It might just be weapons-grade millennial nostalgia, but the internet really did seem better when all we needed was a profile song, an aggressively customised wallpaper, and a place to post cryptic song lyrics after a breakup. No matter how bad your day was, you still had a friend and that friend was Tom from Myspace. 

The youths will never know the thrill of illegally downloading Kiss from a Rose by Seal on Napster and accidentally giving the family computer seventeen new diseases. They’ll never know the sense of decadence of asking Jeeves a question, or the exhilaration of logging into chatRoulette to ask a Brazilian teenager what the weather is like there. 

Now the internet infested with link rot, digital decay and website obsolescence; enshitification driven by recursively nested AIs; swallowing and regurgitating their own content like a bloated Ouroborous, phishing scams, and AI videos you need a masters in digital forensics to distinguish from real content. It’s home to new and interesting ways for people to be awful, such as assassination markets, deep fakes and fibre-maxxers. Data centres are drinking rivers dry like some sort of cursed ancient demon awoken by some commerce graduate committing the sin of trying to jazz up a cover letter. The dark web is only getting darker, and everyone needs you to download an app. 

Is it too late to save the internet? Is there a way to regulate or amputate the good from the bad? Or should we take this as our cue to finally log off and, as the philosopher formerly known as Twitter likes to say, go touch grass?

Come get digital in a debate at Howler with some top ranked comedians and scientists fiddle while Chrome Burns.