The internet was supposed to be our greatest collective win. We had an incredible tool in our hands that gave us total freedom to make the world better. And what did we do with that one shot at positive change? Most of us helped turn the dream into a nightmare, and yeah, that’s something to be afraid of.

Today’s web is nothing more than a mirror of our hollow democracies. And there’s no doubt left that we’ve stepped straight into the dystopia Aldous Huxley sketched in Brave New World: a perfect dictatorship that looks like a democracy, a prison without walls where no one even thinks of escaping. A system of bondage where, thanks to consumerism and entertainment, the prisoners love their servitude.

Hard to swallow? Sorry, the blue pills are out of stock. So don’t reach for the easy excuse. At the root, this mess isn’t the fault of Big Tech, or politicians of every stripe, or Silicon Valley libertarians. The main culprits are you and me, because we caved to the siren song of fake “free” services offered by the worst enemies of freedom.

And in doing so, without really noticing, we abandoned topic forums, blogs, and small independent sites. Instead, we went and flopped into the arms of so-called social networks that hooked us on likes and wasted our time on harmless microblogging with zero social or intellectual value.

On that note, do you remember when you created your first Facebook or Twitter account? Did you think for even a second that you were handing over all your data, your relationships, and your ideas on a silver platter to a state within the state?

And while you’re running that flashback, for every open site that shuts down, for every forum that goes dark, we take one more step toward a society where billionaires have a clear path to cement their ideological rule. The grim result is that new generations are growing up on a web largely controlled by malicious forces. Lacking any real perspective, they get their brains scrubbed from a young age by algorithms designed to manipulate them.

You think I’m exaggerating? Look around you. Look at your feed. Look at what you don’t see anymore. And especially look at what you can’t find anymore. If we’re seeing the same thing, that makes two of us who think the situation is dead serious.

But the game isn’t over. As long as a few open sites remain, as long as there are still people willing to step into the ring and fight through the discouragement, it’s still possible to turn things around. Let’s be clear though: it won’t be easy or fast. What we’ve got left is a tiny chance to reverse course, and only if we get serious right now.

So first, let’s glance in the rearview mirror. You have to go back to the origins if you want to understand why the internet today looks like a stealth dictatorship.

1960s to 1970s: The internet wasn’t created to be free, open, or democratic. It was designed as a weapon. That changes everything.

From the start, the internet was no anarchist utopia. It was born in the 1960s and 1970s, in the heart of the Cold War. The Pentagon’s obsession back then was keeping communications intact after a nuclear strike. No way a bomb was going to wipe out the entire chain of command in a single second.

In that context, ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency, later DARPA) launched ARPANET. The idea was to build a network that could withstand massive attacks. The key was packet switching, theorized by Paul Baran in the United States and Donald Davies in the United Kingdom.

The principle was simple: instead of sending data in one block that could be cut, you chop it into small packets that travel along different routes and reassemble at the destination. The intended result was that if part of the network got knocked out, messages would still find another way through.

Bottom line, the internet wasn’t born to share cat photos. It was a military technology designed to make sure the enemy could never silence the U.S. Army.

1970s to 1990s: the underground anarchist internet

By the late 1970s, ARPANET was no longer just a military project. U.S. universities had access for research, under Pentagon oversight. The real turning point came in 1983, when the network was officially split in two: MILNET for the military, and ARPANET for researchers and civilians. In that setup, the federal government kept its secure network and figured the rest wasn’t a threat.

Ironically, that’s when the weapon started slipping from its makers’ hands. On campuses and in research centers, the network became a giant playground for experimentation. Engineers, students, and hackers grabbed hold of it with a radically different mindset. Their obsession wasn’t war at all. On the contrary, ARPANET was put to work for knowledge-sharing and cooperation.

Throughout the 1980s, that anarchist-minded culture grew in the shadows. Communities tinkered, invented, and shared. And during that period the first tools appeared that would turn this niche network into a planetary matrix.

Take Ray Tomlinson, who invented email in 1971. Without realizing it, he created the mass-communication tool that would send internet use through the roof. Then in 1979, two students built Usenet, a giant, planet-wide forum before its time. People discussed science, politics, code… and yes, there was already plenty of trolling.

