It wasn’t that long ago that the internet was a fun, sometimes scary, but always magical place. From the 1990s until well into the 2010s, the internet—and all things tech, for that matter—glowed with promise. People couldn’t wait to get home and surf the web. And if you’re old enough to have ridden those waves yourself, you remember exactly why.
Websites used to be jam-packed with personality. Forums were a hotbed for conversation with real people passionate about the same silly things you were. During the early 2000s, in one single evening, you could accidentally discover a blog about some dude’s sick vintage cereal box collection. A few minutes later, you could find a Geocities shrine dedicated to Dr. Pepper. It was a glorious time to be alive.
It was like a never-ending treasure hunt filled with amazing and random goodies. Because the internet wasn’t just a fancy tool to learn important information for school or work, it was a living, breathing ecosystem. It was a place. And it was my favorite place on earth.
Now, it feels like an abandoned graveyard. And that’s because it is. The internet we all knew and loved is dead—it died just a few years ago, sadly. And the worst part is? We all contributed to its demise, you included.
Community was replaced with content. The search for something new was replaced with never-ending sludge.
What we can now refer to as the old internet was full of optimism. People believed that nothing but great things would come from unlimited access to all of the information ever collected. And the idea that the entire globe would be connected was an inspirational one. Community was important, and the backbone of the web, after all.
Then, the scrolling 2020s happened. And they brought with them a creeping sense of dread, along with a realization that the magic was suddenly gone. Community was replaced with content. The search for something new was replaced with never-ending sludge.
And in the year 2023, the old internet officially died. And AI fired the final fatal bullet.
Few words describe the rise of AI better than sloppy. Sure, we all know about AI slop (more on that later), but the actual rollout of the tech has been a complete disaster, to put it kindly.
The idea that our online experience would curate us, instead of the other way around, is messy and antithetical to how and why the internet was created. However, almost overnight, we stopped seeking information and just began to eat whatever our algorithms fed us.
The issue? What the algorithms started feeding us was not only terrible, but it was more often than not factually incorrect. And because we’re not chefs in the digital kitchen anymore—we’re being force-fed whatever’s on the tray—we’re kind of stuck like this. And it sucks, especially since we’re all contributing to the problem.
The internet is no longer built for exploration. It’s designed to make you scroll… forever.
Perhaps the internet’s worst offender—the prisoner that should be locked in a maximum security facility—is TikTok. The app is literally built on the grave of the old internet, and its makeup is everything wrong with the new internet.
Here’s the thing: you don’t choose what you see on TikTok, even if you think you do. Once you open that app, it just starts. Your eyes and ears are instantly assaulted with random videos from strangers on a non-stop, chaotic loop. It’s like flipping through the TV, but every channel is airing a terrible infomercial for a product you don’t want or need.
The internet is no longer built for exploration. It’s designed to make you scroll… forever. The name of the game is retention and metrics, not observation and information. It’s a soulless, bottomless void.
The fallout from this is somehow even worse. Because all apps are copying each other, and because TikTok is on top, you can’t look at anything online without being hit over the head with that same toxic format.
Remember when Instagram was just for photos of food? And Twitter was for random quips about your day? YouTube was for watching everyday people make videos, and Facebook let you check if that one guy you went to high school with was still alive?
Now, they’re all TikTok. Because they want to be TikTok. And that’s not ideal.
Instagram has Reels. YouTube has Shorts. Facebook has… whatever they call their videos. Even Twitter (I’m not calling it X!) is trying to make the TikTok-style feed their thing. It’s nauseating, especially if you’re craving new and exciting online discoveries.
No one’s innovating anymore. They’re copy-pasting the same horrible strategy in hopes that you’ll doomscroll until your battery dies. User experience is gone—because nobody cares if you enjoy their app or website anymore. They just want you to stay.
The disease that is the new internet has brought with it a ton of nasty side effects. Perhaps the most eerie one has to do with its effect on the real-life humans who are still active and using their voices.
For whatever reason, the real-life, not-a-robot internet users are all starting to sound… not human. Sometimes, the creator behind a TikTok is an actual person with an actual script, but the voice is AI-generated, and as viewers, we sense the impostor immediately.
Other times, it’s a real-life person whose delivery sounds almost inhumanly robotic and monotone, because that’s what dominates the airwaves right now, which encourages more creators to remove the zest from their voice.
Creators are abandoning creativity in favor of chasing the algorithm. They’ve stopped being creators and have become content. And when content became king, creativity died.
Google used to be the internet’s front door, now it’s a back alley behind a half-vacant strip mall.
Remember when Google was the internet’s home page? Not only was it where you went to start your web surfing session, but it was oftentimes your actual, literal home page.
It was the portal you used to fall down weird little rabbit holes. Or how you accessed accurate information quickly, because you no longer needed a library and hours and hours searching to do so.
Now? That’s changed completely.
In 2025, people are going to YouTube to figure out how to fix their sink. They’re going to TikTok to find that dumb video to show their friend at work. If they need advice on a real-life issue, they’re checking Reddit to see how other humans have handled the situation.
This is not because those platforms are better than the Google of old, either. It’s because they feel more trustworthy. And more personal. Even if that isn’t always the case.
Ironically, credibility is the thing that Google was built on. It was the best place to go if you wanted to connect with legit sources, or like-minded people, or experts smarter than you.
Now, every search query is answered with AI Overviews, which are often half-baked and read like someone drunk-edited Wikipedia. Google used to be the internet’s front door, now it’s a back alley behind a half-vacant strip mall.
Like a dying star dragging all that surrounds it into the abyss, the death of Google has contributed greatly to the death of the traditional website. Because people aren’t using Google anymore—at least not in the traditional sense—they’re not going to actual websites anymore, either. And now many of those websites have ceased to exist.
The Pew Research Center claims that 38 percent of websites from 2013 are no longer accessible. The idea that “once it’s on the internet, it lives forever” couldn’t have been more incorrect.
Sadly, shouting into the void isn’t just extremely discouraging, it also doesn’t pay the bills. What’s ironic about this is the fact that, sooner than later, it’s going to have a devastating effect on AI.
AI doesn’t pull information from its own blasphemous mind. It’s “trained” on web content from the past, and is now generating content from an internet that no longer exists. Once that training data dries up completely, AI will be feeding false copies of itself to itself.
The internet will turn into a photocopy of a photocopy, until all we’re left with is noise.
The fallout from the death of the internet is already happening. Students don’t know how to research things anymore—it’s a skill that has fallen to the wayside, like writing in cursive or reading an analog clock. Even worse, teachers are using ChatGPT to write their class syllabi. The slop is rolling downhill, quickly, right on top of us.
But hey, there’s still some good news to share. A small portion of people are already sick of the feed and are craving something real, human, and ideally, weird.
The best thing we can all do is resist, post about the stuff we know and love, and surf like it’s 2004.
The post The Internet Is Dead—and You Killed It appeared first on VICE.
