The Last Good Day of the Bookish Internet
“It is worth remembering that the internet wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight. Instead, like most everything American enterprise has promised held some new dream, it has turned out to be the same old thing—a dream for a few, and something much more confining for everyone else.”
— “The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small” by Kelsey McKinney
Have you heard the rumor that the internet is dead? When I first heard this conspiracy theory, it sounded nonsensical. The internet is bigger than ever, and it’s incorporated into our lives in fundamental ways. How can it be dead, or dying? Aren’t we just heading into a more and more technologically dependent future, where we wear headsets with virtual reality capabilities every waking moment?
This is a complicated tangle of claims, like most conspiracy theories, but looking at some of the individual parts unsettled me. It claims that most of the internet is fake, automatically generated content — and if it’s not now, it soon will be. Content, especially viral content, repeats every year. Google searches have become clogged with sponsored results followed by nonsensical SEO sludge: articles that just repeat the right keywords without offering any real information.
ChatGPT and other large language models just make this concern feel more pressing. The internet is probably not mostly fake now, but is that only a matter of time?
This theory also suggests that the internet will soon go out of style. It will still exist, but it will be unheard of to spend all day scrolling. It will turn out, ultimately, to have been a fad.
The Day the Good Bookish Internet Died
While I think the dead internet theory is overblown, it does hit on something real. I’ve been internet obsessed since I was a kid sneaking onto the family computer in the kitchen to play Neopets. I’ve been on the bookish internet specifically for about 15 years. In the beginning, it was exciting: there was an explosion of book blogs, followed by the heyday of BookTube, and then Bookstagram took off. There was always something new to explore, and I wanted to try all of it.
While all of those still exist — plus the game-changing addition of BookTok — we also lost something along the way. Where in the 2010s, book blogs were a sprawling playground of ideas, each with their own style and focus, they’re now harder to find and less well-known. Those niche book blogs are hardly talked about anymore, even in bookish circles online.
I enjoy BookTok (and BookTube and Bookstagram), but it’s undeniable that book blogs offer something they can’t. I wrote a whole post about this: Why Book Blogs Still Matter In an Age of BookTok, but suffice to say that there are things blogs do for both creators and readers that visual mediums can’t. Sometimes, text is the best way to discuss a book!
Blogs in general are part of what John Scalzi calls the “artisan, hand-crafted web.” They allow for a multitude of viewpoints, unencumbered by an algorithm deciding who gains access to your content. They allow you to mix formats, so you can have videos, lists, and even podcasts all in the same place. They’re easy to search, unlike trying to find that one TikTok where they talked about that certain book. They’re sturdier: you can more easily back them up than most apps.
That’s why it’s unfortunate that they’ve largely fallen by the wayside.
It didn’t have to be like this. Before a handful of social media platforms became the behemoths they are today, we had a choice. We could have had a decentralized internet, a network of content creators who didn’t have to rely on a few corporations for their audience. You could have had control over exactly what content you wanted to see more of, instead of surrendering to the algorithm. We didn’t know how good we had it, on the last good day of the bookish internet.
If you’re an online nerd of roughly millennial age, you probably already know the event that locked the internet onto the path it’s on now. It was the death of something many of us mourn to this day: Google Reader.
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