Being online has never been a more indispensable part of daily life, and as a result, it has never been as miserable.
For every few people who treat ChatGPT as their best friend or whose main hobby is spending hours a day watching whatever their TikTok «For You» Page serves up, there is somebody complaining about our dependency on the myriad of technologies we can access on our phones and how they are operated by the companies that own them. There is a legitimate criticism to be made, but it can bring about some unhelpful points of view. One of which is the mourning of the early internet.
Early internet nostalgia has been around for long enough that even the notion is vintage. People have spent years reminiscing about old memes or defunct websites. Estimates pin the start of its popularity to somewhere in the late 2010s and continuing up until the present day. The Webcore aesthetic glamorized older operating systems, glitchy graphics, and obsolete computing technologies as inspiration for web series, games, and even music. Recently, there has started to be an uptick in memes reminiscing about these more hopeful, innocent times when exploring the internet actually felt like an adventure. Some Gen Z and Alpha are even beginning to favor flip phones and digital cameras over the convenient all-in-one modern smartphone.
