How I surf the Web
The First Click
Windows 98
I clicked a glimmering power button on a light-gray box for the first time when I was five or six. This was a computer with Windows 98 installed in it. It was attached to a big, fat monitor, which I thought was “the computer”. All the other things didn’t matter; after all, I didn’t really “use” them. Mouse I held, keyboard I clicked away, and the screen I looked at. There was no tacit interaction, “an affordance” between me and the light-gray box. It was just a thing. A humming, indifferent thing.
The Age Of Empires
I played an old video game named The Age of Empires 1 on it. It is a strategy game that situates back to the bronze and iron age. There are multiple other nations that you fight and conquer as a team or alone.
I didn’t understand English, so I was clicking my way through the menu until I got it right. It was a matter of remembering your way along the game menu until you got it.
The game remains the most nostalgic game to me, ever. That’s why I bought the new Age of Empires 2 HD when it came out twelve years later, and I played it almost a thousand hours! Ah. Sometimes I listen to the soundtracks and I get so nostalgic.
Still, I didn’t know much about computers and how they worked. That’s why it was easy for my parents to steal one of the cords, or the mouse, and suddenly I was helpless. They did that when I wasn’t behaving my best, or I was playing too much.
School And The Early Web
In school I tried web browsers and email at seven years old. Yet it didn’t quite make sense what it was all used for. I didn’t have a specific task in mind that would need them, so there was no use for any of these tools and a need to understand them. And even if there was a task, I couldn’t really put one and one together with my teeny-weeny brain. However, someone was ahead of all of us. Apparently, many, many years later I heard that some kid searched and watched pornography on one of the school computers. What mad lad.
Some classmates used Skype and IRC-gallery, though I had no idea what that was. Then there was also Habbo Hotel, but it turned out to be a very expensive video game. You had to buy in-game “coins” with real money just to furnish a pixelated room nobody really cared about. Perhaps even the first game that had mischievous micro-monetisation built in it.
I also didn’t listen to music back then. Therefore, I didn’t have an incentive to listen to music from the internet or buy CDs. I started to listen to “real” music only after I was fifteen, the first being a heavy metal band, Wintersun. Before this I listened to video game soundtracks while I played the game.
RuneScape
In early primary school, I started to play RuneScape. It is a massive multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG. I was ashamed to let any of my friends know that I played the game, because they thought it was lame. I was afraid they would stop being my friends. I lived a double life and hid it from everybody else.
In the game, there are many skills to train, items to collect, monsters to kill, quests to start, and places to explore. The world had a particular texture to it - low resolution and pixelated, yet somehow vast and alive. Every new area felt like genuine discovery.
This was “the Internet” for me. In fact, it was life for me. I ended up spending almost all of my childhood in that world, and I pretty much “finished the game”, too. I was so engulfed in the game that my school grades turned out pretty average, even though they could’ve been much better.
I was so addicted to the game, I remember cycling fast from school to home to play. The urgency was real — minutes felt precious, like the game world was ticking on without me and I was missing it. My parents had a hard time separating me from the computer. However, I don’t regret anything. The game remains my most nostalgic memory and time of my early youth.
The Smartphone Era
Facebook And The First Taste Of Cruelty
Then I was thirteen, and now my friends liked to play on video game consoles. Moreover, I got my first smartphone, Samsung Galaxy S One, and I started to enter the web more concretely. Back then I had a classmate who was excited about YouTube. Funny, I had no idea what he was talking about. He said it was going to be the future.
Then there was Facebook. Classmates registered into it en masse and I followed them. However, Facebook turned out to be a rather unwelcoming place because some of my peers slightly bullied me and didn’t like what I was writing about. There is something particularly stinging about being mocked in a public space — the comments just sitting there, visible to everyone, impossible to take back. Well, perhaps for the best: I never came back.
The PC And The Dark Side Of The Web
Pornography And The Long Fight
Soon I got a proper desktop PC and later I bought a gaming laptop, and I started to understand more intuitively how to surf the “web”. Unfortunately, that also meant that I came across more harmful places, namely online pornography sites. What was initially just an innocent curiosity turned out to be a way to numb feelings and life itself. It became a habit for the longest of time. I became addicted to it. It started to take a hold onto me more and more.
