The end of the internet

On the way home from work today, I had a moment of realization: it's been at least a decade since I can remember first complaining about how much of my time social media takes up. I tweeted about it, back then. Something along the lines of "Can't wait to go on the Explore page on Instagram and watch the next three hours of my life disappear!!!" They had recently introduced an "infinite scrolling" model. That tweet touts obvious sarcasm, but unfortunate truth, even in 2015. I remember that moment well, sitting in the living room of my college apartment with a book I was supposed to be reading for class in my lap, knowing full well I wouldn't be able to fight the urge. Knowing where that time was about to go, and only caring enough to rant on a separate platform about it.

This marks the time when Snapchat filters were used cross-platform, Instagram videos were gaining traction (and, therefore, users' time), and feeds were trading out their chronological order for what began the algorithmic era - much to users' fury, but of course that never stopped it from happening. In fact, that was one of the first legitimate social media outcries I can remember; the spaces at large were still fun and all-consuming in a genuinely social way. This time period that comes to mind was the tipping point from the "wild west" internet of the early 2000's into the black hole of ads and algorithms we constantly subject ourselves to today. But even before then, the internet was a maladaptive addiction for many, myself included - just read one of my first posts here, where I recounted telling internet strangers about my body dysmorphia through Yahoo! Answers at age nine.

It has always been this way: an open, unfamiliar landscape where anything was possible. Scary and exhilarating, like your first night sneaking out to drink as a teenager - and because so many beautiful things could be born here, it would outweigh the sketchy, broken, or illegal things. I think this is still largely the narrative, but I wonder where the new tipping point begins - the one that has us all dancing too close to the edge, losing our balance, seeing the flash of mortality that it really is to be in this artificial world more than the real one.

Because the internet of 2025 doesn't feel like the first night sneaking out anymore. It's more like the thousandth, where you and everyone around you knows you have a problem. You know you shouldn't. You know how it makes you feel when it's all over. You know what's on the line, what's at risk, all that you could lose at any moment. But you just can't stop yourself.

This blog post isn't one where I explain every single reason why we should all be less online - I think if you're here in the first place, you probably already know. And if you don't, there are frankly much more knowledgeable creators out there to learn from (I recommend Taylor Lorenz's Power User...or anything she puts out). Rather, I want to recreate the feeling of overwhelm that washes over every time we scroll, make sense of it together, and share a few ways I'm personally working to dismantle it. You probably also know I'm no stranger to discussing reciprocity and real-life connection, so I want to weave that into this conversation, too. Perhaps we can start there.

We know what's at stake out there in the real world because of the internet. In one way, that knowledge might be the greatest accomplishment humanity has ever granted itself. In another, it's the biggest threat to our very existence - and no, I don't believe that's an exaggeration. Because we have cultivated the gift of knowing nearly everything, we have opened doorways to worlds we would never otherwise conceptualize, much less experience. For some this breeds empathy and action, but for many it breeds cruelty and hatred. Political polarization is at an all-time high thanks to algorithms furthering whatever crumbs of bias we've fed it over the years, and at this point it's fair to say that the internet knows who we are.

What's more, and often scarier, is AI sneaking in and growing like an un-killable weed in just the past three years (can you believe ChatGPT only originated at the tail end of 2022? This was not a part of the conversation in my previous blog post linked above). In only the past few months have the CEOs of these enormous companies admitted they had a problem with AI sycophancy and so-called-sentience, leading thousands upon thousands of users to believe their chosen chat bot had chosen them. Although AI psychosis is real and alarming, it's only one small part of the larger conversation that concerns me. What happens when Sora 2 and similar platforms gain traction and cross platforms, like the Snapchat filters of 2015? What happens when, not only can we no longer separate truth from curation (we're already living in that world), but the majority of what we see is not real?

What happens when most, or all advertisements are made with AI, so we no longer know the legitimacy of the products we're promised to receive? What if it all just becomes a scam?

What happens when someone deepfakes the President declaring war?

What happens when we can no longer believe what we see?

Here's what I hope happens: Enough of us call it what it is. A scam, a ploy, a manipulation, a failed experiment. Enough of us aren't so horribly addicted to the machine that we can step away and survive. We can remember a world where none of this existed - because it was here, not long ago, and I was a part of it. I can remember dial-up taking too long to load and deciding it wasn't worth the time I could be spending playing with bugs in the yard. I can remember getting to the end of the Explore page for the day and turning it off when there was nothing new to look at.

Because I remember those days, I am hopeful. But I am not without reservation, because I know what addiction is and what it does to people. I know that many never recover. Whatever the addiction is eventually destroys their lives. I know that the internet can and probably will be that for many of us. I just really, really hope I'm not one of them.

