The Internet’s Broken Promise

Around the time the Snowden leaks were everywhere, Sascha Lobo wrote something that crystallized what a lot of people were feeling but couldn’t quite articulate. He called it Abschied von der Utopie—a farewell to what the internet was supposed to become.

The dream was pretty straightforward. No gatekeepers between you and an audience. You could build something, teach something, make something public. YouTube tutorials, blogs, memes, weird communities—all of it felt like evidence that things were actually changing. That you could participate in something that wasn’t filtered through institutions or governments. That felt real.

Then you learn that the NSA has been reading everything the whole time. Not accidentally, not as a side effect of something else—that was the actual program. The infrastructure that looked like freedom was set up from the beginning to be surveillance. It’s not like the internet got corrupted. It was always deployed by whoever had the power to deploy it. And once you see that, you can’t unsee it.

What’s strange is how normal everything still looks. YouTube videos exist. People still post. Nothing tangible broke. But the ground shifted under it all. The space you thought belonged to you never did. Maybe that was always obvious to certain people. It wasn’t to me.

I think about Lobo’s piece sometimes and I land in the same place he does—not angry, exactly, but struck by the specific weight of that realization. The internet was supposed to be different, and it isn’t. And now we all know it.