Remembering the blog-era internet

By Paul Haedo. Reproduced from the author-supplied article manuscript. This is original author commentary; personal recollections and external claims are not independently verified here. No original publication date was supplied. One paragraph is omitted from this website edition.

I still remember, clear as a bright yesterday's sun, my first-ever phone. It was an Evo-Shift 4G. It had a keyboard that you slid to reveal, and for my young, around 11-year-old self, it was a marvelous invention. Within my hand, I had access to the entirety of the internet—a thought that would make most parents today shudder.

I wasn't like most kids.

I loved that phone, but I did not text anyone. I barely called anyone, in fact, with the sole exception of my parents. Instead, I had a friend in the form of Google. No AI or Google Search recommendations either. Instead, I simply had my youthful curiosity, still strong and vibrant, withstanding the adults who tried to force it out of me by ordering my silence after subjecting them to a relentless barrage of questions.

Google never said no.

I loved the blogs. And the comment sections!

I was one of Gen Z's harbingers. Born in 1999, I both deserve the title of Millennial, due to my birth literally falling on the turn of the millennium, as well as the title of Gen Z, just from right of birth in that year. I did not grow up with the phone and social media; I grew up with the blogs, the websites, and the free-spirit discussions and debates of the internet comment section.

I saw the best and the worst of humanity. I discovered the manosphere; back then Roosh V still posted strong in his Return of Kings blog. He talked about women and sleeping with women as if it was a video game. I thought it was entertaining, as well as the MGTOW blogs that talked about the perils of divorce as if I was stuck in a video game glitch, cursed to reset my progress eternally.

I read blogs on wild political theory, left wing, right wing, and theory from the Classical Age thousands of years past. I was exposed to it all, no filter, no moderation. Just data produced by human minds and typed into the internet by human hands, with Google as my trusty North Star, guiding me on that vast sea towards a destination that I could never reach.

Then the blogs died.

The manosphere turned even more radical than it currently was, and suddenly the genders found themselves in a deep Cold War. Said war turned hot, and now no one knows when the peace deal will come. The Military-Industrial Complex makes too much money, and the dying will continue in the name of profit and ad revenue. Rage drives clicks, and the best source of rage is misery in the form of short-form content.

Reddit swooped up the blogs and proclaimed itself the source of internet discussion.

YouTube was replaced by TikTok, and those of my generation doom scroll as I once did, only instead of blogs that required hours of digestion, or a spicy article that caused a several-thousand-comment war down in the comments section, I did not receive an education. I received a short video, designed to elicit an emotional reaction like a cursed poem. No intellectualism of any sort, just emotion. Pushing me to do something that makes money in some form to someone who does not care about me and whom I will never meet.

My Evo-Shift 4G became better. I got used to Apple, and 4G became 5G, then 5G+.

My internet became worse. A mockery of itself, corrupted to serve gain at the expense of others. A sad husk of its former self, and I was alive to see its potential.

And now they want to 'regulate' it for the benefit of my generation that is being harmed by the very machinations that the regulators designed to enrich themselves.

I learned to type on the internet; I learned to do it fast through Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games like EVE Online. I absorbed so much random knowledge that I hope it ends up being useful to my overall human development.

I cannot say that an unregulated internet like in the Blog Golden Age of 2005-2015 or so is beneficial to humanity. But it was a perfect encapsulation of what we are, in our most chaotic, wild, and beautiful. Now? With sterilized and moderated sources devoid of argument and debate, no matter how vile or inciteful, are we really better off?

Or did we break our legs, for fear of running into the forest tree?

All that I can do is lament at what we've lost.

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