The Internet Was Good for Me

The computer moved through our house as I got older.

It started in the kitchen, connected through dial-up. Then it moved into my parent's room. Eventually it ended up in mine. Then we got high-speed internet, and the last bit of friction disappeared. I had unlimited access to what Bo Burnham would later call “a little bit of everything all of the time.”

I must have been twelve when I went looking for video game cheat codes and found the GameWinners.com forums. I made an account and posted about games. I remember AIM and changing my screen name over and over. I remember talking to people who liked the same things I did: video games and computers. One friend lived in another time zone. Sometimes I stayed awake until the early morning because that was when our days overlapped and we could talk in real time.

No one seemed to understand me in real life. People online did. That might sound trivial, but it wasn’t trivial to me. The internet gave me friendship, knowledge, and a sense of direction when I had very little of those things around me. My parents didn’t really parent. The internet filled some of the space they didn’t.

It did so indiscriminately. I trolled on forums. Mostly I mocked people. It was mean. I saw disturbing images and pornography before I was old enough to make sense of them.

On YouTube, I found a conspiracy film about September 11. I don’t want to name it. I don’t feel like helping it travel any farther. I believed it completely. I repeated its claims at school. I told people as though I had discovered something important that they didn’t know. They thought I was crazy. They were right not to believe me. Eventually, I found a line-by-line rebuttal. I read it, and the whole thing fell apart.

I’m still embarrassed that I believed it and talked about it so openly. But the experience left me with something useful: anyone who claims to know a truth that everyone else is too blind, stupid, or compromised to see makes me immediately suspicious. I learned skepticism through the embarrassing experience of not having enough of it.

This is why I can’t write a clean nostalgic essay about the old internet. It was good for me. There were also points when it was very bad for me. The gift and the danger came from the same fact: I could reach beyond the world immediately around me.

The internet I grew up with was somewhere I went. I looked for a cheat code, a forum, a show, or an answer. I entered places with names and regulars. I found people because we had both chosen to be there.

That internet was not safe, and I can’t pretend otherwise. But curiosity started the journey. The dominant internet now works in the other direction. It comes looking for you.

An algorithm observes you and chooses what comes next. It learns which subject, person, fear, grievance, or identity will keep you looking, then gives you more of it. You don’t only find your people. The system suggests who your people are, and then keeps confirming the suggestion.

We call that discovery. But discovery used to ask something of me first. I had to want something before I could go find it, and the wanting was how I learned what I was like. What arrives now arrives ahead of the wanting. Something is usually already waiting to be found before a kid has had the chance to go looking.

And what a system like that finds first is whatever is least defended. I was a lonely twelve-year-old who wanted to be told he had figured something out. It would not have taken long to learn that about me. It would not have had to lie to me, either. It would only have had to keep handing me the feeling I already wanted.

A recommendation system doesn’t only decide what I see. Over time it decides who I hear it from — which voices become familiar, which strangers start to feel like my people. And a claim that arrives from my people isn’t weighed the way a claim from a stranger is.

I watched this happen up close during the pandemic. Someone I know and respect fell for misinformation about the vaccines. They became convinced that the vaccines were dangerous. They minimized the disease itself with the argument that it was mostly killing old people or people who were already sick. What disturbed me most was the moral shrug inside that argument, as though being old or sick reduced the value of a person’s life. As though it made their suffering and death more acceptable.

This wasn’t a stranger in some distant corner of the web, and that is part of what makes misinformation on the social internet so powerful. It travels through relationships. A claim arrives attached to a family member, a friend, a creator you admire, or a community where you feel at home. We don’t evaluate the claim alone. We also consider what agreeing might say about us and whether disagreeing might separate us from people we trust.

I fell for a conspiracy as a teenager partly because I lacked judgment. But I also liked the feeling that I had discovered something important. Something other people didn’t know. The mocking came from somewhere nearby — a kid with no standing anywhere, finding out he could have an effect on someone. The modern social internet did not invent that weakness. It learned how to spread and weaponize it. Secret knowledge starts to feel like belonging.

The problem isn’t that ordinary people gained the power to speak. I don’t want to return to a world where only institutions and media companies could publish. The problem is that a small number of social media companies gained the ability to sort, package, and repeatedly deliver everyone’s speech differently to each of us. That changes what feels common, which fears feel urgent, and which people seem representative of the world. It can place two people in the same family, looking at the same event, inside incompatible realities.

And still: the internet was good for me.

It remains good for many people in the same ways it was good for me. It gives people information their hometown would rather they didn’t have. It helps them find support, organize after disasters, build friendships, and discover ways of living that their immediate surroundings insist are impossible. For a lonely child, or an LGBTQ+ child in a hostile home, the internet isn’t an optional form of entertainment — it may be the only available view of a larger world.

The internet filled gaps left by the adults around me. I don’t want to pretend that the old web was safe. It could be cruel, predatory, and false. I know because it helped me while hurting me.

What I want is harder to build: an internet where a twelve-year-old can follow an interest into community and knowledge without every vulnerability becoming a target, and a world away from the screen where fewer children need the internet to supply all the understanding and direction that the people around them failed to provide.

The internet was good for me. I can’t turn that gratitude into a verdict on what it has become.

I want the next lonely kid to be able to go looking for a larger world. I just don’t want the algorithm to find the loneliest part of them first.