Forty Years of Losing the Human Internet

It’s 1986. I am in the military overseas and work the swing shift. It’s quiet at 2 a.m. A handful of staff and enlisted personnel are keeping the mission on track. On a table is an IBM XT computer. Amber monitor, two 5.25" floppy drives, no hard drive. 64K of RAM. This is where my life in technology was born.

It’s 2026. I am sitting at work looking at two laptops, both connected to a 32" widescreen, curved HD monitor via a KVM (keyboard, video, mouse). One laptop is connected to the work internet, and my personal laptop is tethered to my iPhone, using it as a data source. Thirty years in the IT field. The amount of technological change in those 30 years is hard to fathom, especially if you’ve only lived in a world that has ever known the internet.

Someone born in 1800 might have seen their world transformed by steam power, railroads, and factories within a single lifetime. Still, most people experienced maybe one or two truly disruptive technologies per generation. Where earlier eras measured transformative change in centuries or generations, we now measure it in years, sometimes months.

And here I am thinking about that kid, totally mesmerized by a computer system that would now be nothing more than a doorstop.

But the funny thing is, that doorstop is where the internet started for me, and from those “times before” came the foundation of the internet, but more importantly, the true nature of the internet.

What was the early internet like?

It is now 1991. I’ve transitioned out of the military and am temporarily staying with my dad until I get my own place. He had a computer similar to the one I had in the military, but this one had a CGA monitor. Color (albeit, not a lot of color), and I mostly played games on it and printed things on the dot matrix printer. I knew nothing of being online until reading an article about BBSes (bulletin board systems) that allowed you to talk to other people through the computer.

I was fascinated. I ended up moving, bought my own computer (a Packard Bell 486DX2/66), and a 2400-baud phone modem. This was 1992. By 1994, the heyday of the BBS, I was not only building computers, I was running my own BBS with multiple 56K modems, as well as connecting to other BBSes in the area and some outside of it. You have to understand that, unlike being able to pretty much call anywhere in the world now, back then calling anyone outside your immediate area incurred long-distance charges, so those calls were kept to a minimum.

In my opinion, THAT was the internet. Sure, AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy had been released, and you now had a way to use Windows 95 (I fought it, as I was knee-deep in everything MS-DOS with BBSes) to connect to graphical things called websites and send messages over email. BBSes had this already, more or less, with things like networked message boards, netmail, FTN networks like FidoNet, etc., along with text systems like Finger, Gopher, IRC, and others.

It was decentralized, owned and managed by people, based around community, with no algorithms, no global infrastructure, and (this is probably a big one) no bots or AI.

Unfortunately, the BBS world was overcome by centralized corporations monetizing everything, even usage. Then, in my opinion, came the one thing that killed the BBS era: chat rooms.

Chat rooms, instant messaging, and the birth of social media

AOL was famous for this. So was a service called ICQ. MSN Messenger came onto the scene. No longer did you have to wait to connect to a BBS. The internet was always on. No longer did you type a message on a BBS message board and wait for a reply. Now you could connect to people in real time, with no waiting. More importantly, even while still using a modem (well before high-speed internet was a thing) you had a local number to connect to, so you could talk not only to people in another state, but to people across the country, coast to coast.

BBS usage dropped. 1993–1994 was the peak BBS era in the United States, with an estimated 60,000 BBSes serving 17 million users in the U.S. alone.¹ Then, with the rise of the internet, by 1997 there were an estimated 10,000 BBSes active in the U.S., down from an estimated 45,000 in 1995.² Within a few years, BBSes had virtually disappeared, and what had been a substantial online culture had become a niche… essentially erasing the entire 1985–1995 growth wave in about five years.

The nail in the coffin came in 2003, when MySpace launched.

By 2005, it was signing up 200,000 new users a day, and it became about the profile as the product… your page, your friends list, your Top 8, all publicly ranked and displayed. Then News Corp bought the parent company for $580 million. A media conglomerate now owned the social graph of millions of teenagers, and what followed is something we are now all too aware of. Incentives shifted from building a good product toward monetizing it, and everything that made the platform work got buried under ad integrations.

That defined everything that came after. A clean, real-identity, centralized product. And it won because it modeled what the next era of the internet would be optimized for… legible user data, advertiser-friendly uniformity, and a feed the platform controls rather than a page the user controls.

Ownership by a media company normalized the idea that a social platform’s real customer is the advertiser, not the user, and every major platform since has been built on that premise.

Welcome to the modern internet that is most likely here to stay

Somewhere in the last two years, the internet quietly crossed a line. Estimates say more than half of all web traffic now comes from bots. Thales’s 2026 Bad Bot Report puts it at 53% for 2025, up from 51% the year before.³ For two years running, machines have outnumbered people online.

Of all web traffic, bad bots alone, the ones scraping sites, committing fraud, and trying stolen passwords, account for about 40%. The rest comes from search engines, monitoring tools, and a growing number of AI agents doing things people used to do themselves.

People have noticed, and they don’t like it. I can’t count how many posts I’ve seen on Reddit, Mastodon, and Lemmy where people say that companies collecting their data does more harm than good. I see the same thing on Facebook, where I promote my music: people saying they feel like they have little control over what gets shown in their feeds. I see it daily. The algorithms are in control.

AI hasn’t helped. Look anywhere online where people are talking about it, and you find that those who know about it don’t trust companies to use it responsibly. Most also expect their information to be used in ways they never agreed to. This isn’t a fringe opinion anymore. Most people feel this way.

So now what?

I miss the old days when BBSes ruled the world. But I would also be lying if I didn’t say that a lot of the technical advancements have been beneficial. I am not anti-AI. I think AI as a tool is incredibly useful… but the people whose hands it lies in are many of the same people who took the internet in a direction it was really never meant to go.

The small web is an option, and some are taking it. So are federated places like Mastodon, Lemmy, etc. Personal blogs touting that they are “human-made” are popping up all over the place. Even BBSes are starting to see a slight rise. I believe that is because those of us who remember the world before AI and the modern internet think there is a place again for something slower, something familiar.

The thing is, these people are not trying to replace the internet. They just want to find a more palatable alternative.

Part of me thinks the current internet is no longer salvageable. I feel like the status quo cannot be changed and that it is beyond the point of “fixing.”

Yes, there are still many valid uses for the modern web. But I think it’s time to remind those of us who were around before the internet, as well as teach those who have never known a world without it, that the early 1990s, in their immaturity, had the right ideas. They had the right pace. It was a place where you were in charge of your content consumption. You were not a statistic… an analytic to some faceless corporation making you believe that likes, social status, identity profiling, instantaneous gratification, and that dopamine rush are what you should be putting your time into.

Slow down. Wean yourself from social media. Find hidden gems in places beyond the mainstream internet. Discover that there are people and places online that are personal, intentional, informational, and maybe even sometimes silly. But they are real places, picked by you to visit, not by a faceless corporation.