The Web We Lost
There’s a photo of Hossein Derakhshan with the singer Lovefoxxx, both of them younger, both of them in a moment before everything changed. He was a blogger in the 2000s, when blogs still felt like the future—when millions of people were typing their thoughts, their politics, their obsessions into their own little corners of the internet. Some of it was noise. A lot of it was noise. But some of it was dangerous, in the way that real ideas can be dangerous. Hossein used his blog as a weapon against a rigid political structure, and the Iranian government noticed.
By 2008, blogs had already started to lose their grip. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat were gathering people up into platforms that promised convenience and connection but really just wanted to monetize your attention. Hossein got arrested. A few years later, in 2011, he was convicted by Iran’s Revolutionary Court: 19 years and six months in prison, plus a fine of 30,000 euros. For writing on his blog.
He was released on November 19, 2014, after a pardon from Ayatollah Khamenei. He opened his laptop and found an internet that was no longer his. That had betrayed him without knowing it was doing so.
This is what he wrote about it: Blogs were decentralized. They were windows into people’s lives, bridges between different worlds. They were cafés where you could actually talk to someone, where ideas moved freely, where a person could go deep on whatever interested them.
He was describing a web that actually existed, one he’d risked everything for.
But the stream had won. By 2014, that wasn’t how it worked anymore. People didn’t click on websites or follow RSS feeds. They scrolled. Algorithms decided what you saw, and you’d never know what you weren’t seeing. The whole thing had been quietly centralized, and nobody called it that.
I understand why it worked. The stream is frictionless. You don’t have to find anything; it comes to you. No opening new tabs, no browser, no effort. Just your phone, just scrolling, just the endless feed. The mountain came to you. And yes, it felt like freedom, or at least like convenience, which we’d learned to confuse with freedom. The cost was obvious if you bothered to think about it—your diversity of thought, your time, your control—but it felt so small compared to the luxury of not having to choose.
Except the diversity part was real. The algorithm doesn’t like friction, doesn’t like difficulty. It buries challenging ideas under videos of people falling down, listicles, the same opinion repeated until it becomes consensus. Hossein was clear about this: challenging thoughts get suppressed because they don’t play well with the ranking game that platforms built to keep you watching.
And the platforms have absolute control. You can post to Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, sure. You have a URL. But you can’t own it the way you owned a blog. You can’t change how it looks. You can’t even count on your own words staying visible. The platform decides the rules, decides the lifespan of your thought. Twitter limits you to a line or two, so you learn to think in slogans. You abbreviate yourself to fit the box. You adjust your thinking to get the likes and the reshares, because that’s the only feedback mechanism that exists.
Hossein called it personal television. You log into Facebook and suddenly you’re watching a stream of content carefully curated to be exactly what you might like. You never leave the platform. The algorithm learns you, shows you more of what you already think, and calls it personalization. It’s not. It’s capture.
The shift happened quietly. A decade ago, an authoritarian government imprisoned bloggers. A few years later, Instagram didn’t need to be blocked because filtered breakfast photos weren’t a threat to anyone’s power. The internet had domesticated itself.
I miss the days when people read more than 140 characters,
Hossein said. I miss publishing something on my own domain, with my own address, without worrying about promoting it across platforms so anyone would see it. When nobody cared about likes. When you could just write something and it could exist on its own terms.
He’s describing a feeling I never got to have, an internet I only know secondhand. But I understand the loss he’s talking about. We all do, even if we don’t admit it. We traded an open web for a convenient feed and called it progress.