The Internet we lost

A Brief Retrospective

The world of the World Wide Web has changed as radically over the last three decades as almost no other area of human civilization. If we look back at the late nineties and the early two-thousands, the internet was an entirely different galaxy. The websites of those days were wild, unstructured, often colorful, and above all shaped by a deep enthusiasm of their creators.

It was the era of static HTML pages, blinking GIF animations, and guestbooks. Back then, you didn't just browse casually on the bus. Access to the web was a deliberate act. You sat down in front of a bulky CRT monitor, started a computer running operating systems like Windows 95 or the legendary Windows 98, and listened to the mechanical concert of the modem during the dial-up process. Bandwidths were minimal, images loaded line by line, and every minute online cost real money. Yet it was a space of unlimited possibilities, a digital Wild West shaped by enthusiasts.

As technology advanced, the infrastructure in the background changed too. Windows XP replaced the old systems and brought a new stability to households, while DSL lines made the blocked phone lines a thing of the past.

Websites became more complex, more interactive, and moved closer to people's everyday lives. It was the transitional phase into what became known as Web 2.0, in which users suddenly were no longer just passive consumers, but became shapers themselves. Forums shot up like mushrooms, blogs gave individuals a worldwide voice, and platforms like YouTube or early social networks began to fundamentally change the structure of exchange.

The computer was during this time the undisputed gateway to this world. A tool that stood on the desk and was switched on after work or after school to dive into a different reality.

This era of desktop dominance lasted for years, but in the background the next great revolution was brewing. With the rise of modern smartphones, led by the first iPhone and the subsequent Android wave, the focus of the digital world shifted unstoppably.

The internet was suddenly no longer tied to a place or to a specific device on the desk. It migrated into the pocket.

This transformation happened at a racing speed. As early as 2016, a historic threshold was crossed: for the first time, more than fifty percent of all internet users worldwide were browsing via mobile devices. Websites had to adapt, design became more responsive, but also more uniform. The wild, individual design of the early days gave way to optimized, clean layouts that load quickly on small screens and can be easily operated with a thumb.

Around the year 2019 (at the latest), this transformation was completely finished. The internet had evolved from a tool that one uses deliberately into a permanent extension of the self. One was no longer online, one was never offline.

In this new reality, only a handful of gigantic corporations dominated the entire market: Google controlled search and advertising, Facebook dominated social interaction and communication, Apple and Microsoft provided the platforms and the hardware on which all of this took place.

This centralization marked the end of the old, decentralized web. The space that was once defined by millions of individual homepages and independent forums was herded into enormous, closed platform ecosystems. The algorithms of these corporations began to determine what we see, what we read, and what we think about.

Between Technology and Generations

I myself was born in the year 1998, in an extremely exciting phase just before the gigantic dot-com bubble burst. One could claim that I grew up in exactly the first generation that experienced the modern internet as a permanent companion from an early age.

I had my very first own computer at around the age of six. That was in the year 2004. On this computer, however, the technology running was by no means the most modern, but rather the already visibly aging Windows 98. This was simply because in many families the older hardware was passed down rather than always buying the newest model.

The urgently needed upgrade to Windows XP I was then allowed to carry out myself a few years later, and indeed quite classically from a physical CD-ROM. Those who lived through those times know exactly what the mechanical whirring of the CD drive sounded like while you stared full of anticipation at the blue installation screen.

With my birth year, I fall according to common definitions just barely within the range of Generation Z.

It is in any case fascinating to observe how closely we couple generations today to the respective state of technological development. One can often draw the boundaries between age groups far more precisely using hardware releases and digital milestones than through rigid year numbers.

Let us simply ask ourselves for illustration: which Nintendo console releases did you actively experience? Whoever consciously witnessed the historic release of the Nintendo 64 in June 1996 and was already in the world at that point clearly belongs to the group of Millennials. In my case, the earliest point of contact was the GameCube, which came to the European market in May 2002. That marks the classic entry point for Generation Z. Today's Generation Alpha in turn grows up with the Nintendo Switch or its successors and no longer knows a world without touchscreens and permanent cloud connectivity at all.

