional communication and standardized the way of browsing; so for those people it has been a disappointment. But for those who had an economic interest in the extension of capitalism, the internet has become exactly what they wanted, which is not so different from television. The rest of us experience it as a conflictive space, where there are many disappointing things but which always regenerates and opens up new possibilities. The internet does something very cruel and difficult to bear emotionally: at first it disappoints you, but then it gives you hope again.”

These cycles of hope and disillusionment also affect the rhetoric about the online world, which, in times of disillusionment like the present, can function as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Proyecto Una, a self-described millenial and feminist collective, does not want to be pessimistic either: “We do not like the hyper-fixation of certain left-wing groups with defeat. Part of the internet we have is the logical evolution of that project by some hippies who thought they could fix the world with technology. Now they are realizing that the world’s problems were more social than technological; but there are alternatives.” One of the topics that this collective dedicated to digital thought and activism most energetically combats is the idea that there is still a border between the virtual world and the real world and, therefore, that it might be possible to escape from one to the other. “The real world and the digital world do not exist as separate entities. We are materialists: the world is what we build with our capacity to act on it,” they note.

This group of philosophers, programmers and YouTubers does not tolerate well the fatalistic, technophobic messages claiming that, given the bad situation of many online spaces, this means that all technology (especially since the popularization of Artificial Intelligence) is governed by unclear rules that cannot be altered. “Naturalizing human behavior or essentializing the evolution and impact of a technology is done either out of ignorance or by private interests that seek to create that ignorance. Whenever we receive a message, whether in the offline or online world, we have to ask ourselves: who is sending it? Why is it stated like that? What benefit can they be getting from it? Who is interested in me repeating this? The worst propaganda is the one we replicate without even realizing it.”

What do we miss so much?

In Los hechos de Key Biscaine (The Facts of Key Biscaine), the latest novel by Xita Rubert (who was born in 1996), there is a scene in which two teenage friends enter Omegle, a very popular website around 2010 that, like Chatroulette, was used to chat with strangers. “A virtual infinity of penises. A terrifying phallic universe. Behind each chat there was a crotch always ready to insinuate itself and prepared to be revealed,” describes the narrator. Situations like this were very common in spaces that are now missed and mythologized but which, even then, were reproducing sexist and racist behavior. For this reason, Proyecto Una questions whether the Internet of 20 years ago was more free: “Was it free, for whom? The fact that you can say anything does not mean that there is more freedom. It means that the freedom of the strongest prevails. On 4Chan, people used to joke that there were no women on the internet, and if someone identified themselves as such, they were required to show their tits. These types of spaces (like the rest, of course) were not neutral.” They believe that the situation has not changed that much and that today “large commercial platforms allow fascism to grow, precisely when they do not take measures to moderate content. When they choose the profits offered by the engagement of a hate message or a racist hoax over intervening in certain types of behavior.”

Although the internet was never entirely free, almost every user could mention a certain milestone that affected them particularly (from the virtual rape in a role-playing game in 1993 reported by the journalist Julian Dibbell, to Trump’s first election victory or, why not, the closure of Tuenti) and establish a subjective date when the internet broke down. In addition, many would agree that sarcasm as an approach to any interaction has been another one of the factors that have most deteriorated the online world, and it has been working as a double-edged sword for at least a decade. “Sarcasm can bring you closer to what you are ironizing about. Turning something horrible into a spectacle can promote it or even radicalize it,” explains Gómez. “On the one hand, we have to overcome the phenomenon of algorithmic personality (since I hang out with people who think like me, you cannot recognize that the other person might think differently). On the other hand, if we pay attention to and turn into a spectacle all the ultras, incels, neo-fascists and violent people who organize themselves on the internet, it may seem that they cannot harm you, that they are images or representations without any real power. When something becomes a meme it gives the sensation that it does not exist, and being too ironic turns possible and dangerous things into fiction,” explains the researcher.

Like all nostalgic escapism, the myth about a world wide web before the age of sarcasm (and the dominance of big companies) where everything was more sincere and simpler is a melancholic trap. The Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann wrote that when you turn 30 you discover the ability to remember, and those who were teenagers when broadband was installed in most homes are now that age. That is why the internet has filled up with memories of itself, although, with some effort, it is still possible to find new things full of a collaborative spirit. “There is still a lot of kindness on the internet. You just have to go to YouTube and watch those videos about how to fix a specific washing machine,” says Gómez. “A lot of content is a sign of goodwill; the real Youtuber is the one who has 10 views on each video. There are a lot of sweet, practical, erratic, very strange things there, and also a lot of people helping others selflessly,” she notes.

Oche Zamora, a social educator, waiter and one of those individuals who make Facebook worthwhile, also thinks that many people continue to make a brilliant use of the internet: “We have come to suspect that all publications hide a spurious desire for recognition and that everything we do on social networks we do to pretend that we are better than we really are,” he complains. “And I don’t think that is the case. We all want to be loved and, above all, to be loved by certain people. What is the problem with that? The fact is that on social networks there is a desire to express oneself, to play, to reflect and to have a good time, and not just a Machiavellian strategy to get likes,” he says. “Seeing what the networks are becoming, announcements of events and polarized opinions on the umpteenth debate on the media agenda, one misses that exposure of the intimate. I wish to read personal stories or confessions again.”

So, is there a way to recover the good things about the internet that we miss without falling into the self-serving nostalgia of Flow 2K or into apocalyptic talk? The essays cited above offer some political keys (such as recovering our digital sovereignty) and individual ones (such as giving visibility to the self-organized projects and venues that continue to exist). Mayte Gómez concludes: “We must stop this reactionary thinking and this fear of technology that arises from the idea that the internet has made us bad. That is not true: we were already like that. If the internet is unfriendly it is because we are becoming less so. We cannot perpetuate the idea that machines are entities with a will of their own; we must take responsibility for what happens on the internet.”

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