Your Internet Isn’t Mine

The Internet is something about 67% of the global population uses. In the UK, about 97% of the population do. Yet everyone does not use the ‘same’ Internet. 

In a better term, not everyone exists within the same “infosphere,” defined as the metaphysical realm of organised information. An example you may have experienced is almost everyone knows someone who has a far-flung opinion on something, as if they exist on a different planet. Usually the source of this is that they are knee-deep on some weird TikTok/Instagram/X/Reddit social bubble. They may have falling down a pipeline of algorithmic suggestions until they are sifted into an echo chamber which does not match with everyone else’s.

Another reason for this is also that the Internet is a big place. Not only does the main World Wide Web contain about 1.2 billion sites (only 17% / 200 million allegedly being active), but the major corporate social media platform networks have user bases in the hundreds of millions. This is pretty hard to picture. The top 10 largest stadiums are all about 100,000 in capacity, with the largest in India having only 132,000. Cities are probably a better comparison, but even then the largest city, the Greater Area of Tokyo, only has 37.1 million. I say only, because if each platform was to be likened to a city, it would need to be the equivalent of at least 13 Tokyos merely to be the user base of Pinterest. You’d need 82 Tokyos to reach Facebook’s 3.07 billion. The better metaphor would probably be nations, and even then the largest population is India’s at 1.46 billion; still less than TikTok’s user base, which is the 5th in size.

But ok, we get it. The Internet is massive. People can be radicalised. What’s the point here?

Each person, at least on the big corpo platforms, will be in a different “Internet” to one another. Your grandma’s Facebook reels of silly 2015 pranks and AI generated boomer slop is going to be completely different to my X timeline of people discussing digital feudalism, Palantir mysticism and techno-optimists that naively worship the inbound AI singularity and the people who critique the cyborg theocracy being constructed in the West.

Given the likelihood that you do not even understand that previous sentence, it only highlights my point. You probably exist somewhere else entirely. TikTok makeup land. Instagram Reels car crash land. r/AITA Reddit land. 4chan /pol/ land, even, God forbid. Each platform has many nested ecosystems of subgroups within subgroups, and their infoterrain dictates how each people speak, how they interact, what they do. It is in this that I say that your Internet is not mine. It has many faces. One man’s feed is not equal to another man’s feed. 

So when people still say “I found this on the Internet”, they could be talking about at least 10 different places, but in all likelihood, billions of different places. We haven’t even spoken about things like esoteric website forums, Discord servers, Telegram chats, WhatsApp groups, etc. All of these ‘places’ that aren’t publicly findable at all. Private or hidden residences and communes, you could say.

But what is the problem? People live in different places globally, they speak different languages and have different cultures. Indeed, correct. But similarly, you cannot deem a Somalian pirate’s culture and outlook with Belgian government official’s. You cannot deem a Mongolian village the same as Dubai. A desert is not a jungle. The arctic is not a woodland. These are all distinctly different places. 

Yet, these places are all separated by space. Cyberspace, meanwhile, exists everywhere all at once. In every computer you can reach almost any of the places we’ve mentioned, if you know where to search for them. If you can log in. The differentiator becomes the person and their knowledge, rather than the space. I can log in to my X account anywhere, even on your machine. You can log into your accounts anywhere, even on my machine. Therefore for every user and every ‘location’ in cyberspace, the Internet takes a different form in everyone’s minds. It’s a mirror based on personal usage.

However, in spite of this, one issue doesn’t hold up in line with what we are saying; the idea of a unified standard, of alleged ‘equality’ across all users. Especially in a geographic place. In one road, you may have as many outlooks as you have people, rather an a relatively corresponding community of people who all coexist in the same reality, as was more likely before the Internet. It’s this that has arguably ruined the sense of community people feel for their real locations, because their community of hyper-matched peers is not in the same location, but spread globally and in a shared hallucination of cyberspace.

So, just as you cannot deem all the birds in the worlds truly equal (yes, they’re birds, but a penguin is not a pigeon, which is not an eagle), you cannot deem all people truly equal. Uh oh, fascism alert? Maybe. But we all really aren’t. I am not you. You are not me. If we were truly equal, we’d be the same person, and there’d only be one of us. You’d need differentiation to be as close to 0 as possible.

