In 2026, people are going offline as much as possible—I think, in large part, to reclaim this feeling of preciousness around life. They’re chaining their phones to their walls, starting movements to touch grass, and creating entire product lines around reducing phone usage. In the face of a hostile internet, abstinence has become the mainstream accepted response. We crave the spontaneity we know to be in the physical world.
I don’t blame them. The Internet looks quite grim these days. Dead internet theory, stating that the internet is being overtaken and, eventually, will only be inhabited by bots, is entering mainstream discourse as AI social accounts multiply and compete for what flavor of slop comes after Italian brainrot. People are arguing with fake people, and creators have to clarify that they didn’t use AI to make the work they share. Culture commentators are writing about the death of the open internet as people retreat into dark forests, private spaces like group chats that are hidden from the web.
The Internet has lost its innocence, and logging on feels like fighting for survival.
But every once in a while, we still encounter something meaningful that makes it all worth it. Something heartwarming, genuine, inspiring, or joyful that justifies all the hours scrolling and a lifetime chained to our devices. Earnestness shines through even in “content” manufactured for spread.
If dead internet theory posits that the internet will eventually become only bots, alive internet theory proclaims we will never let the open internet die. We will always find a way to look for each other, to answer a call for help, to share a laugh and an argument right after one another. If there’s one trait of the human race that every apocalypse movie agrees on, it’s our will to survive.
We still have hope for the Internet because deep down, we still believe in each other.
The internet we remember never went anywhere, not really. We just all got sucked in by these conmen and sellouts who started “new and exciting” websites like Google and Facebook and Youtube then trapped people there and turned them into free infinite money generators with an ever-growing audience of captive eyeballs they could sell ads to.
The same old internet is still there and it’s still free to join and contribute to: the indie web, the cozy web, the smol web, whatever you want to call it. We just forgot how to find it and join it and traverse it, and the ways of finding it are no longer common knowledge. Google and Bing are the only search engines that still exist, and they don’t want to show it to us. Social media is the only place we really have to share things with each other, and until we had Fediverse options they didn’t really want to let us see each other’s work and creations either, making it a cultural faux pas in many contexts and even going so far as to imply that it’s “spam” like Reddit’s infamous no-self-promotion rule. “How dare you try to create something you want us to show to anyone for free without being a company paying for ad space?” was the vibe I always got from that.
It really won’t take much to get the old internet back. It’s not far away. It’s all drifting around out there in the ether, the content creators are still creating their content and they probably always will be, we just need to start putting the pieces back together again and figure out what sort of glue we need to put them all back together into a platform we can all stand on together once again.
THANK YOU. I’m always saying this. People always say they miss the “old, weird internet” but it’s still there and still active and still growing. But these people choose to spend their time on 2-3 highly addictive apps and complain about it. Nobody is forcing you to download Tiktok dude.
Show me a touch grass movement