For half of my life, I fought against the addiction, but nothing worked. Not until a year ago after I finished my first 10-day vipassana meditation retreat, that brought about the awareness of my mind and negative thoughts and emotions. Ten days of silence, no phone, no screen — just breath and the slow, uncomfortable work of sitting with yourself. In fact, I guessed that only an intense meditation retreat followed by daily meditation would break the cycle. I have now been free and clean for almost a year.
Creating Content
Video Editing And A Dream
In high school, I used to scroll memes on 9gag on my smartphone every school recess and every evening before bed. I played Bloons Tower Defense and Angry Birds during Swedish, religion, and philosophy class. That was a recipe for the lowest grade that you could attain. I cringe the disrespect I gave these teachers. Today I wish I had learned about these subjects, because many of them would’ve been useful to me.
Be that as it may, I was also creative: I made dozens of YouTube videos on video games that we used to play with friends regularly. I learned how to use Adobe After Effects and Premiere, Blender 3D, Cinema 4D Lite, and Sony Vegas Video Editing software.
I mean, they are just programs. Really, what I learned was film cutting, video editing, video effects, motion graphics, graphic design, and 3D modelling. I spent late nights tweaking keyframes and rendering clips that would take hours, sometimes three days, to export, only to spot an error and start over. I loved every second of it.
Well, this wasn’t how I surfed the web per se, but I was definitely a part of creating the Web through my art. I dreamt of becoming a motion graphics designer, but that dream fell short because I didn’t have the proper network of people and support.
Then I became twenty-one, and I created this blog. By then I had stopped making motion graphics.
Blog and My Own Island
These days you mention the word “blog” to a nine-year-old, and they roll their eyes. Unfortunately, for the majority of people, including so many of my same-aged friends, the internet is equivalent to social media. That is, the instagrams, the snapchats, the tiktoks, and the reddits. These internet overlords hold them captive and they do not know that there exists another world. The corporate tentacles have a strong grip on them, and they feed into the attention economy. I’ve been there. Soon they require identification to enter the internet. Mark my words.
My blog is a place for my thoughts, opinions, and experiences. I have thought about even sharing my coolest photos here, but that time may come later. Right now I feel lazy and I don’t see the reward.
Sometimes it feels like I am in my own bubble, an island, when I write on my blog. Just words, sitting still, waiting. It’s like a digital home to me right now, because pages and posts are laid out just the way I want them to be. Especially after I changed the style and infrastructure, it also feels different — like I built it from the ground up, and I take pride in that. Surely that’s a lie, because I didn’t create the building materials, like Hugo or the Shibui theme, yet I feel it’s mine in other ways.
Social Media And The Attention Economy
Instagram and TikTok
Instagram and TikTok are hella addictive. I used Instagram for four or five years. At first I wanted to share my pictures from a camera, but later it turned out to be an endless stream of videos every morning and evening for hours on end. That wasn’t good for me, and I ended up wasting a ton of time. It was part of me escaping some uncomfortable feeling, mostly loneliness. I used to follow people’s stories and publish my own, and anxiously waiting for how many “liked” my story. Such vanity.
Over time I saved and bookmarked reels. Before I deleted my account, I watched them again. I remember thinking back how these reels were super insightful and educational. After looking at them again, I realised they didn’t really end up having much wisdom.
I also tried TikTok for three months. I felt the app was extremely devious and addictive. I realised I couldn’t have something like that involved in my life, something that has that much control over what I feel. It was insane, and I felt really bad for others, and concerned. These applications are associated strongly with negative mental health, and parents are ignorant about it. Well, the same happened to me back in the time, with video games and porn. I guess the cycle repeats.
I do understand people who use these apps for intentional entertainment purposes, or finding ideas for cooking or other DIY hobbies. However, the algorithms trap the user so, so easily, and unbeknownst to you, a whopping three hours has suddenly passed while searching for a specific video.
Functional Use Of Platforms
I still use and follow LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and Hacker News. However, I use them less and less, often it is functional for miscellaneous tasks that come and go.
For example, LinkedIn for finding people, work, and specific ideas. Reddit for keeping up with world news, namely glancing at the list of headings. YouTube for watching videos on a specific topic, intentionally. I have maybe ten subscribed channels. Facebook for specific marketplace groups that sell and buy things. I visit maybe once a month. And finally, quickly checking HackerNews to keep up with what’s happening in tech. However, I am slowly lessening my exposure to these mediums, because I don’t find them really that meaningful in my life.
