The Toilet Walls of the Internet

There was a period, right around 2006, when the press decided that blogs were the toilet walls of the internet. You’d read editorials about it—the danger of oversharing, the naivety of posting photos, the irresponsibility of saying things publicly that should have stayed private. The warnings were everywhere. Almost nobody listened.

Sooner or later, everyone who keeps a blog writes a post about keeping a blog. This is mine.

What struck me then, and still does, is the sheer democratic weirdness of it. Students, celebrities, the unemployed, children—all publishing, all findable, all talking into what felt like a void but was actually just an audience of strangers who had opted in. Nobody was forced to read about Anni’s new top or what Fred thought of his beer. The beauty was exactly that: you could read it or not. You could write it or not. The choice was yours in a way that almost nothing else online at that moment was.

John Perry Barlow—EFF co-founder, Grateful Dead lyricist, one of the original internet utopians—kept a blog during this era. Reading it felt like getting a letter from someone who genuinely believed the network could set people free. He wasn’t naive about it; he’d been online long enough to know the infrastructure could be captured. But the belief was real. Web 2.0 was the moment that seemed to prove him right: everyone publishing, everyone connecting, everyone leaving a trace.

The toilet-wall critics weren’t entirely wrong. A lot of what got published was garbage. Some of it was embarrassing. Some of it was dangerous to the people writing it. But the walls of a toilet are where people write what they actually think when no one official is watching, and I’ve always found more truth there than in the polished surfaces above the door.