It started for me with a hiss and a shriek, our dial-up modem screaming like it was dying. Watching the screen glow dim and blueish in the room, a hint of fear rose in my chest at the uncertainty of it all, this unknown plane. Fingers hovering over the keyboard like I was unlocking a portal, like we’d just found the proverbial closet door to Narnia. At the time, it seemed like a new form of life, something both alien and filled with possibility. I was in elementary school the first time I heard that modem screech, eyes fixed on the family desktop waiting to get on “The Internet.”
Just pixels and text at first, game cheat codes, primitive websites with flashing GIFs, the occasional message board. Then came the chatrooms. AOL. A/S/L. The strange thrill of talking to strangers who you knew were also sitting at another computer somewhere else, fingers tapping keys just seconds before you saw the text. The freedom to say anything without your voice cracking or your hands sweating. I was a shy kid growing up, super unsure of myself. But online, I could be whoever I wanted.
And so, incidentally, could everyone else.
From the start, people said things they’d never say out loud. Racist jokes, sexist rants, brutality masked as “I’m just being real, bro.” It didn’t feel forced so much as inevitable.
Like…we’re giving people relative anonymity here. Of course the masks are gonna came off.
Some argue the internet has made society worse, pointing to political polarization, misinformation and online harassment as evidence. That argument holds water when it comes to the extremes, but it also misses the deeper truth.
That the internet didn’t make us worse. The internet is us.
The Mask Slips
By high school, the novelty of the whole thing had worn off, but the impact hadn’t. AIM was a legit hangout spot, characterized by the inside jokes and passive-aggressive song lyrics on everybody’s away messages. It was mostly innocent back then though, I’m sure most people thought.
I sure did.
Beneath the surface though, in the dim glow of low-res avatars and lagging lobbies, something darker lurked. Comments that cut like serrated knives, buried in threads from usernames that felt like balaclavas covering the faces of shadows.
For some people it wasn’t just trolling, then or now.
Trolls offend for the thrill of seeing people angry. Many times, they have no personal connection to the offensive stuff they post. It’s not them I’m talking about, though the ironic meme accounts and edgelords trying to be funny by provoking and humiliating are their own issue.
I’m talking though about the kind of meanness that feels honest, in the worst way possible. Long, unhinged rants about race and gender and sexuality from people who remain faceless in ways that still conjure images of the boogeyman, or the masked serial killers in all those ‘70s and ‘80s scream queen horror films.
The digital world didn’t invent cruelty, but it did provide a shield for people to feel comfortable removing their filters, like an astronaut back in the station from a spacewalk climbing out of the suit. Back then though, in its early stages, most of us couldn’t know that this raw, unfiltered chaos wasn’t the internet’s final form. Couldn’t realize that, as it evolved, so would the way we used it.
And weaponized it.
The Performative Self
Internet anonymity gave people the space to unleash what they wouldn’t in person. But at some point, internet identity itself became a thing. By the time I was in college, the internet wasn’t just where people found information and said what they thought. It was where they curated how they wanted to be seen. Being on the internet became the equivalent of getting dressed for school, carefully choosing which outfit would represent you to the world that day.
Facebook was the first organized main stage, with Instagram coming along later on like a vanity mirror. By the 2010s it seemed like everyone I knew was suddenly an entrepreneur or philosopher or fitness guru (or at least trying to look like one).
Not to say I didn’t fall for the bait too.
I admittedly have spent an embarrassing amount of time choosing the right photos, multiple takes of the same pose so I could delete the ones that made me want to hit the gym.
Even as anonymity gave way to identity though, the ugliness didn’t disappear. It just switched up its wardrobe. We still got our slurs and screeds, but now they were accompanied by carefully selected profile pictures, fake smiles and filtered selfies. Daily highlight reels of individually-important lives.
Back then, a lot of the self-comparisons and stream-of-consciousness mind dumps still seemed harmless in the grander scale of things. The impulses beneath the urges — whether insecurity, envy, pettiness, or performative morality — didn’t come with the apps though. They were already in us.
The internet didn’t create the horrible tendencies, it just brought them out into the limelight. Updated their outlets for the modern age, added a couple hashtags and hit post.
Loathsomeness went viral.
And once enough people were performing for the feed, the individual acts blurred into something collectively louder, meaner, and harder to stop.
The Mob and the Mirror
Eventually, all that curated ugliness had to reach critical mass. What used to be individual performances turned into collective rituals. Timelines became coliseums, displaying battles both external and internal.
Rage bait. Outrage cycles. Hashtag vs Hashtag.
The pandemic was a divergent point. Height of the George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests, watching one cancellation and dox unfold after another, lockdown days blurring together like circular set pieces rotating from day to night. All of us stuck inside with nothing to do but doomscroll. One day, a racist college kid. The next, an influencer. Then a pastor. Names and faces flooding feeds, the drama even more addictive in the stir-crazy haze of lockdown.
Many of the people canceled at that time and since deserved the accountability, especially those outed for things like racist ideologies and abusive behavior. But what began as an avenue for valid criticism spiraled into performance mixed with a kind of social bloodsport, which had the duel effect of making us all look bad while also inflating every issue to the point that none of them seemed individually important anymore.
What I noticed even more than anything though, was how much we all enjoyed destroying people.
There was a rhythm to it.
That’s the part that’s scary. The internet doesn’t reward empathy, it rewards extremity, and humanity fits right there. That’s how the algorithms are designed, to bring to the surface whatever gets the most reaction, not what’s most thoughtful.
That collective voice shouting from all sides makes me think of the Freudian id. The raw, impulsive part of us that’s hungry for attention and power, lit up by likes and shares. A digital subconscious, just a lot louder and a lot meaner than we expected.
The internet didn’t change us, it magnified us. Amplified our worst tendencies until they echoed louder than everything else.
The Hope (Not a Solution)
Yet, despite all that, I haven’t unplugged.
Not completely.
It’s exhausting, seeing that reflection every day. But I still show up. Not because I believe I can change anything, but because sometimes the internet still surprises me.
There’s a strange kind of hope in that, I think. Not in the platforms themselves (those things definitely ain’t saving us) but in the few moments of connection that still get through. A message from someone I haven’t spoken to in years who read something I posted and remembered me. A stranger I exchanged likes with years ago, and now we support each other’s artistic endeavors. A comment thread that didn’t devolve into war but stayed real and funny and empathetic and generous.
They’re rare. But moments like those still happen.
If you can’t tell, I’m trying to stop blaming the internet.
The internet isn’t sentient. It’s a mirror. A megaphone. If the internet’s a playground, our insecurities are the cigarettes we bring to the park benches, chain smoking negativity like it won’t eventually kill us.
These days, I try to log off more. Post less, write more. Maybe there’s not much else I can do, but I can choose how I respond. I don’t think there’s a fix for what the internet has revealed, not a clean one anyway. But I do think there are small acts of resistance. Choosing not to dunk on someone even when it’s easy. Choosing not to post the photo that’s clearly a cry for validation. Choosing to figure out your own insecurities instead of unleashing them on the world.
The internet didn’t break us. It just showed us where the cracks were already forming.
But since they’re out in the open now, maybe we should…you know, take a look.
See which of those cracks we can fix.
***
→ Subscribe to my Substack for more essays and short stories.