Surfing Nowadays
Bookmarks And Rabbit Holes
During my time in blogging, I have come across dozens of blogs. I must confess though: I am not such a big reader of other people’s blogs. Relatedly, since I don’t put the effort to follow anyone’s blog, I’ve always kept the question in the back of my head, Why would anyone follow my blog? I leave that to you. Really, I am not so shaken about this for the reason that I write for myself. This has always been my philosophy.
When it comes to my habits, I have a knack for collecting sites and bookmarking them. I create a tree of folders where I organise them neatly. Sometimes it gets out of hand though. I might come back to some of them, but not always. Sometimes I go on a real deep end, bouncing from hyperlink to hyperlink, site to site, and finding places that even have even lists of of obscure websites.
It is the closest thing I know to wandering through a second-hand bookshop — the thrill is in not knowing what you will find around the next corner. That’s when I start to drool, and feel like I’ve found treasures.
Extensions And Privacy
To surf the web safely, on my desktop, I use Mozilla Firefox with many extensions, namely uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes, I Don’t Care About Cookies, and Bypass Paywalls Clean. In my iPhone it is not possible to install these extensions because of how all the browsers conform to Apple’s nasty requirements. I might use an Android as my next phone, to be honest. Therefore, I use my phone anywhere from half an hour to two hours a day, mostly to read articles and research. Finally, I have my VPN on most of the time.
Practically this means that I surf the web privately, without trackers and advertisements, and without paywalls. However, I don’t follow news at all anyway, so having that last extension is only sometimes helpful. At least it’s there.
I also don’t use many Google products for ethical and privacy reasons. There was once a time that I used absolutely no Google product, and found a way with alternatives. The reason being that I want to support alternatives because otherwise we risk giving large corporates a chance to become a monopoly, after which they control our lives and digital identity too much. Too much power under one platform risks losing all the work.
For example, I use DuckDuckGo as my search engine, Protonmail as my email, Mozilla Firefox as my browser, and different cloud storages and a password manager not associated with Google. I continue to use Google Maps, because Apple Maps and Open Street Map aren’t always so reliable.
Going Back To The Cave
That’s how I surf. The web, to me, began not as the web at all — it was a game, a pixelated world with a particular texture to it, vast and alive, and that was enough.
Then slowly, the web crept in through school computers and email addresses that meant nothing to me yet, through classmates whispering about Skype and IRC-gallery and a pixelated hotel that wanted your parents’ money, until one day I had a phone in my pocket and suddenly the web was social, loud, and cruel in ways I hadn’t anticipated.
It grew around me like a city I never chose to move to — Facebook, then YouTube, then Instagram, then TikTok — each platform a little more frictionless, a little more consuming, each one designed with a patience and precision I didn’t recognise until I was already deep inside it, scrolling, waiting for likes, numbing something I couldn’t quite name.
And then there was the darker current underneath all of it, the one nobody talks about openly, pulling in a different direction entirely.
But somewhere along the way I started to find the quieter streets — the blogs, the rabbit holes, the bookmarks stacked in neat little folders, the hand-built corners of the web where someone had simply put their thoughts down and left them there, not for an algorithm, not for applause, just because they had something to say. That is where I live now.
I know internet used to be different, even though I never surfed it exactly as those born before me. Still I was born early enough to experience and know the difference. In my opinion internet could be cooler. Way cooler. But even with its drawbacks, if the internet is to shape back to some imagined essence, I believe it’s natural gravitation will make it so, slowly.
However, I am starting to see the need to unplug myself from “the Matrix”. I now wish and yearn to spend less time behind a screen. I don’t think I will stop writing though. I have a primal urge to go back to being a caveman. Not the kind of caveman who grunts and drags things — more the kind who sits by a fire, watches the flames, and thinks about nothing in particular. Well, maybe not that drastic, but you get the point.
I love to meditate, enjoy the sun, go to the gym, go hiking, enjoy swimming in the sea, socialise, watch movies occasionally, and sleep well. I’ve spent so much of my life behind a screen, which is why I stopped playing video games a few years ago, and now social media.
As Moomin says, I only want to live in peace and plant potatoes and dream!
