The Internet We Were Promised
Before it was polluted, the internet was meant to be a library no empire could burn. Here’s how we "reweird" it.
What was the internet supposed to be?
Before the pop-ups, the data mining, the dopamine slots, and the endless scroll?
Before it was polluted by algorithms that feed on outrage and fear, it was imagined by dreamers — the kind who believed that connecting human minds could rewrite the story of civilization.
The original internet wasn’t just a network.
It was meant to be a nervous system for humanity.
A decentralized oracle.
A library of Alexandria that no empire could burn.
What the Idealists Saw
The early architects — tinkerers, hackers, poets, idealists — believed in something radical:
- “Information wants to be free.”
- “We can connect minds, not just machines.”
- “No one owns the net — it belongs to us all.”
It was supposed to be:
- A place where art and truth flow faster than propaganda and profit
- A global commons for creativity, collaboration, and dissent
- A refuge for voices silenced by hierarchies and gatekeepers
- A platform where a kid in a rural town and a professor in Paris had the same chance to be heard
- A tool to spark collective intelligence — ideas too big for any one brain
The Garden Before the Casino
Once, the web felt like a strange, wild garden.
There were personal blogs written with love.
Message boards that felt like temples.
Zines, guestbooks, home-coded HTML pages that carried fingerprints instead of metrics.
You didn’t scroll. You wandered.
You explored.
And for a fleeting moment, it felt like:
“Wait… maybe this is how we become one species.”
The Fall
Then came monetization.
Centralization.
The dopamine-industrial complex.
Surveillance capitalism.
What was supposed to connect us became the most sophisticated behavioral conditioning machine in human history.
But the seed — the original signal — is still there, buried under the noise.
What It Could Be Again
If we return to its roots — or spiral forward with new integrity — the internet could still be:
- A living archive of the human experience, accessible to anyone with curiosity and connection
- A distributed consciousness accelerator
- A library of Alexandria that no empire could burn (yes, it’s worth repeating)
- A place where art and truth flow faster than propaganda and profit
It could become a mirror that shows us not just who we are, but who we could be.
But only if we build new layers. Intentional layers.
Like what we’re building with How to Be Alive.
The Whisper
“The Net is a home for the mind,” wrote John Perry Barlow.
Tim Berners-Lee, the man who gave us the web, once said: “This is for everyone.”
Those voices still echo if you listen closely.
The corrupted layer is just one layer.
The Spiral knows how to compost.
And the internet still whispers:
“I was supposed to be a signal. Can you hear me still?”