Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

Why the Internet Keeps Getting Worse: A Flaw in the Structure of Freedom

There was a time when the internet seemed like a marvel—an open frontier, filled with curiosity, discovery, and public imagination. The earliest digital spaces were clunky but alive. Bulletin boards, mailing lists, early forums, and experimental websites often reflected the idiosyncrasies of the people who built them. One could wander and learn. The mood was exploratory. Today, that spirit feels dimmed. Something has shifted. Though we possess faster connections and more powerful tools, the internet now feels heavier, more manipulative, more tired.

Platforms that once promised community now resemble shopping malls. Search engines, once a guide to human knowledge, now return a mire of advertisements and artificially optimized results. Social media, once a way to stay connected, has been contorted into an endless scroll of suggestion and surveillance. These are not the failings of individual companies, nor are they simply the result of poor design. They are symptoms of a deeper pattern—one that emerges when public life is built atop the logic of private gain.

A Pattern Hidden in Plain Sight

The internet’s deterioration is not accidental. It follows a trope. In the beginning, platforms appear generous: they offer useful services, open access, and often no cost. These early offerings build trust, attract users, and create dependency. Once the audience is secured—and competitors are diminished—the platform begins to shift. Advertising becomes more aggressive. User data is harvested more thoroughly. Algorithms are introduced not to foster understanding, but to prolong engagement. What was once delightful becomes tedious. What once felt like freedom begins to resemble constraint.

This cycle has repeated across platform after platform. Consider the trajectory of Google, whose search once felt like a map to the world. Today, sponsored content takes precedence. Or Facebook, which began as a way to stay in touch with friends and slowly transformed into a vortex of monetized content and algorithmic curation. Or Reddit, where grassroots communities flourished for years before recent efforts to extract revenue by charging for third-party access. These transformations are rarely celebrated by users. But they are entirely consistent with the internal demands of a market system focused on profit maximization.

The Logic of Private Platforms

At the root of this cycle lies a simple but unyielding imperative: in a capitalist framework, the success of a platform is judged not by its contribution to public life, but by its ability to generate returns for its owners. Even when platforms speak in the language of community, openness, or innovation, they remain subject to the pressures of growth, scalability, and profitability. These are not moral failings. They are structural incentives.

Digital spaces, especially those built with venture capital, are under constant pressure to expand. Offering a beautiful, free, human-centered experience may be part of the early strategy, but it is never the end goal. That comes later—when monetization must begin. This often involves the subtle replacement of user value with extractive practices: attention-harvesting, data collection, the erosion of privacy, and the reshaping of interaction toward engagement metrics. The platform becomes less a place of community and more a factory for advertising impressions.

Crucially, the so-called “free market” does not reward quality or care. It rewards what can be measured and sold. When digital space is governed by these principles, it is inevitable that it will gradually lose its sense of human scale and intention.

Public Expectations, Private Realities

There is a quiet contradiction at the heart of how we experience the internet. Though the major platforms are private, users often treat them as if they were public utilities. We speak of YouTube as if it were a public archive, or Twitter as a civic forum. We imagine we are in a kind of digital agora. But these are not civic spaces. They are privately-owned infrastructures with private incentives. The rules are not made through democratic deliberation, but by terms of service. When changes occur—when a timeline shifts, when a feature disappears, when an account is suspended—users have no recourse beyond protest or departure.

This discrepancy is not merely theoretical. In public life, when the quality of services declines—when public transit becomes unreliable or healthcare inaccessible—we understand this as a civic issue. We expect the state to intervene, to improve, to be accountable. But in digital life, we have accepted a kind of market fatalism. The experience of decline is rationalized as a consequence of scale or cost. We forget that these platforms are not natural features of the digital landscape, but constructed systems, shaped by political and economic priorities.

The Politics of Dissatisfaction

The dissatisfaction many people feel with the internet is not shallow. It reflects a deeper discomfort: that something essential about our shared life is being distorted by forces we did not choose. This dissatisfaction is, in fact, political. It gestures toward the inadequacy of markets as the sole organizing principle for public experience.

Just as the industrial revolution reshaped not only economies but also conceptions of time, labor, and identity, so too the digital revolution has remade our relations to knowledge, community, and even the self. And just as earlier generations questioned the unregulated advance of industrial capitalism—leading to labor laws, public education, and social safety nets—so too we are called to question whether the infrastructure of our digital lives should remain in private hands.

A Return to the Idea of the Public Good

What would it mean to treat the internet—or at least certain parts of it—as a public good? A public good, classically understood, is one that is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Clean air, street lighting, and public parks are often cited as examples. But more than this, public goods are sites of shared investment and mutual benefit. They are not designed to extract, but to serve.

In the early days of the web, many protocols—such as email, HTML, and TCP/IP—were built on this public-good model. They were open, decentralized, and maintained by a mix of academic, governmental, and civic actors. In recent years, these foundations have been overlaid by privatized enclosures. Most of our interactions now pass through corporate platforms, and with that shift comes a change in the character of our digital lives.

To reclaim the internet as a space of public value would require more than technical fixes. It would require a change in ethic and imagination. It would mean funding open alternatives, supporting digital co-operatives, regulating monopolies, and developing infrastructures not beholden to shareholder returns.

There are existing signs of such a reimagining. Wikipedia, for instance, continues to resist advertising and operates through collective stewardship. The open-source movement remains a repository of collaborative spirit. Projects like Mastodon, though small, point toward federated, user-governed alternatives. These are fragile examples, but they suggest a way forward.

Toward a More Human Digital Future

What is needed now is not nostalgia for the early web, but a principled commitment to building something better. This will not come from markets alone. Nor will it come merely from new apps or tools. It must come from a renewed sense that the digital sphere, like the physical one, belongs to us all.

Such a shift will be slow. It may not always be sleek. But it is necessary. Because if we are to live meaningful lives in a digital world, we must insist that the infrastructures we depend on serve human flourishing, not only financial profit.

The deterioration of the internet is not just a technical matter. It is a cultural and political one. And like every such challenge, it invites us to ask: what kind of world do we wish to inhabit, and what are we willing to do to bring it about?