Five years ago I was sitting around drinking a beer with my college buddy Dayv. I was scrolling through Twitter and watching people get mad at Donald Trump’s latest outrage, and I said “You know…fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now the real world is an escape from the internet.” “Tweet that!”, Dayv said, so I did. That banal observation became my most popular tweet of all time, and the quote has now been posted ad infinitum on content mills all over the web.
Why did such a bland observation resonate with so many people? It’s easy to see why the internet now feels like a place we need to flee from. The smartphone physically attached the internet to our persons; now we take the internet wherever we go, and its little colored icons are always beckoning, telling us to abandon whoever we’re talking to or whatever we’re working on and check the latest posts. But what’s harder to remember is why the internet used to be an escape from the real world.
When I first got access to the internet as a kid, the very first thing I did was to find people who liked the same things I liked — science fiction novels and TV shows, Dungeons and Dragons, and so on. In the early days, that was what you did when you got online — you found your people, whether on Usenet or IRC or Web forums or MUSHes and MUDs. Real life was where you had to interact with a bunch of people who rubbed you the wrong way — the coworker who didn’t like your politics, the parents who nagged you to get a real job, the popular kids with their fancy cars. The internet was where you could just go be a dork with other dorks, whether you were an anime fan or a libertarian gun nut or a lonely Christian 40-something or a gay kid who was still in the closet. Community was the escape hatch.
Then in the 2010s, the internet changed. It wasn’t just the smartphone, though that did enable it. What changed is that internet interaction increasingly started to revolve around a small number of extremely centralized social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and later Instagram.
From a business perspective, this centralization was a natural extension of the early internet — people were getting more connected, so just connect them even more. Why have everyone make their own websites when everyone’s homepage could just be their Facebook page? Why try to track people down in IRC chat rooms when you could just talk to anyone directly on Twitter? Putting everyone in the world in touch through a single network is what we did with the phone system, and everyone knows that the value of a network scales as the square of the number of users. So centralizing the whole world’s social interaction on two or three platforms would print loads of money while also making for a happier, more connected world.
It certainly did the former. Facebook became an all-conquering corporate behemoth, and Twitter managed to stay profitable and secure from competition in spite of being notoriously poorly managed. But almost immediately after the great centralization of the 2010s, I started noticing that something was wrong with the internet I had come to know and love.
It started with the Facebook feed. On the old internet, you could show a different side of yourself in every forum or chat room; but on your Facebook feed, you had to be the same person to everyone you knew. When social unrest broke out in the mid-2010s this got even worse — you had to watch your liberal friends and your conservative friends go at it in the comments of your posts, or theirs. Friendships and even family bonds were destroyed in those comments.
At first Twitter seemed less bad than the Facebook feed, since you didn’t have to reveal your real identity if you didn’t want to. But Twitter was far more extreme in the way it threw everyone in the whole world together. Your family and friends might fight on Facebook, but at least you didn’t have to get deluged with angry comments from random anonymous Nazis or communists or weirdos mad about video game journalism.
The early 2010s on Twitter were defined by fights over toxicity and harassment versus early-internet ideals of free speech. But after 2016 those fights no longer mattered, because everyone on the platform simply adopted the same patterns of toxicity and harassment that the extremist trolls had pioneered. By 2019 you could get mobbed by angry librarians, or Saturday Night Live fans, or history professors. The only defense against an angry mob was to get your own angry mob. Twitter felt like a prison, and in prison you need a gang to survive.
Why did this happen to the centralized internet when it hadn’t happened to the decentralized internet of previous decades? In fact, there were always Nazis around, and communists, and all the other toxic trolls and crazies. But they were only ever an annoyance, because if a community didn’t like those people, the moderators would just ban them. Even normal people got banned from forums where their personalities didn’t fit; even I got banned once or twice. It happened. You moved on and you found someone else to talk to.
Community moderation works. This was the overwhelming lesson of the early internet. It wor