At the end of the day, all these terms like Millennial, Gen-Z or Gen-Alpha are of course extremely vaguely defined. It always remains to some extent a matter of interpretation exactly where the dividing lines run, and honestly speaking it is completely irrelevant to me in everyday life which of these pigeonholes one puts me or others into.

Linguistic categorizations and the dynamics behind such terms are admittedly an immensely fascinating field, but we don't need to lose ourselves here in any colorful, linguistic fantasy worlds.

What really counts is the lived experience with the tools of our time. Whoever has personally traversed the transition from analog or at least purely local computing to total connectivity looks at today's web with an entirely different awareness than someone for whom the internet was always as self-evident as electricity from the socket.

How the Web Shaped My Path in Life

Six years after my first Windows 98 computer, in the year 2012, at the age of twelve I had finally saved up enough money to buy my own, up-to-date computer.

This device would accompany me intensively over many years (until today, but in the sense of the Ship of Theseus paradox) and would significantly shape my path in life.

Back then I spent, like so many my age, two to three hours daily with online games. My absolute favorites were League of Legends and Old School RuneScape. Particularly the hours-long immersion in RuneScape was in retrospect an extremely instructive school of life. The game taught me the hard way that you should absolutely trust nobody who makes any kind of promises on the internet.

Anyone who back then lost their laboriously earned armor to an apparently nice player who offered to upgrade the items for free knows exactly what I'm talking about. My personal trauma was the loss of my Rune plate armor. This early lesson in digital skepticism burned itself deep into my brain: question everything, examine the intentions, and never be naive.

But the PC was for me far more than just a gaming machine. Through gaming I found the entry into deeper IT topics. I wanted to understand how things work behind the scenes, how networks are built and how software is created. At the same time I developed through browsing the web a huge passion for science, particularly for astronomy and chess. I lost myself for hours in complex, logical puzzles and crypto-riddles like the world-famous phenomenon Cicada 3301.

The internet back then was a gigantic treasure chest of knowledge. When I wanted to learn something new, there were no algorithmically optimized feeds bombarding me with short videos. Instead I searched deliberately for YouTube videos by passionate explainers, read my way through extremely detailed blog posts by experts, and dug through forum posts in which nerds from around the world shared their knowledge completely free of charge and without commercial ulterior motives.

The forums were places of genuine exchange. You had to register, follow rules, and built up a reputation over years within a small, select community. The blogs were personal diaries and knowledge databases at the same time. When someone published a text on the web, it was mostly because they had a real passion for the topic and wanted to leave something lasting behind for the world.

This digital environment not only massively fueled my technical skills, but also shaped my way of thinking. It showed me that the internet can be the most powerful educational tool in human history, if one learns to use it correctly and self-determinedly.

The Invasion of AI Slop and the Decay of Today

The most radical upheaval of recent internet history announced itself when the first large language models appeared on the scene. When OpenAI published the paper on GPT-3 on May 28, 2020, and the technology slowly became accessible, I was immediately fired up. I was among the first to throw themselves into this new world, because the topic of automated conversation had fascinated me long before. I had in fact already programmed my own chatbots and published them on the web, long before it became cool and mainstream through the big hype.

The modern large language models were of course an entirely different caliber in comparison. What began as a fascinating technological revolution has however developed over the last few years into a real plague. We are writing in the year 2026, and half the internet is by now filled to the brim with so-called AI slop. This term describes the endless flood of low-quality, synthetically generated content that is dumped onto the web without sense or reason, solely to manipulate search engine rankings and siphon off advertising revenue. Experts and technology analysts have long been warning of a genuine meltdown of information quality. Everything I consume on the internet today I have to question three times over. The ease of the old web has completely vanished.