I've been chronically online since 2006 - almost twenty years, almost two-thirds of my life. Whether it was watching music videos or reading the forums of Yahoo! Answers (a cesspool), I've found this alternate world as expansive and enchanting as anyone else in those early days. I often daydream about collecting stories from my friends about their wackiest, most TMI stories from the 2000's internet and turning them into a coffee table book to keep as a relic of simpler times. But, unfortunately, the fantasy was short-lived. Most of my cognizant internet experience has been one of shame, of knowing I should be somewhere else, but never being able to pull away. Even in that blog post from 2021, I lamented about this very problem.

I regret to inform those younger versions of me that the problem has only gotten worse. Now, along with the existential threats outlined above, I also face my own inner dissonance of wanting to be done with it forever, while also wanting to share this work with a wider audience. To rub salt in the wound, trying to regularly post to Lead to Gold worsened the amount of time I would spend distracted by the rest of the platform. But I've been sold the idea, as have millions of others, that social media is the only way to build a brand. Paying for ads and curating SEO is the only way to ensure new people find the content. And content, of course, is the only way to truly share my gifts. I know this isn't true, but I also find it so hard to believe it could be done organically, via word of mouth, via real-life community and networking.

And then I reached an impasse: In September of this year, Charlie Kirk was assassinated and became an immediate martyr. People had a lot to say and share about it online, and the majority of them were non-celebrities - normal people with small or even private platforms. I remember one of my colleagues messaged the group chat for my department of English teachers, warning us to be extremely cautious when sharing any political opinions online, because a colleague at a neighboring school had been blasted on a popular right-wing Facebook page for sharing less than empathetic views on the situation. Nothing she said was violent, or even derogatory toward Kirk - she merely pointed out the fact that no one seemed to be talking about the school shooting that had happened the very same day. With a post garnering thousands of comments, she was berated, bullied, doxed, and handed death threats. They posted photos of her children.

This changed everything. This shattered whatever may have been left of the rose-colored glasses I was wearing for the internet - for whatever "duty" I had to be unafraid of sharing my opinion, unafraid of posting Reels and "being cringe" and seeking to gain a following. Too much is at stake now, too much of my real life is being put on the line. I had to reorient and figure out what would actually work for me in order to continue any semblance of this passion for writing, for sharing, for building community online and off.

So here's what's going to happen:

• I'm taking all non-essential apps off my phone - that includes the obvious ones like Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest, but also things that don't count as social media, like Uber, Canva and Gmail. All that will be left is phone and messaging, my music platform, photos, and maps. My fiancé and I held onto our old phones, which we will turn back on but not connect to a network. Their batteries don't hold anymore, so they have to be plugged in pretty much the whole time they're being used. That's where my non-essential apps will go, and this will require me to go to a specific place in my home to use them.

• I'm committing to never using AI of any kind for Lead to Gold. There was a time where I would use it to write the descriptions for my podcast episodes, outline blog posts, and even write some of the trickier sections for me. I look back on those writings now and cringe, because it's so obvious what a machine wrote - so void of voice and character. All of this, from this day forward, comes from me.

• I'm going to work on bringing this work into the real world, with my real, local community. I don't really know what that's going to look like yet, but stay tuned.

• I'm going by a pen name on the internet. My last name will change once I get married, but I am not carrying that part of me into this work, mostly for a sense of anonymity. My real-life job is too fragile with the current state of surveillance and whistleblowing to risk anything I write or post about being used against me or my place of work.

In that blog post from 2021, I said: "Not to diminish the severity of addiction to substances, but Instagram is one hell of a drug." Today, I believe that the comparison is completely founded. I think it's likely that we will see more people beginning to speak up about their long-standing addictions with social media and call it what it is - no apologies, diminishments, or mincing words here. I believe that people who've experienced AI psychosis will continue sharing their stories and, hopefully, holding the CEOs of those billion-dollar companies accountable.

Again, I am hopeful. I hope that beyond this, regulations will actually become national law and be put in place to ensure surveillance capitalism doesn't destroy the fabric of our culture, namely by furthering political polarization. I hope that enough people demand this that it has to happen, rather than something catastrophic occurring first to make it so. I hope it becomes more mainstream to move back into the earlier eras of the internet - where we weren't expected to be on social media to keep up with friends and the larger world.

Above all, I hope that we all remember that while community can certainly be found in here, through the screen, the only way we will truly move forward together is out there. Whatever we can do on our own to get out there more often, and more authentically, the better.