I would sneak out of my room and slip into the den after my parents went to bed. Blanket or pillow in hand, I was prepared to muffle the sound of the modem dialing up. I had customized my AOL profile to play pings when I logged on instead of “Welcome. You got mail!” To silence those, I simply had to turn the knob on the computer’s right speaker counter-clockwise.

The internet was firmly a place. I could not use it outside of our den, on the beige Gateway computer that my dad had purchased without asking my mom. (The ensuing fight was so bad that my mom stormed out of the house and wandered in the desert behind our lot for hours, fuming. My sister, dad, and I, meanwhile, curled together on the floor and watched the screensaver, which he had selected just to entertain us. It cycled between pictures of wild animals, and my sister and I gasped and cheered when it landed on a cheetah.)

Until my first smartphone, which I procured sometime around the release of Pokemon Black and White, the internet was a place. My family’s den, the library computer lab, the nook in the living room of my first apartment.

The first bit of psychic damage, post-smartphone, came quickly: I could now be on the internet, everywhere. This seemed wonderful at first. I could look up new Pokemon without leaving my couch! I could Google something to prove someone wrong! I could prove someone is wrong, about Pokemon, on Facebook, from my couch! It was odd, though, how doing that made me feel very concerned about what people I had met once and then friended thought of me.

The second bit of psychic damage came delivered via the ease of apps. Thank you, apps, for making it easier and faster to deliver content! So much more streamlined than using my clunky browser. And the notifications! So helpful. They number in the hundreds daily, for I am that important.

Last bit of psychic damage came, of course, quite American-ly in 2025. I would scroll for hours, then rant to my husband in the evenings about all the things I had viewed in my rage rectangle. On the worst day, in mid January 2025, I spent 14 hours on TikTok and Reddit. 14 hours. That is how long it used to take me and my mom to drive across five states to visit family in the summers, and I spent it simmering about the atrocities that were to come.

I deleted most remaining social media in the second half of the year, and delayed my news consumption by sending articles to my Kobo to read for 15 minutes in the morning.

I hadn’t realized how the internet had slouched out of its place and into every waking moment. That is until a few days ago, when the TikTok “for you page” broke. Instead of brand new, shiny content, every other video it displayed was one I had previously viewed. I was not the only one experiencing this, which I realized after several minutes of troubleshooting.

Algorithms like TikTok’s for you page work like a slot machine. Rather than selecting what one wants to consume, one swipes or presses next or what have you until the perfect piece of content appears. With each swipe, I’m seeking that dopamine hit—three red cherries in a row, or a video that makes me laugh or roll my eyes or feel righteous anger or say “haha exaccctlllyy.” And when that newness is no longer in play, it quickly becomes apparent it’s slop–slop I’ve wasted hours, days of my life on.

In 2000, when I sneaked out of my room and muffled the computer’s snitchy screeches, I would rotate between my favorite content, all of which I sought out on pre-Google search engines: Sailor Moon fansites, personal blogs by weirdos, fanfiction.net, tweeny dramatic webcomics. I continued rotations for years, switching out Sailor Moon for snark blogs, fanfiction for meme websites. I found new content via Lycos then Google then webforums I ventured into.

The internet will never be that small again. There is capital in our data, rent to be paid via ad-ridden news websites. Instead of a vaguely mindful rotation of content we seek out purposefully, our content lurches towards us at a constant pace, a looming amount that we can never fully consume.

The internet isn’t a place, but my life can be smaller, perhaps.