Learning to navigate consciously: what the geeks of the first internet teach us

At first, extremely online It was a way of life, then it became a concept and later a trend about which several books have been written, the last one, Extremely online (Intensely digital, without Spanish edition), by journalist Taylor Lorenz, Technology columnist Washington Post.

The term began to be used in 2014 to describe those who intensely lived internet culture. Not only did they spend most of their waking hours (and some sleeping) there, but they only talked about what was happening there. Another life seemed irrelevant and boring to them. They are credited with the creation of the acronym IRL (In Real Life; in Spanish: in real life) to point out the things – almost always boring logistics – that took place in analog life.

Ainhoa ​​Marzol, author of the newsletter Digital Gargoyleconsiders herself extremely online. She was for several years. She had just turned 16 and spent at least 10 hours on the Internet (she barely spends one today), obsessed with issues that were only discussed in forums and interacting almost exclusively with people she had met online. “We only knew about the internet. We went from one strange forum to another even stranger one. My behavior seemed dark to my friends who still had a life outside, but we were self-referential, and we only represented a select group of those who were connected at the time, we were the geeks who needed the Internet as a refuge. After the pandemic, be extremely online became [una experiencia] mainstream“, he says in a telephone conversation with EL PAÍS.

A decade later, having grown up continually fleeing from mainstream has made many of those intensely digital experts in dealing with the aggressive internet of platforms and algorithms. In the words of Marzol: “Today we are the ones who know how to escape the capitalization of online spaces.” For her, the worst thing about the internet is that it is dominated by platforms whose mission is to extract economic returns from their users. “They always fought for our attention, but now it's more obvious and blatant.” It is estimated that the 5,000 million Internet users produce quintillion bytes daily, which, with the invaluable help of voracious algorithms, have turned the web into a “non-place” where we navigate adrift while time dissolves like a sugar.

The headline of a magazine article Atlantic reflected the feelings of many users: Nobody Knows What's Happening Online Anymore (No one knows what is happening online). Its author, Charlie Warzel, suggests two theories for such unrest. One is that the era of social media is ending and has no clear replacement; the other, that artificial intelligence has flooded the Internet with synthetic content and is killing the old web.

Statistics show that we interact and post less than ever. We don't want viewers and prefer private messages. Adam Mosseri, president of Instagram, acknowledged that users were spending more time in DMs (Instagram direct messages). “Everything that is shared with friends is moving in that direction, there are more videos and photos shared in DM than in the stories and in the feeds“he said in a podcast the last summer. This means that much of the visible content is monetized. It's not just that he is not spontaneous, fresh and fun, but that he hides spurious interests. The mistrust is such that the forecasts of the consulting firm Gartner predict that half of the audience will be scared away by 2025, and those who remain will reduce their interactions by 50%.

Today, those intensely digital seem true visionaries. Marzol, for example, does not use Google as a search engine: “Very obvious things come up,” it only interests him as a geolocator. He only enters Twitter to confirm if there is already talk of an event or news, and TikTok, to look for information about trends. Consider that letting yourself be carried away by the algorithm only serves to access the “most basic” of the web, and that the best remains in unexplored territory.

To escape the algorithm, Marzol has a method: “Jump from account to account, from link to link, do not scroll On autopilot, use bookmarks to systematically return to sites you've liked, write down the names of authors you've been interested in, and search for everything they've done, from articles to tweets. In short, instead of drifting, passively surfing the Internet, take control and regain control. “Now I have everything very optimized, I know where to look,” says Marzol, who is responsible for Communication at the publishing houses Minotauro and Planeta Cómic, and estimates that the most he can now spend on the Internet is one hour a day.

One of the strategies to escape the algorithm is to subscribe to newsletters: they arrive directly to the email and recommend sites without monetizing or optimizing, far from the voracity of the algorithms.

In the much cited article Browse betterpublished in The vanguard, journalist Delia Rodríguez called for conscious and deliberate navigation. “You have to make the decision to be informed and go out every day to achieve it. This, despite a technology industry that adopted dark patterns to hook us into unconscious, addictive and unsatisfying browsing, and that boycotted good ideas to maintain control of our information diet.” Among them, she mentions the RSS reader that Google closed, or the Nuzzel tool that ended the then Twitter (now X).

Make Internet Great Again It is, more than a slogan on a t-shirt, a movement that has been gathering for several years the opinions of experts interested in keeping the web useful. Sander van der Linden, professor of Social Psychology at the University of Cambridge, is one of them. In his opinion, we should start by building tools that break the echo chambers of social networks, that monstrosity that only exposes us to those who think like us. “Social media makes money off of anger and polarization and we need to use behavioral science to create a platform that doesn't separate people,” he explains via email. Replacing advertising with subscriptions is the recommendation of Tim Hwang, author of Subprime Attention Crisisa book that describes the digital advertising bubble and explains why advertising has taken over the internet despite little evidence of its effectiveness.

To regain faith in the Internet, many recommend returning to the closed communities that arise around a person and their universe, and recovering the method: entering with an objective and a time to investigate a specific topic. In short, give up drifting, and, in any case, let ourselves be dragged by people and not by algorithms.

Nobody said it was easy to escape the algorithm, but having lived intensely online is a useful experience to smell danger from miles away and run in the opposite directi
on. The challenge is to navigate the internet like someone entering a supermarket: never hungry and always with a shopping list.

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