The Internet After the Growth Phase

I’ve spent the last few essays examining the tightening of the internet — the collapse of the attention economy, the growing pressure on creators, the structural fatigue underneath it all. It would be easy to mistake that tone for complaint. It isn’t. If anything, I find myself strangely at ease in this phase.

Long story short, I used to treat certain corners of the web like a sanctuary: not respectable, not optimized, often a little weird, but alive in a quiet way — a place where people created because they had to, not because it made sense.

Then the pandemic arrived, and with it the economic shockwave that rippled through everything. Suddenly, the internet wasn’t just where people passed time or built strange little worlds. It became a field. A resource. A last-open space where income might still be extracted, where leverage might still be found, where stability might still be improvised.

If I try to name what that shift felt like, the closest image I have is ecological. It was like watching a forest get discovered by industry. Not because the trees were special in some romantic sense, but because the forest was simply there — open land, unowned space, a terrain that had never been fully mapped. For a while, it could sustain odd little ecosystems: misfits building rituals, creators experimenting without pressure, small communities orbiting ideas that didn’t translate into status.

And then, almost overnight, the machines arrived. Well, not literal machines, but the cultural machinery of measurement: growth language, performance thinking, optimization reflexes, dashboards, funnels, conversion logic. The same vocabulary that lives in the corporate world suddenly appeared in places that used to feel like personal studios, strange salons, or digital corners full of unfinished work.

It didn’t happen because people turned evil. It happened because pressure forces migration. When the offline world tightened — jobs unstable, costs rising, routines collapsing — a huge number of people looked around and did what human beings always do when the ground shifts: they searched for any open channel that still looked like possibility.

For many of them, creating wasn’t a calling. It was an attempt. A survival experiment. A way of placing a bet on visibility when other bets seemed closed. And in that sense, it’s hard to blame anyone. If the system offers you fewer stable paths, you will try the remaining doors — even if those doors lead into spaces that were never designed to carry mass traffic.

For a while, the flood made everything feel louder than it had ever been. Platforms filled up. Feeds accelerated. Everyone seemed to arrive with an identity kit already assembled: a brand voice, a growth strategy, a slogan, a personal narrative framed like a product. Not because they were shallow, but because that’s the only language many people have been trained to speak in public. When your adult life has been shaped inside corporate measurement, it’s difficult to enter any space without trying to measure yourself inside it.

And the internet rewarded that behavior, because the internet — at least in that phase — could still convert performance into some form of return: attention, opportunities, small income streams, social proof.

But what happens when too many people enter the same forest at once is not only that it becomes crowded. It changes its biology. The ground gets compacted. The undergrowth disappears. The delicate species that survive only in quiet conditions begin to vanish. Not because anyone hates them, but because the climate is no longer theirs. And this is where my own reaction surprised me.

In the first months, I didn’t stop creating — I stopped publishing. Not as a dramatic statement, and not because I wanted to protect some pure sacred space, but because I could feel that the atmosphere had shifted into something I didn’t want to participate in. It felt like a sanctuary being turned into a market while people were still pretending it was a sanctuary. And I didn’t have the energy to perform enthusiasm inside that contradiction.

But now, years later, something else is happening — and it’s subtle enough that it might be missed if you’re only watching headlines or platform announcements. The wave is receding. Not in the sense that the internet is dying — there is arguably more traffic, more content, more activity than ever — but in the sense that the human layer that treated online creation as a viable economic field seems to be thinning out.

I keep noticing abandoned profiles, not only the small ones, but also the surprisingly large ones: accounts with thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of followers, left untouched like empty houses. No goodbye posts. No explanations. Just silence. The kind of silence that doesn’t signal tragedy, but closure — as if the person simply stepped out of a costume and returned to their other life.

And again, it’s hard to blame people. For many, the pandemic-era creation phase was never existential. It was opportunistic in the neutral sense: a rational attempt to stabilize life during a distorted period.

When the world reopened, the cost-benefit equation changed. There are easier, more predictable ways to earn money than maintaining even a fairly successful creative presence on a platform whose algorithms shift without warning and whose rewards, even at scale, often remain minor and irregular. The followers might look impressive as a number, but numbers don’t guarantee distribution anymore, and distribution doesn’t guarantee anything durable.

What’s paradoxical — and this is the part I didn’t expect — is that as the forest emptied, I began to feel better inside it.

Not better as in “finally, the competition is gone,” and not better in some petty sense of vindication. Better in the way you feel when a room stops buzzing and you can finally hear your own thoughts again. Better in the way you feel when you realize you no longer need to translate yourself into whatever language the crowd is currently rewarding. Better, even, in the simple bodily sense of being able to breathe.

Because when the market leaves, the performance pressure loosens. The quiet returns. The need to narrate yourself constantly — to package output, to optimize timing, to signal relevance — begins to feel optional again. And in that new quiet, the act of creating changes its texture. It becomes less like content production and more like what it always was for me: a form of thinking. A way of discovering what I really think by forcing it into shape. A slow studio practice, closer to craft than to commerce.

I’ve noticed that I now publish with almost no announcement. In fact, I no longer maintain the usual channels for it. I stepped away from almost all social platforms once they became flooded with automated responses and bot-like interactions, and once it became clear that genuine organic reach — especially for work like mine — was largely illusory anyway.

I don't chase distribution. I care about basic structure, readability, the integrity of the piece — but I don’t treat a post like a product that needs to be launched. Sometimes I repost to larger platforms, which I now see less as stages and more as scattered islands where thoughts occasionally land. Often, there is little or no immediate traction. A few years ago, that would have felt like failure. Now it feels more like weather — like the forest simply not echoing today.

But the strange thing is: the silence is never absolute.

Somewhere, eventually, people arrive. Not in waves, not in numbers that reshape anything structural — but steadily enough to make the space real. Sometimes they leave a comment that isn’t trying to signal intelligence or status, but simply acknowledges presence. Sometimes they send a message that makes it clear they weren’t browsing for content, but looking for resonance in a world that feels increasingly disordered.

It isn’t frequent enough to build an economy. It isn’t predictable enough to design a strategy around. But it is consistent enough to remind me of what the internet once allowed before it was fully enclosed by growth logic: not scale, but proportion. Not virality, but resonance.

In that sense, what’s returning now isn’t the old internet in a nostalgic or reversible form. The forest is still scarred. The machines are still nearby. Bots and generated content occupy vast parts of the terrain. The architecture remains more enclosed than ever. And yet, without the pressure of the mass wave, the space behaves differently. Smaller. Uneven. Human in scale.

When fewer people are trying to extract value at scale, the remaining space begins to behave differently. It becomes more niche, more uneven, more human in its proportions — not because it is pure, but because it is no longer pretending to be a universal marketplace for everyone at once.

Maybe that was always the fate of the internet. Maybe every open space gets colonized, industrialized, and exhausted — and then, when the returns fall, the crowd moves on. But ecosystems don’t only collapse. They also regrow, not as grand restoration, but as small, stubborn life returning where conditions allow it. Thin stems. Small leaves. Quiet species that don’t survive in crowds.

And perhaps this is what creating online is becoming again: not a ladder, not a career path, not a stage — but a clearing. A place for strange, unoptimized thought, free from the constant demand to measure itself. A place where creating doesn’t have to justify its existence economically. A place where a few sincere readers are not a consolation prize, but the correct scale.