The Internet You Miss Never Existed
On the political work of digital nostalgia, and the fantasy of the Lost Internet
I don’t have to work very hard to feel nostalgic about the early internet.
I was fourteen when Dad brought home our first computer. A beige box that whirred like it had a heavy centrifuge in it. The 56k modem screeched its metallic aria every time I logged on, and if someone rang the house to talk to Mum, the whole thing came tumbling down and I’d have a tantrum.
I lived inside mIRC channels and ICQ chats. I listened to WinAmp obsessively. I haunted Napster and Limewire, spending an entire weekend trying to downloaded a few songs, hoping that the typos on the filenames just meant a careless uploader and not the song being completely different to what was promised. I created little pixel art sprites for Palace Chat, and loved the catty viciousness of playing “Sissyfight 2000” online.
I built friendships that have outlasted school and geography. I found videogames, and the dense, argumentative communities around them, and eventually built a career in that world. Those years gave me language, collaborators, and a sense of a larger world beyond suburban Australia, where there were people who understood the things I loved. When I think about that period, a flush comes to my cheeks. Part warm memories, and part embarrassment for that poor young thing who didn’t know shit. Then a prickly, sharper memory of just how often I was explicitly reminded of that at the time.
“A/S/L?”
“Pics or stfu”
“shut up and make me a sandwich”1
The rhythm was constant. The first question established whether you were worth speaking to. The second tested how far you would go to prove it. The third reminded you of your place. Being a girl online meant performing the correct answers to these questions, and copping the disrespect and even sheer contempt as just being the price of entry. If you didn’t laugh off threats or disrespect you would look humourless, and there was no bigger crime on 1998’s internet than being a humourless bitch. I logged off some nights buzzing with connection and others carrying a low, steady shame I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
Every few months someone declares (with their whole chest) that the internet used to be better and that we need to go back. A comforting claim, I guess. But nostalgia is a compressing force. When commentators invoke a shared early internet, they conjure a universal user who wandered freely through a commons that never really operated as such.
This is temporal engineering doing its thing. The past gets flattened and cleaned up, then handed back as if everyone lived through it the same way. If we say the early internet was more playful and the vibes were pristine, people can then frame the subsequent decay as a corruption, either thrown at the feet of those meddlesome queers (via hetconning) or repositioned as an inevitable force of nature, like gravity. It shows up more explicitly (and indeed more menacingly) in right-wing nostalgia, where the past is cleaned of queer and feminist presence altogether.
Ben Tarnoff’s book “Internet for the People: the fight for our digital future” puts pressure on the idea of an early utopian internet, arguing the network that felt open and communal in its early years was already being shaped and influenced by emerging commercial interests: “The profit motive came to organize not only the low-level plumbing of the network but every aspect of online life.”2
Those forces would set the conditions under which connection happened, including who could enter and who could stay. What many people remember as unlimited freedom reflects their position within that arrangement, one where the constraints had not yet tightened around them.
Despite the frequent loud wailing from the contemporary online right about censorship and shadowbanning, early online spaces depended heavily on gatekeeping, too. Even figuring out what to download and how to make it run felt like you had to know someone who already knew, sometimes. Unmoderated Lord-of-the-Flies-esque forums rewarded endurance and aggression. In 1993, Susan Herring3 documented how adversarial communication styles in computer-mediated environments reduced women’s participation and reshaped discussions around combative norms. Participants who could match that dominant tone stayed. Others left. Years later, that attrition can end up looking like a warped sort of bond, where people are proud of their “thick skin.”
Play flourished for those insulated from that pressure. For others, participation required putting up with constant degradation and disrespect. Waxing nostalgic about “bringing back the forums” needs to be tempered with an understanding that the experience we have on the internet is dictated by the incentives we embed into its architecture.
Early internet providers built walled gardens structured around making advertisers comfortable. Naomi Klein traced similar logics in retail and media, showing how corporations pursue enclosure wherever infrastructure permits4. Commercial platforms like America Online enforced “family-friendly” standards that restricted sexual content and controversial discussion, often sweeping up queer communities in the process, a pattern reflected in CompuServe’s 1995 decision to block LGBTQ+ newsgroups under obscenity laws.
Those who navigated these early spaces without sustained harassment or censorship remember their experience positively. Those who faced doxxing campaigns, misogynistic pile-ons, racist trolling, or heavy-handed anti-queer moderation remember something else.
Nostalgia flattens those divergent histories into a single register focused on the least harmed. Even contemporary critiques can (unwittingly) reproduce this flattening, after taking on a life of their own. Cory Doctorow’s “Enshittification” names how platforms degrade once they secure users and suppliers, tying that process to monopoly power and regulatory failure5. In casual usage though, the term shrinks into aesthetic disgust, with the subsequent conversation drifting easily toward mood and vibes and the customer’s dissatisfaction with the product, while the big heavy-hitting topics of antitrust, labour conditions, and data governance consequently don’t get swung at.
That, to me, is the true danger of indulging in nostalgia for the early internet: it softens structural and architectural problems into some vague feeling of sentimental loss. If we’re too busy encouraging mourning then we’re sure as shit not organising to de-privatise the network or nationalise the pipes, and if we distract ourselves with wanting to restore the internet past, we have no room for thinking about how it could have (or should have) been engineered differently.
This fantasy operates differently from the others in this project, and this is less obviously partisan and less neatly captured by the right than the other fantasies I’m mapping here. People across the spectrum indulge in nostalgia, but the online right aren’t as afraid to use it to intentionally flatten difference. It’s useful to the right-wing project here to obscure who benefited and who absorbed the cost. That is the work of hetconning: a selective past is recirculated as a shared memory, and in the process it becomes harder to see what was built, who built it, and who it was built for.
When Elon Musk describes Twitter as a “digital town square” that has drifted from its original commitment to free speech, or when Marc Andreessen contrasts an earlier, more open internet with a neutered present, the past being invoked is selective, reflecting their position within the system, rather than the system as a whole. Curtis Yarvin (writing as Mencius Moldbug) extends it beyond the internet into a broader political argument, presenting democracy as a failed experiment and advocating it should be abolished and replaced with a CEO monarchy, where states are run more like companies, and their populace become its customers.
Nostalgia is doing more work here than I can fully unpack in this piece. It doesn’t sit neatly as a single fantasy so much as it runs through all of them, in a way. The bullshit soft-focus past shows up everywhere in these restoration narratives, from domestic nostalgia, all the way to nationalist mythmaking. I’ll come back to that in a broader piece on where nostalgia sits in the Hetconned framework, but for now it’s enough to say that it’s rarely just about a personal memory. It’s about carrying a version of the past forward where everything feels right again—at least for the people it was built for.
Every invocation of a supposed golden age does hetconning work, quietly advocating a return to a past that worked best for one particular kind of person. Figures like Curtis Yarvin—whose arguments are taken seriously by powerful tech actors—are already using that nostalgic fantasy to try and drastically change our future. This is not harmless remembering. It’s planning.
- Leena
There are far more egregious examples of the kinds of shit I had to put up with detailed in my first book, but I’ve chosen to not share them here as my children are old enough to come across this work.
Tarnoff, B. (2022). Internet for the people : the fight for our digital future. Verso.
Susan C. Herring, “Gender and Democracy in Computer-Mediated Communication,” Electronic Journal of Communication (1993).
Naomi Klein, No Logo (1999).
Cory Doctorow, essays on “enshittification,” 2022–2023.
Got engrossed by this antisentimental, evidence-marshalled, incisive, compelling, and wholly-persuasive analysis of the seductive surface-smoothing mechanics of neocon nostalgia online.