2) The Internet Is Broken, Not Me

This year, watching tech titans standing on the inauguration stage with Trump, something snapped.

Oligarchs in Plain Sight

There they all were—smiling, powerful, unembarrassed—no longer pretending to be neutral tools or awkward builders of connection. Facebook. Apple. Google. Amazon. AI. Just oligarchs in plain sight, aligned with power, soaking in proximity. The dorky geeks turned monsters—deconstructing “social,” co-opting “friends.”
The betrayal wasn’t hidden anymore.
It was on stage, with a nightmare corporate-sociopathy president bumbling and crowing at the front.
The emotional manipulation they had engineered—carefully, profitably—was no longer disguised as innovation. All the promises of democratization and community finally lost their grip. The veil dropped.
In that moment, all the minimizing collapsed. Years of hand-waving about “unintended consequences,” “value-neutral platforms,” and “just connecting people” slid clean off. Years of struggling to positively reframe online platforms, of scheming to remedy online sexual exploitation of children and youth, slipped off my shoulders—leaving a raw new truth underneath.
That day, I accepted that I wasn’t part of creating culture anew.
I wasn’t guiding others on how to integrate new technologies into their lives anymore.
I had drunk the Kool-Aid and stayed blind to the long, slow decline—from IRC to the attention economy to short-form video. I’d waited two minutes for each webpage to load in 1996, and now life—compressed into six-second sound bites—had me skipping like a stone across a surface of life hacks, horse videos, and dross.
The interwebs, designed with neuroscience to rewire brains toward ever-increasing hits of dopamine, were polluted. The oligarchs had won.
And suddenly, I could see the machine.

Seeing the Machine

Once I saw it, I couldn’t un-see it.
The commodification of reputation and “influence”.
The now-obvious mental-health and social-emotional injuries.
The universal posture of people in public, gazing only at their iPhones.
The pieces were all there.
The way emotional manipulation had been engineered, normalized, then minimized for years—more pieces clicking into place.
From the outside, the internet had once looked like opportunity. A cause I could take up. A gorgeous synergy focus for my social-justice heart and my geek brain. I dedicated over two decades to it.
When I finally got still—really still—I could see it clearly.
I’m not broken.
It is.

Sludge vs. Signal

For over two decades, I watched the indicators worsen. I devoured the research and projections. I experimented with every new platform, signing up early for all the legacy ones.
I was on Facebook in 2005, right after it launched publicly, after its first years corralled around Yale and Harvard.
I speculated endlessly about the internet’s effects on kids, children, and families. Directing SafeOnline Education—first as a non-profit, then as a consultant—I taught about privacy, about using “settings” to stay safer, and why not to send pictures of your junk to other people.
And all those years, the value of the technology and online spaces was steadily heading downhill.
The cracks had been showing for a long time. I was watching a slow-motion car crash—seeing it coming, warning people, bracing for impact. Everyone treated me like Chicken Little.

And then one day, there it was: the wreckage steaming, groaning, undeniable.
Many people tried to warn us—researchers, design ethicists, former social-media insiders. Even the tech titans themselves, knowing exactly what they were doing, quietly opted their own children out—choosing Montessori schools, screen limits, human-scale learning. Analogue over digital.
Now the education system is crashing. Generation Alpha is struggling to read. Teachers are overwhelmed and burned raw.
Young people lack historically imperative skills like eye contact and handshakes. Kids are saturated with anxiety while doom-scrolling TikTok, hoping to grow up to become influencers.
This wasn’t a side effect.
This was intended.
Our identities, our attention, our lifeblood were feeding an amoral machine with overt disregard for the consequences.
This wasn’t democratization.
This was the business model.

Stepping Sideways

I realized I’d been giving my energy to something I no longer believed in.
My attention.
My voice.
My nervous system.
The internet I thought I was building toward—open, connective, humane—isn’t what this became.
It’s worse.
Unimaginably worse.
And realizing all this, in the stillness of near-death, was a relief.
I don’t have to pretend anymore.
So I stepped sideways.
I stopped performing.
I stopped feeding the metrics.
Not in anger—
in clarity.

We’ve All Been Fooled

If any of this feels familiar, pause with it. Notice what your body already knows. Learn how these systems work. Talk about it with people you trust. And choose—deliberately—where your energy goes next.
That choice still belongs to you.