Yet, the rise of the liberal idea that everyone is merely an interchangeable unit forgets fundamentally human nature and culture makes everyone different. Where you come from very much does determine key traits in how you as a person will become. Who your parents are also does, because not all parents are equal. Abusive parents are not equal to good loving ones. The only commonality is that both have kids. Likewise, the Somalian pirate and the university studied Belgian government official are not equal. The only commonality is that they are both human beings. Other than that, it’s a pretty big difference.

Now, before you get on a moral high horse regardless of your opinions thus far, no I’m not about to justify slavery or eugenics or something that radical. This is indeed where those concepts get their ideas, yes, and much can be said about them depending on where you and I rather unequally stand on the topics. But we’re talking about the Internet, so let us return to that. 

By extension, as we’ve said, the Internet is a mirror. And just as we all see ourselves in a mirror differently, we are unified in the act of looking at the mirror. What we do in the mirror is different. What we see in the mirror is different. And fundamentally, all that we obtain from the mirror is what we put in. We dress well, we see a good clothed individual. We dress ugly, we see an ugly individual. It’s all personal perspective, because again, one man’s style is not another man’s style. A woman may look at dresses whilst a man may look at suits, and each will think her or his own opinion on what she or he should wear or look like.

So where is it that I am going with this? The quality of the Internet we each individually see is also dyed with the quality of our selves, opinions and of our minds. It’s a place of self-expression, and not all expression is created equal. Opinions from the far-right are not equal to opinions from the far-left, at the greatest extremes. Opinions may have commonalities, but as we have discussed, the Internet is a massive place with many places within it. If we only take the 10 largest western websites, the top 5 (Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram and TikTok) having over a billion users, realistically there’s going to be so many different subcultures that you can’t even compare them. If each platform is a country, subcultures are probably cities. Therefore, to determine everyone in a city is the same, or believes the same things, or acts the same way, or can be treated as interchangeable economic units; this would be absurd. Hence, to think everyone on the Internet can also be equally replaceable or is unified… equally absurd.

But what about governance? Surely we don’t want the wild west? People say many things on the Internet. People act in many ways in person. And not all things spoken or done are equal, naturally. Murdering someone is not the same as going out with them for a coffee. Telling your wife you love them is not equal to hurling an insult at a protest. Likewise, someone on shitlib Reddit complaining about their polycule is not equal to a 4channer who trolls such people from personal hatred, and neither is also equal to someone who simply posts their artwork on Instagram to get commissions, and to someone who rambles their reactions to various things on X dot com like me. All completely different ‘netizens’. This is the ultimate question of law, of governance and authority.

When it comes to free speech, say, you can go either full America mode and 1st Amendment everything so that all things can be said no matter what. Or you can go China-mode and surveil as much as possible to ensure nothing said is contrary to The People’s Party’s Guidelines. The European mode of thought is probably somewhere in between; you can say mostly everything, except some things which are determined as ‘hate speech’. As to what is determined ‘hate speech’, well… EU Party Guidelines, I guess.

Increasingly in Europe, especially in countries like Germany or the UK, we have seen many cases of people getting arrested for simply saying things on various platforms. Infamous cases of this exist, like Lucy Connolly, under the guise of “what you said was offensive and therefore incited further violence”. The problem is often times this violence is not really evident outside of “this idea may in some circumstances cause harm if people think it and then go and do something bad”. Essentially, in my opinion, waffle that can justify anything that isn’t beneficial to the prosecutor, which then becomes the next question; who is doing the prosecuting?

In many cases, the government types who are in charge are, for better or worse, incompetent. They are often around 40-60 years of age. People who do not know how the Internet works, really. At most they probably use Facebook or WhatsApp. In some rare cases they’re like Rupert Lowe and know how to navigate moderate shitposting on X. But none of them are truly Internet-native. They haven’t grown up in the trenches of COD lobbies (back when they were free, now they have voice recognition to ban you if you say naughty words). They didn’t grow up on 4chan’s cesspit culture flowing down into mainstream YouTube discourse. They think these massive subcultures are still somewhat similar to their (increasingly rose-tinted) visions of ‘realspace’, so to speak.