In the same decade, another revolution was brewing: free software. In 1983, Richard Stallman launched GNU, soon followed by the Free Software Foundation. The concept was simple and radical: software belongs to everyone, not a handful of companies. To crown it, in 1991 Linus Torvalds added the missing piece with the Linux kernel, which quickly became the backbone of most internet servers.

By the late 1980s, ARPANET was aging. So in 1990 it was officially shut down and replaced by NSFNET, run by the National Science Foundation to interconnect U.S. universities. That made it, de facto, the core of the civilian internet, which between 1990 and 1993 handled the network’s infrastructure and prepped it for opening to the general public.

All through this era, the ancestor of the internet was still unknown to the public. To the federal government, it was just geeks and researchers playing in labs with their internal network. In reality, the anarchist internet was laying the building blocks of the future that would democratize the web, letting a military creation slip out of research labs and campuses.

1990s to 2000s: the birth of the consumer web

In the early 1990s, the civilian internet ran on NSFNET. In the shadow of that academic network, a decisive invention appeared in 1991 at CERN in Geneva, when a British engineer, Tim Berners-Lee, created the World Wide Web. The breakthrough was linking documents with clickable hyperlinks and browsing them with a web browser. For the first time, you could jump from page to page without typing a single command.

After that, in 1993, the Mosaic browser opened the first graphical explorations of the web. But in 1994, with the arrival of Netscape browser, the real shift happened: the web began leaving the labs and entering living rooms.

Right on cue, internet providers popped up everywhere. AOL and CompuServe in the United States, Wanadoo in France, T-Online in Germany… and the screech of 56k modems became a generation’s soundtrack. Pages loaded slowly, often badly, but it didn’t matter because the information came from the other side of the world. That was pure magic.

Between 1995 and 2000, the consumer web really took shape. We discovered early directories like Yahoo!, clunky search engines, hand-rolled personal sites in HTML, and instant messengers like ICQ and MSN Messenger.

It was chaotic, messy, full of typos… but it was also a fantastic experimental space with almost no censorship. For the first time in history, a regular person could publish information and be read almost instantly on the other side of the planet.

2000 to 2010: the golden age of the open web

Then the 2000s hit and the web exploded. The dot-com bubble inflated at breakneck speed as capital poured into any site with a .com. When it burst in 2000–2001, it quickly wiped out a huge slice of those VC-fueled startups. And if that bubble burst so fast, it’s because everything capitalism tried to sell at a premium, the open web kept releasing at no cost.

It sounds naïve now, but back then we thought we’d won for good against the libertarians. We didn’t see that a tiny online bookstore called Amazon would become the global gravedigger of small retail, stopping at nothing to crush every last bit of competition.

Maybe that carefree vibe came from the golden age of human-scale sites that let anyone spin up their own space online. The tools were everywhere: PHP-Nuke, SPIP, Dotclear, and dozens of other CMSes helped millions of amateurs become web actors. It was the era of tinkering, customizing, and proudly adding a guestbook to your site to collect friendly messages.

Above all, it was the great age of forums. These structured discussion spaces formed a truly decentralized social network. People talked about everything in warm, familiar atmospheres, with conversations that stretched over years. Over time, usernames became lasting identities. We knew each other, or not, but either way we helped each other out. That was real social fabric, not today’s hollow look-at-me feed.

You could even set up a small online shop without being enslaved by opaque algorithms or dependent on predatory platforms that hold life-and-death power over your business.

In short, the 2000s were a digital sweet spot. It was a moment when the web still mostly felt like a giant village square, open, joyful, and bursting with good ideas.

2010 to 2020: the social-media steamroller

By the late 2000s, the web entered a new phase. Google still seemed like the cool alternative with a clean design and “Don’t be evil.” Facebook opened to everyone, Twitter took off, Reddit grew, and YouTube, already acquired by Google, became unavoidable. Behind the friendly image those startups projected, their strategy was ruthless. They were ready to lose billions for years just to crush competition and seize total control of the web.

Their secret weapon was the fake free model, where you are the product. Big Tech quickly understood that to win the second round, they had to bypass the free-of-charge barrier that had powered the open web.

