My Internet Journey

My first encounter with the Internet dates back to the early 1980s, during my time at university. It was perhaps not the Internet as we know it today — more accurately Arpanet, connecting universities and research institutions. Even so, the experience was extraordinary. The mere ability to send an email to another continent felt like a marvel. I was equally astonished by the community that had formed around USENET and tools like XRN — a place of genuine, substantive discussion, free of advertising and noise. You could catch up on everything that mattered in a single sitting each day. Everyone online was there for a purpose.

After completing my studies in the mid-1980s, I joined Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). At the time, DEC operated its own worldwide corporate network connecting over 100,000 employees — primarily for internal communication, but with gateways to the open Internet. I began in software support and progressed into Software Services, remaining with DEC for six years in total.

After leaving DEC, I moved into financial software development. From the very beginning the focus was on trading systems, and that is where I remained for the rest of my professional career — approximately 25 years in an industry that sits at the intersection of technology and financial markets.

The real revolution began in the mid-1990s. More and more people came online, the number of websites exploded, and yet it still felt relatively open and uncommercialised. I would describe that first decade as the golden era of the Internet — a period of genuine growth and discovery, before corporate interests had fully taken hold. The most recent decade, however, has seen an aggressive exploitation of the medium, with monetisation as the overriding priority. Today, virtually everyone is connected around the clock and conducts much of their life online. I cannot say I am surprised — it is, I suppose, the natural trajectory of any technology that reaches mass adoption.
Beyond the limited number of connected users in those early days, the quality of connectivity was also primitive. My first device for connecting remotely was a 1200/75 baud modem — and with only one telephone line available, being online for any length of time was an imposition on the household. Most people at the time had no more than a dumb terminal at home; to access a real computer, you had to dial in. The modems and lines improved rapidly, though: within a few years I had progressed through a 2,400 baud modem, then 9,600 bps, and eventually a 56 Kbps modem. Then ADSL arrived, and for the first time you could be connected around the clock — with speeds that ranged from 56 Kbps up to 250 Mbps, though I personally reached only 10 Mbps. Finally, fibre became available, and today almost everyone has a fibre connection; speeds of around 1 Gbps are not uncommon and remain surprisingly affordable.

All of the above, to varying degrees. Social media concerns me most, primarily because of the sheer amount of time it consumes. The algorithms are deliberately engineered to keep people engaged — trapped in an endless, mindless scroll. I consider this a genuine global health issue. Data harvesting troubles me less; it is an inevitable consequence of commercial interests, and one could argue it is the price of free services. What concerns me more is the systematic effort by large corporations to lock users into proprietary ecosystems, gradually making the open Internet less relevant and less accessible.

As I understand it, the Dead Internet Theory was originally presented and conceived as a conspiracy theory — and, as with all such theories, it is not necessarily true. Yet there is often a unce of truth to be found within them, and this one is no exception. Personally, I believe that AI is already, or will very shortly become, a powerful tool for generating content at scale. I would be astonished if it were not already being deployed to shape people's impressions and opinions in one direction or another. Different actors will have different agendas and goals, but the broad trajectory seems clear: the volume of content on the Internet will continue to grow, and an ever-increasing share of it will be AI-generated. I fully expect we will see the Internet flooded with material that is plentiful but largely not being substantial — and I beleive that this will have effect on people's views and opinions, to say nothing of the time they will spend consuming it. Should we be worried, possible in the short run. But the human kind is smart and will adapt.

Honestly, the primary motivation is a genuine interest in the technology itself rather than any ideological stance on Internet freedom. That said, I am not entirely comfortable with the opacity of modern platforms — not knowing precisely what data I hand over, to whom it is passed, or for what purpose. Running my own Git server, web server, and mail server gives me a level of control and transparency that I find both technically satisfying and personally reassuring.

Above all, I feel fortunate to have witnessed the transition from a world of paper and pen, fax machines and voice calls, to a fully digitalised society. Life has become easier in so many ways that it is easy to forget how much has changed. And now, just as the Internet revolution is maturing, artificial intelligence is taking off. The past year alone has felt like a revelation, and I believe what lies ahead will be truly transformative. I am not fearful — on balance, I trust it will be for the better for humanity. One life, two revolutions. Not a bad run.