Take your average Gen Z guy or gal, at least in the UK. Realistically speaking, any form of UK they have ever grown up in is the “Yookay”. The shitfest of melting-pot culture which has balkanised any prior sense of community in most places. They live under the corporations of Tesco and McDonalds and Greggs, and any independence is limited to shitty vape shops and Turkish barbers. Their town is pretty much dead except chavvies who will probably mug you or start a fight, or old people who are completely apathetic towards the world outside of “do I get my winter fuel allowance”. They can’t exactly own their own house in half of the country, so they can’t start a family. Nor can they exactly start a business to earn a lot outside of the ‘standard wage of £30-50k’ without getting taxed to oblivion, and that’s before they even fill out the humiliation ritual of countless bureaucratic forms. So where to they retreat to? The mirrors. They can use one anywhere. And they can go anywhere they desire.

They go off into these online cyberspaces where they can truly live. Not live in fear. Not live poorly. They can be anyone they want to be. They can live a life where they’re more than just a wageslave, if you can even call it a life being trapped online within algorithms and widespread open cognitive warfare. But they can see anything, learn about things, talk [somewhat] freely with people who will understand them better than their immediate family or friends.

(On that last part, though; that’s probably because their immediate family and friends are likely too busy within their own Internet mirrors, looking at their own reflections instead of reality, as well. Why? Because our devices are fundamentally designed to hijack our minds for profits. But again, that’s another conversation for another time.)

So then here come the government adults who don’t like that the youth are gaining notions of Arab-Springing against them. Take Germany. AfD was immensely popular but was almost banned from running. Why? Because people are sick of the liberal parties and fake-conservative parties who have ruined their real lives and forced them to live in the simulacrum of one online, owning nothing and being fake happy. Why has Reform gained traction in the Yookay? Because outside of cities, most people are sickened by what is happening to their country, and are pleaing the last remnants of democracy they have left to “vote for something other than what has fucked everything over”. 

The Internet remains a channel to circulate these ideas. As Joe Rogan said when talking with Elon Musk at some point around the 2024 US election; without him making Twitter into X, it’s highly unlikely that Trump would’ve won. Twitter was heavily censored by infiltrated agencies as shown in the Twitter Files, whilst X is now (relatively) open. But as we’ve said; netizens exist far and wide. TikTok is highly popular among the youth. Yet in places like Romania, it was allegedly used to “rig their election” after “Russian interference”, causing a revote that gave a “better outcome”. Hmm. Interesting. Then again, it could be like Albania, which banned its usage outright for a year because of a case of “youth violence” which conveniently happened just before their election season. Business and government tyranny, as usual.

The division of the Internet, whilst often harmful to cohesion, means people are now much more open to many forms of thought, rather than the mere two party system of reds vs blues. Yet it’s clear that people in power never wish to give it up once they have it. It makes sense. But the issue becomes you either can have democracy where people vote in masses, or you don’t.

The Internet is far from perfect, but it is democratic in the sense that everyone is entitled to their own take and view, largely. You don’t like TikTok? You can easily go to X. Don’t like X? Go to Instagram. Banned? Make another account. Code a competitor. The market will deliver a better location in cyberspace to network in, because anyone can inhabit its protocols. Such freedom does not exist in real life, and thus forms its incompatibility with society’s framework of ‘regional democracy’.

Now, what is my solution? There’s got to be one, right?

I’m not exactly the first and probably won’t be the last person to say such a thing. Greater minds than I have said things along what I am saying about democracy. Peter Thiel. Curtis Yarvin. Sam Altman. Probably many more that I am unaware of because those examples are the ones in my corner of the Internet who have said it and whom I’ve heard personally. They suggest a more authoritarian and elite driven role. The cyborg theocracy, so to speak.

What can be done instead? It’s hard to not get all preachy and idealistic with a naive sense of reality when thinking about how we should run things. You can’t exactly have your cake (freedom, democracy) and eat it (controlled order of all things).

Though this said, my takeaway would be: explore the Internet outside of platforms, and sympathise with the fact everyone has not got similar takes because of this kind of hijacked culture from a personal mirror hallucination in cyberspace. Try to build bridges. Understand the bigger and fuller picture to the best of your capacity. But given the breadth of what is discussed, I allow you to choose what you think is best.

Ultimately, whatever led you here today was because in yourself you have felt a notion of what I speak of, and freedom is in the hand of the beholder. Just don’t forget you have the freedom to see the whole Internet, and traverse it to learn about it all.