Monday, March 02, 2026

Winter is Coming

I honestly can’t imagine that the internet will still exist within fifteen, or twenty years. The internet, first and foremost, will break and collapse at some point; it’s only a matter of inevitability. With how things seem to be going, this inevitability has only been accelerated, and the next greatest catastrophe in the history of human civilization just seems like it’s going to arrive quicker and quicker. Only four years earlier, before ChatGPT-3.5 was released in the November of 2022, the internet then still seemed like a relatively hospitable place. In comparison to that time, now in 2026, over half of all total internet traffic comes from bots.

Google is nearly impossible to use now; looking things up requires one to either read a Gemini AI summary, or click on irrelevant links conveniently placed at the top of the search results. Imageboards that just three years prior which still maintained a semblance of human activity and culture has all but devolved into cesspools of spam. This is of course further exacerbated by the shitflinging wars between imageboards, all of which nonetheless house the exact same type of spineless outcast. Every corner of the internet feels hostile to use, which by design it is—even people who claim that it’s still possible to retreat to friendly, indie part of the web more often than not is actually just deluded by their nostalgia of something they have never experienced.

While this is the case, it’s comfortable enough to insist from then that we should just return to the pre-internet days, but this can also be easily reducible to another form of a nostalgia for lost futures. It is not enough to hole ourselves in, retreating to a position where we don’t have to deal with people and the world around us. The most pressing concern, if anything else, is providing an alternative away from the disastrous platforms in use now. Winter is coming, and it’s not going to be enough for us to cave ourselves in. We need each other.