Stranger Friends

The internet of 2025 bears little resemblance to the 1995 web. We take it for granted that we can wave our phone around like a titanium magic wand and conjure plane tickets, order nachos to our door, and mainline video clips of…well, I’m not exactly sure what that muppet is doing with that chicken, but I hope everyone is cool with it. We have access to an incomprehensible amount of information and are brought into contact with the best and worst human impulses every single day. The running joke is that our monkey brains were wired to eat fruit and sleep in a tree. We were not wired to endure the constant, random stimulus of learning about a nation’s debt crisis, tips for manifesting destiny, and weird tricks to clean ketchup out of car seats.

But here we are.

Bo Burnham captured this sense of overstimulation in “Welcome to the Internet.” The song is a third act banger in Burnham’s Inside, a project that stretches the concept of a comedy special into a whirling critique of modern online living. “Could I interest you in everything all of the time?” Burnham asks the audience while looking like Salad Fingers exhumed from an Adobe Flash grave. The song is addressed to someone who was handed an iPad when “[they] were barely two,” framing the lyrics as an introduction to the terrifying majesty of the internet. “Apathy’s a tragedy and boredom is a crime” he cackles while crunching out minor chords from a digital piano.

This internet blitzkrieg is delivered via social media, which means social media now signifies the modern internet for a vast swath of people. There was a time where that wasn’t the case. “Social media” in those quasi-prelapsarian days was blog rings, IRC, and MySpace profiles. There were no algorithmic feeds, influencers, or content generators. Hell, it was the time before we insisted on calling every scrap of human creative output “content.” People largely encountered the internet one website at a time.

That sense of scale is the bright line dividing the early internet and social media experience from the contemporary one. Up until the mid-aughts I had the definite sense that the internet had an edge, a terminus, an end. I had a selection of websites bookmarked in my browser that I would take a tour of each morning. Once I finished the lap, I turned off my computer. I might turn it on again in the evening to fire up MSN (then Windows Live) messenger for a bit while I was writing whatever university paper needed writing, but that was it. I wasn’t online to sip a content slurry for 16 hours a day. I was online for a purpose: I wanted to find something, post something, talk to someone.

The people I regularly interacted with online were also people, not just accounts. Online friendships were forged over hundreds, even thousands, of posts and messages in chat rooms or message boards. Were there assholes (or worse) online? Of course—there’s a reason the phrase “ban hammer” exists. It’s not that the early internet was innocent, but there was a better sense of scale and more consequences to shitty online behaviour. Moderators would ban chronic troublemakers from forums. Community Standards were more than an unenforceable footnote in a ToS agreement. The early internet was an extremely social place, but it was people interacting with other people with a mututal sense of humanity.

The intense commercialization of the internet has mangled the experience beyond recognition. The aggressive push to optimize everyone’s online persona into a profitable, marketable advertising profile has pushed everyone to consume performances and perform consumption. Boredom is a crime in the Attention Economy Era of the internet. You are rewarded for avoiding your feelings with yet another anodyne animal video or conspiracy theory hit from the glowing dopamine slot machine* in your hand. The more isolated, angry, and miserable you are, the longer you will desperately swim the ocean of content searching for something to rescue you from your anguish. The longer you watch, the more profitable you are to someone, somewhere. This version of the internet would be unrecognizeable to someone from, say, 1995. I suspect if this time traveller existed, they would stroke out from the shock of encountering “everything all of the time.”

I started working on this blog as an act of resistance against this garbage. For a long time I foolishly attempted to optimize my online writing for the ease of machines to categorize so advertisers could better exploit my (miniscule) audience and maybe offer me a sliver of attention in return. That’s a horrible deal, and it brought me no closer to my actual goal: writing stuff and putting it in a place where other people could read it. So I went back to the fundamental form of writing online: a blog. Text on a plain background. I didn’t even try to be clever about the site name because I realized trying to make a “brand” for this project was slipping right back into the commodification cycle I was trying to escape. I mashed some letters from my name together, bought a domain, and here we are.

Everything about the Elzyg experience is me channelling the spirit of Gozilla from this iconic comic from The Oatmeal. SEO optimization? Nope. Entries loaded with keywords? Nope nope. Drafts written by a talking calculator (i.e. generative AI)? Nope nope nope nope nope…and now I’m giving two middle fingers while walking into the sea. I’m not trying to write consummable content. I’m not writing targeted copy. I’m not writing for the pleasure of the algorithm. I’m writing because I want to, in the style that I want to. It means that I require more of your attention than a cat video. I know this will deter a large number of people and that’s quite alright by me. I’m requesting your focus, but you can decide where you spend your attention.

Each of us must choose where and how to focus our attention. Various tech companies have obscured this choice, but the internet is still yours and you can choose how and when to interact with it. It’s not an easy choice, but if ever there was a moment to be more conscious of the power of small actions, it’s now. Nothing about the current state of the internet or technology at large is irreversible, irresistable, or immutable. You can still write like it’s Livejournal in 2001.

*The phrase “dopamine slot machine” is borrowed from another poster. As is the case with so many things in the modern internet, the orignal source has been lost in the scroll.