I keep catching myself thinking the same old-man thought.

The internet has become stupid.

Everything is shorter. Louder. Angrier. More confidently wrong. Somebody posts one sentence, somebody else reads half of it, a third person replies to something nobody actually said, and by lunchtime everybody is fighting. You guys should try Threads.

Then I remember something.

Maybe the internet did not become stupid.

Maybe everybody simply arrived.

When I started wasting my life online properly in the early 2000s, being on the internet still required a little bit of effort.

You needed a computer. A connection. Some patience. A lot of it if you were on dial-up. 🤣 You sat at a desk. You searched for things. You found forums. Blogs. Message boards. IRC. Weird little websites made by weird little people for another twenty weird little people.

Even finding those places required some intent.

Nobody accidentally opened a browser, fell into an infinite vertical feed and emerged forty-five minutes later having watched seventeen videos of strangers arguing about whether a restaurant served the correct amount of sambal.

We had to work for our stupidity.

And because internet access itself filtered who was there, I think many of us developed a slightly romantic (probably misguided) idea that the old internet was somehow populated by smarter people.

University students. Office workers stealing company bandwidth. Geeks. Forum regulars. Bloggers willing to spend two hours formatting one post nobody asked for.

Very intellectual, konon. But let’s not bullshit ourselves.

The old internet had plenty of idiots too.

Chain emails. Fake virus warnings. Urban legends. Forum flame wars. Terrible forwarded jokes. People typing in ALL CAPS. Blog posts about what somebody ate for lunch accompanied by seven badly exposed photographs.

I know because I contributed generously to several of those categories.

But there was one important difference.

There was friction.

Writing something long took effort. Reading something long took effort. Finding a community took effort. Uploading a photograph could take long enough for you to reconsider whether the photograph was worth uploading in the first place.

Then the smartphone happened.

And suddenly the internet stopped being somewhere you went. It became something permanently attached to your hand.

That is an enormous improvement, by the way. I don’t mean this as some “kids these days” complaint. More people being able to communicate, learn, publish, create, sell things, find communities and access information is obviously a good thing.

But when you remove almost all the friction, you also remove the little pauses that used to sit between thought and publication.

Think.

Type.

Edit.

Maybe delete.

Now it can be:

See thing.

Feel thing.

POST!!!

And because everybody is carrying a camera, keyboard, television station and publishing platform in their pocket, there is simply much more of everything.

More brilliant people.

More funny people.

More experts.

More complete idiots.

More cats. Especially cats.

So perhaps the internet did not deteriorate into a worse version of humanity.

Perhaps it finally became a fairly accurate sample of humanity.

Which is slightly terrifying.

There is another part to it though.

The platforms themselves learned what keeps us staring at the screen. Not necessarily what is most useful. Not what is most thoughtful. What keeps us there. All those algorithms.

Shorter things are easier to consume. Bite-sized outbursts and “thoughts”. Outrage is easy to understand. Certainty travels better than nuance. A thirty-second video is easier to start than a 2,000-word article. Before you know it, you have trained yourself to expect every idea to arrive already chopped into bite-sized pieces.

I complained about this recently in So… what now? — that I think some of the degradation in the way we express ourselves comes from consuming too much shortened, quick-fix material. Bite-sized stuff is only good for Chipsmore. LOL.

But the annoying thing is that I am part of the problem too.

Of course I am.

I use Twitter. X. Whatever. I’m also on… Threads. 💀

I scroll. I post stupid observations. I share screenshots. I watch short videos. I open something interesting, tell myself I will read it later, then never see it again because the feed has already moved on to twelve other things. Just scrolling back up to find those old photos or videos would take forever and quite some effort.

Convenience wins.

I actually figured out part of this years ago.

In 2018, when I briefly tried blogging again in I iz bek!, I realised that Twitter and Facebook had slowly replaced blogging for me simply because they were easier. I could do everything from the phone. A thought didn’t need to become an article. It only needed to become a post.

Then that became the habit.

And habits change the way you think. Eventually, how you do things too.

If every thought must fit inside a tiny box, eventually you start thinking in tiny boxes.

That is probably the part I came to dislike most.

Not that social media is stupid.

It can be hilarious, useful and occasionally brilliant.

But it encourages you to hit publish before the thought is properly developed.

You publish the thought while it is still half cooked.

Sometimes that is fine. Some thoughts deserve exactly seven seconds of attention.

Some of mine deserve less.

But other things need room.

Room to explain.

Room to contradict yourself.

Room to change your mind halfway through.

Room to write three paragraphs before finally discovering what the hell you were actually trying to say.

That is one reason I am enjoying having this stupid blog back.

There is no character limit here.

No algorithm deciding that the first sentence must provoke somebody immediately or the post dies.

No obligation to turn every point into a thread, carousel, reel, short, story, whatever.

I can ramble.

Which, historically, I think I am quite good at. And twenty years later the rambling is still here. That might actually be the biggest advantage a blog has over the modern feed.

It stays put.

A social-media post has the lifespan of a mosquito. It appears, gets some replies, disappears down the timeline and becomes archaeology within a week.

A blog post can sit quietly for fifteen years until some idiot rebuilds his dead website, finds it again and wonders why he used to write like that.

There is value in that, at least for me.

I don’t want the old internet back exactly as it was. I like fast connections. I like smartphones. I like being able to access almost anything from almost anywhere. I definitely do not miss waiting for a photograph to load line by bloody line.

But I do miss the idea that the internet was a collection of places rather than one enormous feed.

Places you visited deliberately.

Places with strange personalities.

Places somebody actually owned and cared about.

Maybe that is why resurrecting bongkersz.com felt unexpectedly satisfying. I “force” myself to write again. Longer posts. And re-read my old posts. I do not even care that much if anyone is reading or commenting.

It is my little place again.

Not because the old internet was smarter.

It probably wasn’t.

There were simply fewer of us, more friction, and more reasons to slow down. Maybe that is why so many people keep saying “it was better back in the day.” Perhaps they could feel the connection, the sincerity and the effort given. Heck, we had LAN parties, blogger meetups and forum meetups back then.

Now everybody is here.

Which is wonderful.

And terrible.

Basically, humanity lah.