A perfect example of this rapid decay is provided by the platform LinkedIn. In order to generate a little reach and traffic for my projects, I created my own account there about a month ago. What gets flushed into my feed there on a daily basis is absolutely shocking. The sheer mass of posts that obviously originate one hundred percent from the AI factory is barely tolerable anymore. It is always the same unnaturally smooth text structures, the same phrasal motivational sayings, and alongside them completely bizarre AI-generated images in which people with six fingers sit in sterile offices.

Did any real human actually look at this before posting it? It feels like a sterile ghost forest. Machines write texts for other machines that then automatically like and comment on them, while genuine human exchange gets left completely by the wayside. I have already addressed this alarming development in my last blog post.

The Digital Divide and Our Responsibility

That these grievances immediately catch my eye is of course due to my personal bubble. I have been a trained software developer in Germany since the year 2020. I am chronically online, work daily in the engine room of the internet, and probably also view the whole thing to some extent as an occupational hazard. I constantly have to check whether my servers are running stably, I maintain my websites and optimize the code.

My digital projects are like my own babies to me. Even my LinkedIn profile I do not regard as a classic social media channel for self-promotion or showing off, but rather I maintain there essentially a public developer diary. For me these platforms are purely tools that I deploy deliberately and with a clear awareness of the mechanisms behind them.

But what does reality look like outside our tech bubble? How does a Karen from accounting, a Miriam from the HR department, or the Uwe in the logistics warehouse fare when they navigate the web? They also use the internet daily, but often without the technical background knowledge about algorithms, prompting, and automated content factories.

This is precisely where the decisive question lies: how does this flood of artificial content influence their daily internet use? Are they even remotely aware of what is happening in the background? Whoever does not deal with software development or the tech industry on a daily basis often does not notice at all how subtly they are being manipulated by AI-generated content, distracted, or simply fed misinformation. When half the web consists of synthetic garbage, trust in digital media as a whole erodes.

Even I as an experienced developer who has been intensively following the emergence of this technology for years must openly admit: I frequently stand before content and fail despite all my expertise to distinguish a cleverly written AI plagiarism one hundred percent from a genuine human text.

Yes, there are efforts to label such content or mark it with digital watermarks. But let us be absolutely honest with ourselves. On LinkedIn and on countless other platforms I see every day masses of posts that pass through completely without labeling and continue to clog the web. If we simply shrug our shoulders and accept this state of affairs, we are capitulating before the algorithmic mud wave.

What You Can Concretely Do About It Now

The situation may appear bleak at first glance, but we are by no means helplessly at the mercy of this development. We must stop allowing ourselves to be fed like passive consumers in the walled gardens of the big platforms. Do it exactly like me instead: go back to the roots of the web. Build your own independent website.

It has never been as easy as today to secure your own domain and set up a small server or host a static page. Show the world out there what you have created with your own hands, what you have coded, or what you have genuinely thought deeply about. Your own website is your personal protected space in the digital realm, a place where no algorithm in the world determines what your content has to look like or who is allowed to see it.

That's pretty damn cool, isn't it?

See that? I swore. I can do that because this is my website.

If you browse around on my page, you will also find in my finds targeted posts about defending against and precisely identifying AI-generated content. It is a genuine matter of the heart for me to pass on this knowledge and sharpen awareness of the digital slop.

We must learn to look more carefully again and to display a healthy skepticism. Use tools for verification, pay attention to the typical linguistic patterns of language models, and don't be blinded by sterile, perfectly polished posts that were generated in seconds without a human spark.

The most important step however is a very personal promise to yourself and to your fellow human beings: be absolutely honest with yourself and ensure at every point in time that YOU are writing and publishing the content, and not an anonymous AI in the background. There is absolutely nothing wrong with using technology as a source of inspiration or as a tool for spell-checking.

The voice, the soul, the mistakes, and the genuine edges and corners of a text must compulsorily come from you. Your readers, your customers, and your genuine friends on the web will thank you infinitely for it. They long in this flooded, artificial world more than ever for genuine, authentic human experience. Let us together reclaim the real internet.