“I am 30 years old and I miss the old Internet. send beautiful people like everywhere”

Journalist Marie Le Conte publishes a book in which she nostalgically describes how the Internet was better at the turn of the century: no cell phones, no networks, no influence.

The Internet is changing so fast that there are already people in their 30s who fondly remember another era. Franco-Moroccan journalist Marie Leconte Wrote a 300-page book on the brutality of these changes. His name is exhaust. How one generation shaped, destroyed, and survived the Internet (currently only in English). Le Conte analyzed The Internet is changing between the first two decades of the 21st century.

The result is a useful cultural history of the Web: “The Internet is like a big old bar. You find it by accident, you see it’s great, you tell your friends, they tell theirs, the drinks get expensive, it fills up every night and you feel like it was great because hardly anyone knew,” he wrote. Now he’s back in that bar, entertaining, but sitting in the corner, more alone.

EL PAÍS spoke via video conference with Le Conte, who has been living in London since 2009, where he works in political journalism. His life on the Internet began with blogs about music indie. The web has become an anonymous place to find friends, popularity and even sex. today, That clutter has disappeared in favor of algorithms, influencers and more passive consumption. All this does not mean that the journalist has escaped. The Internet is still “my home,” he says, but it’s no longer an intimate and cozy space, but “flat, boring, and lifeless.” The internet wasn’t real life and it is now. In a conversation with this newspaper, Le Conte explained some of the most important points of his book.

1. Freak place nostalgia

“I’ve identified two periods of the Internet,” Le Conte explains, “in my formative years it was basically A place for people who weren’t very smart in real life: They were very strange, they didn’t have many friends and their hobbies were strange.” The author includes himself in this list: “So we all ended up in that different space because in real life we ​​didn’t do well,” he adds.

These years were roughly between 1985 and 1995 for the micro-generation. were who shared adolescence Web, created in 1989. It was already a popular place, Amazon, Google and even Facebook were born, but life was in forums and blogs, which were also only read on a home computer.

In the second decade, everything changed: “The The second phase is expected to start in early 2010. That’s when literally everyone joined us. “Suddenly, it became completely normal to spend all your time on the Internet,” he recalls.

That’s when they “broke” into the bar. Being online was no longer special. This distinction between the digital and the real has shrunk to zero: “Real life and the Internet have finally completely merged into one world in the early 2020s,” he says. Everything that happens or is said online is already real, has consequences in your work or personal life, and is forever linked to who you are.

2. Lucky micro-generation

One afternoon in 2007, at the age of 15, Le Conte had the most “boring” experience of the 20th century. He organized a concert with small bands in his hometown: “What we did was basically piss my dad off by printing a lot of brochures on his printer. Then we went to distribute them in the beautiful parts of the city. Back then it was still the only way to get the word out,” he recalls.

The A lucky micro-generation The journalist saw the last breath of the previous era. Furthermore, they were young enough to use the Internet as a controlled laboratory for adolescence. Პirveli, They were anonymous: “We had this limitless opportunity to reinvent ourselves. Because of the culture of the time, you didn’t use your real name online, but you might as well Different pseudonyms on MySpace and Messenger on the forum“.

And second, that anonymity meant that the distance between digital and real life was enormous. There was nothing on the other side: “I did a lot of stupid things online When I was young and got into many stupid fights. None of that ever made it to the real world.”

these two properties online Another physicist chimed in: The iPhone didn’t exist yet or was barely developed. The Internet was something that happened at home: “I already had a cell phone and could send text messages. But I didn’t have internet. This, in retrospect, strikes me as the perfect balance. so The world I miss so much: having almost everything from the Internet, but also abandoning it when I leave home“, He says.

3. Porn was frozen trout

The chapter on discovering sex and porn perhaps best illustrates this leap between this Internet and the present. At the age of 12, in 2003, Le Conte and a group of friends played a contest to “find the weirdest porn on the Internet.” It will be impossible to describe today’s results in the newspaper. But at the time, they found videos involving frozen trout, men dressed as pterodactyls (from the waist up), and a rotting sheep’s head (the journalist won this one).

The journalist remembers these discoveries as something positive for his training. She helped him discover this world, with the cooperation of his mother, who answered any questions he had. He did not seem terribly affected.

But while writing, he changed his mind. Once he was strangled for a sexual game without his explicit consent. “There was a positive conclusion in the chapter, but I looked at the data and saw that I couldn’t pretend it was good. I’m sure it’s not just drownings, these are very extreme events that have become commonplace,” he says.

Le Conte also sees A generation gap: “When I was a kid, porn was everywhere, but it was in pop-ups or pictures or videos that took a million years to download. Whereas if I was five years younger, suddenly all the porn sites were there. is The streaming era was a bigger change for porn than the internet in general, because throughout history, sex has always been on the Internet. But now it’s a question of volume,” he explains.

4. The arrival of handsome and when everything changed

The porn expansion was just a symptom. But the author sees several progressive moments that are difficult to define: When we all moved on to Facebook when Tumblr stopped being a niche network. But it was more key When bloggers gave way to influencers. Le Conte has a subtle theory about this move: “If you were a blogger, you did it because you loved sharing your life and making friends online. While influencers want money, they want success and fame in real life. It shows a change in internet culture: from wanting to write my thoughts and hopefully gain a following, to basically failing unless big fashion brands send you thousands of euros worth of clothes.”

But his most sophisticated hypothesis for when the Internet became the real world is “when the handsome boys arrived.” “There are studies that show how attractive people have more enjoyable lives. It’s in the data, I’m not making anything up,” he assures us. Initially, in the previous network of Instagram, this distribution did not exist. “The rise of Instagram marked this shift: ‘Oh my god, we’re doing it again. We re-invented that beautiful people are popular‘. They’re men and women, they’re really pretty and boring, and it’s like the Internet has become a typical American high school movie.

5. The algorithm is like my cat

“People 10 years younger have grown up on an Internet I don’t know,” writes Le Conte.

he Uses Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and other popular apps, but marks TikTok as its frontier: “I don’t like it. I’m never going to have TikTok on my phone because I’ve tried it and I hate that it doesn’t let you search or watch what you want. It’s completely algorithm driven. It’s incredibly frustrating. I’m human. You can suggest things to me, but You can’t dictate what I see,” he says. The most common uses of TikTok aren’t about who you follow or specific topics you’re interested in, but about what the algorithm decides.

Le Conte doesn’t want the TikTok algorithm to decide for him. Instead, in the book, he explains how algorithms that recommend ads or other content came into his life. As the original reader of blogs, which depended mainly on the will of the user, Sees algorithm-driven recommendation engines as an unnecessary but welcome addition. For a journalist, his algorithm is “like an animal”.

“I know there are people in Silicon Valley who want to control my movements to sell me stuff, but they are far away and irrelevant,” he wrote. “My algorithm, on the other hand, is small and it’s here with me; I preferred the online life when I was alone and could decide everything, but I was not given a choice. Now I have a partner in my journey and I take it personally when he doesn’t pay attention to me, which is often. It’s like her cat, she adds.

6. But the Internet is still my only home

Le Conte did not take advantage of this speech to abandon the Internet and focus on the real world. He can not. It is still his home, less pleasant, but unique. “I still really enjoy spending mostly all my time online, even though it’s also enhanced my life in the real world. The tension for me is between that fact The internet is no longer the home I used to feel, but at the same time it is still my home. And there’s nowhere I’d rather be, I think.”

“As a space, it’s not as fun and liberating as it used to be, it’s more reduced now, it’s flatter. But still, I would say, at least for me, it’s something that has a positive impact on my life,” he adds.

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