an essay about my experience on the internet

It’s 2025, or maybe 2026, as I’m letting the world read this essay I’m writing.

I have been an internet user since I was eight, in 2016. I remember days when my phone was just a side object like everything else at the time. Acting up like my older siblings and cousins was what I wanted at the time. By 2019, I started getting more online, I made friends with strangers then and strangers now, the memes were legitimately just funny, my favorite artist at the time just took off and blew the feeds. By 2020 and 2021, COVID-19 hit the global population and everyone was locked at home, with their cellphones to kill the boredom that came with isolation. I think that’s when our phones started to become our primary companions in life. When we became as dependent on them as our clothes. I can trace back all of this tech-social evolution. Though I still can’t quite put my finger on when online free speech also has moral courts to judge others.

I was scrolling on TikTok the other day and stumbled upon an edit video of Taylor Swift which I quote “Rip taylor swift, you would have hated Taylor Swift.”, implying the death of an old version of her and the emergence of a new one. For context, the video depicts the new version of her with pictures of her hanging out with her friends (who happen to be MAGA), her engagement ring photos, and her new cocky and enthusiastic lyrics on her latest album ‘The Life Of A Showgirl’; whilst the old Taylor is shown with some of her most poetic and tragic lyrics, and moments of her being happy with a seemingly better and perfect boyfriend for her, which is her now ex, Joe Alwyn. As I watched the video, I couldn’t help but feel the pressure on my nose as my face showed disgust. I found it absurdly parasocial to be this upset over this.

I mindlessly checked the comments, and saw the ‘swifties’ sharing the same feelings toward her. The frustration and the we-know-better attitude I got from reading the comment section reminded me a lot of medieval times. Back when you would crucify and throw tomatoes and rocks at whomever the village disagreed upon. In this day and age, it takes the form of tweets, hot takes, and in the comment sections. Behaviors such as parading their pitchforks to make her stop what she’s doing, writing open-letters to her to break up with her current fiancé, “advising” her about how to live her own romantic life. Never have I ever seen something so demented.

In the comments, I wanted to defend her, but I don’t know… how do you explain color nuances to someone who only sees in black and white? That she’s none of what they claim to be, but they already established who she “became” in their minds. How do you move someone who is not at the same frequency as you are and won’t want to?

The internet is turning into a tribunal, and a humiliation court to whoever is the target now. A few years ago, I had the promise of diversity (whether in genders, races, and opinions) hinted at me in the older comment sections of users but now it is just… as I said, a place to be judged. This essay is not just about Taylor Swift herself but how we interact and behave on the internet today. Every user is a judge, and they feel allowed to vitriolically hate what they deem as morally wrong, even with baseless claims. That is what we refer to as cancel culture. I feel like people seem unable to stand nuance, they have to go to extremes to prove somebody’s take is wrong because it differs from their norms. And historically, that has always been the case even in the old days of the internet, but today that rejection comes with more violence. If you happen to have an opinion or act in a way that does not satisfy someone’s ideology, you’ll get a hate train. When you get a hate train, you become the accused witch that they want to burn at the stake. Suddenly, all the moral codes they claim to preach are abandoned for the sake of punishing a seemingly outlaw. You just become a concept to be scrutinized and criticized, putting aside your humanity behind their screens, and yours. 

Quitting social media is now the new “cool”. Chase your hobbies, go online niche spaces instead of the big multi-billionaire ones, stop consuming for the sake of consuming. That’s what I hear about these days. Who knows what’s to come in the next five years. No one is there to tell you, or unfairly try to command another user about what they must do, or punish them for not doing it. Social media has become such an integrated part of our lives. Quitting it also means losing an essential part of your day, an essential part of your forming self. I also don’t think you can escape it without having the FOMO, unless you get updated by your friends, which is the least likely scenario ever. But that’s where I want to get to now: staying updated. How do you walk around clueless about the current state of the world after you have been spoon-fed about all the news in the world for years? The shorter answer is: you just do. You don’t need to know everything, or at least hear about everything. If it’s important enough, you’ll probably hear about it through friends or gossip and if you don’t, you don’t. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, free from the machinery I’m in. I still check my social media just for the sake of it, but even I grow tired of it, yet grow more addicted to it as well. Writing this essay is one of those moments where taking action locks you in and pulls me away from it, but oftentimes I am just one of the consumers of memes, and various online content.

Hopefully, I’ll become like one of those Pinterest, or YouTube vloggers talking about their offline lives. Or at least, what they choose to sell to me. Going analogue to imitate that offline life is probably the solution, or so a new online community preaches. But I still have to admit that it can lead to another form of consumerism too, and that is a discussion for another day. Either way, there’s a loss in everything. So really what should I do?