So they offered better than free. They handed millions of users tools worthy of professionals, with the promise they would never charge a cent. Suddenly, to be visible online, you no longer needed to build a site or a blog and grind for SEO. Facebook and friends took care of everything. In seconds you had a turnkey storefront and an audience that felt like it dropped from the sky.

In exchange, they vacuumed up all your data, including the most sensitive. Everything went into the hopper: your tastes, your opinions, your relationships, your habits, your sexual preferences, your health status. Everything that should have remained private forever was sold to the highest bidder, including governments.

At first, it didn’t seem obvious. You simply noticed that someone on your favorite forum stopped showing up. Then another person disappeared. Then another. Where did they go? You didn’t need to investigate long. They had all fled to Facebook, Reddit, or Twitter. On your blog, comments grew rare until they vanished completely. People no longer had time for the real internet because they had become willing prisoners of the big platforms.

So to keep up, you closed your site or blog because it felt pointless. You migrated to toxic networks filled with trolls, bots, and dumb drama. You kept posting to stay in touch. But instead of writing about what mattered, you churned out crumbs just to chase likes.

And if you still believed those clicks kept you relevant, the truth was crueler. You were no longer the person people admired for knowledge, kindness, or talent. You had become just another thing forgotten five seconds after the next scroll. That’s the reality. That’s where Big Tech led us. Billions for them, a soulless web for us.

2020 to 2025: a wrecked web and algorithmic rule

In the early 2020s, the landscape looked nothing like what the previous generation knew. Small independent sites, cozy forums, and personal blogs had almost all disappeared. Those still standing survived by making big compromises, or more rarely thanks to a handful of diehards who refused to quit. Every month, more sites from the open internet shut their doors.

The reason was simple. Platform algorithms had seized total control. Getting a site or app discovered was no longer about quality or determination. The rules had changed, and they were rigged. If you didn’t have money, media connections, and heavyweight capitalist partners, you stayed invisible. Your content could be better, richer, more useful, yet no one would see it. Most traffic flowed through filters designed to maximize screen time and advertising revenue.

And yes, since 2023 and 2024, everyone talks about artificial intelligence. It’s everywhere in the news and on stage. But let’s be clear. Up to now, AI didn’t kill the open web. The real culprit is, once again, the reign of algorithms in social networks and search engines. There is no doubt about it: they are the ones choking dissenting voices by locking down access to audiences.

The result is that today the open web is a wasteland. Only survivors are still fighting in the shadows, like NovaFuture, pushed aside by Google and Bing, who presume to decide who has the right to exist based on absolutely intolerable criteria.

Even so, building an independent site is still possible. But the road is brutally discouraging. You are pushing against an invisible wall while the crowd packs itself into the gilded cages of social platforms. So let me say this as a friend: if you want things to change for the better, it’s time for everyone to wake up and return to the spirit of the original web. Simple as this: join the resistance against Big Tech now.

A concrete example: the Dorsey mirage

To make it crystal clear, let’s take a big impostor like Jack Dorsey. The guy drops a lousy app on the web, vaguely hyped as a “revolution,” when it’s recycling ideas others had twenty years ago. Despite that, the media lost their minds, investors showered it with millions, and the easily influenced rushed in as if it were genius. Here’s the truth: today what really counts isn’t a good idea or quality content. It’s the address book and the billions backing a project.

Now switch scenes. Imagine you work for months to ship an app that is genuinely solid and useful, with no ads and no scams. You sweat every detail to get it right. And then? Radio silence. Without millions and media megaphones, you remain stuck at the bottom of the pit. And if, by bad luck, your project attracts too much attention, chances are a giant will lift your concept, launch it with fireworks, and pocket the win you earned.

The final verdict is even clearer. Today’s web has become a billionaires-only zone because they decide what rises and what disappears. For everyone else, there are only bit parts. To keep up appearances, the diversity-killers sprinkle a few crumbs, just enough to maintain the illusion that a little of the web’s early spirit survives. It’s pathetic, but that’s how it is.

The hammer blow: open-internet alternatives in the wolf’s mouth

The day the alternative crowd abandoned independent forums and open blogs to throw themselves into the wolf’s mouth, I knew the fight would get bloody. Free-culture folks, even anarchists, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Reddit. Absolutely wild. The same people who said they wanted a fairer world dove straight into the trap. Honestly, what can you expect from a fight where we are prisoners of our worst enemies? The question stands. I’ll let you answer it.

And the worst part is that we no longer have a choice. If we want to reach our people, we have to wade into those digital dumpsters. Even NovaFuture has to. We post on those toxic platforms because people who share our values got lost in that black hole. It hurts to say it, but it is the reality.

For a veteran of the open internet, it is humiliating. For years I believed the internet would remain a vast space of freedom and that anarchist-minded folks would never fall for the crude trap set by libertarians. Yet today we are forced to use their pipes just to hope to meet our audience. Every time, it makes you want to quit.

And that is not all. A site like NovaFuture is relatively young, sure. But the people building it are not beginners. We have launched a lot of open projects. And every time we see the same selfish behavior from folks who should be backing us.

Here’s what I mean. Instead of urgently finding ways to join forces, too many actors in the open scene behave as if we were coming to eat off their plates. And since shame is not their thing, every time they hit a legal or financial snag, they come crying for help. Well, that is over. We did it, but we will not do it for them again. Meanwhile, we will keep growing fast and bring along every project with the right mindset. As for the rest, I put them on the same shelf as Big Tech.

Let’s be real. We know we will not make many friends by saying this, but we would rather have open enemies than fake friends who hold us back. There it is.

Conclusion: the daily fight to win the internet back

I will admit it: a lot of what is in this piece is not exactly cheerful. But we had to share our daily struggles with you. Getting back in the ring every day to create quality content, run the site, and post on platforms that dare call themselves social networks is exhausting. More exhausting with every passing day. And honestly, we have already gone through heavy bouts of discouragement where we seriously considered pulling the plug.

So yes, fair question: why don’t we drop the rotten networks entirely and focus only on alternatives like the Fediverse? Maybe because preaching to the choir doesn’t change much. And maybe because the limited format of social networks, whether open or not, simply does not suit us. If it is a copy of Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit, we might as well reach the most people on the originals. That is all there is to it. But that is just how we see it right now. We are not closed-minded. Prove us wrong with working alternatives and we will not waste a second to change course.

As for Google and Bing burying us, they should tread carefully. Our patience has limits. We have no problem playing by the rules, but not when the rules are rigged this blatantly. I hope someone over there reads this. Those sites that think they control the weather online are just lines of code. In other words, hot air. Lucrative hot air, yes, but still hot air. And billions can vanish overnight. They had better be careful that we do not reset the clock our way the day we have had enough. The web is not theirs, and we will remind them when it counts.

Meanwhile, it is time to ask what you can do to change this. It is simple. Break your dependency on the toxic web and start showing up on open-internet sites. If you have solid web-dev skills, help win back our lost freedom by building new concepts.

And beyond that, open initiatives need to federate quickly instead of moving forward in a thousand disconnected pieces. We need truly free search engines, good directories, good forums, and real backlinks between us. In the end, calling out Big Tech’s ugly practices is not enough. We need a sharp strategy to climb out of the rut we are stuck in.

Which brings us to the obvious next step. We need to kick the libertarian parasites off our screens. It is a matter of survival! We are 100% ready to join that push by spreading the word about the best alternatives, and even pitching in financially if needed. We just have to relearn how to talk to each other somewhere other than those dumpster networks, so we can rebuild on solid ground.

To wrap up, you know the refrain by now. If you want to act, or simply hang out in a good vibe, NovaFuture’s forums are here for you. And if you truly want to help the site grow, you can buy us a coffee (or a few) on Buy Me a Coffee. And please share this post widely on your networks, because Google and Bing will not lift a finger to boost a dissenting voice. To make it easier, you will find quick-share buttons a little further down.

Finally, a huge thank-you to everyone who has been with us from the start, via RSS or other alternative channels. Thanks to you, we are genuinely happy to have quickly found our place again in the underground web. That is what has kept us motivated this far. Thanks again, and see you soon for the next round.