The Illusion of Boundless Opportunity

We often think of the Internet as a vast, limitless space—a digital world where anyone can carve out their own unique niche and “own” a piece of private digital land.

But nothing could be more misleading.

The Internet is often compared to Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake. And in some ways, this metaphor is apt: immense in theory, but with most of its life concentrated in a small portion. Despite its vastness, much of the Internet’s activity flows through a few dominant hubs—platforms like Facebook, Amazon, and others.

The Myth of the “Old Internet”

Having worked with online links for years, I’ve observed that most web traffic is funneled through these central nodes. It’s an obvious conclusion, perhaps, but one that hints at something deeper. The “old Internet”—the chaotic, decentralized web of hobby sites and niche forums—feels increasingly like a relic.

Sure, there’s archive.org, a noble effort to preserve this past, but it’s a museum, not a living ecosystem. It offers a glimpse of what once was but doesn’t restore the function or vitality of the “old Internet.” I used to think these independent spaces still existed in meaningful ways, but now I suspect they’ve been largely lost.

I wanted to test this assumption, and so I looked. The results were sobering.

…But there are thousands of pages!

Yes, there are thousands—maybe even millions—of websites. But do they matter? Does it really make an impact that there are 100k of casino pages? I think not. There is literally nothing more.

What we are left is:

• youtube
• substack
• reddit
• content mills, farms spewing new sites for every “news”, feeding of your FOMO

The Inevitable Centralization

Centralization, it seems, was inevitable. The Internet, like all systems, is subject to entropy. Evolutionary principles—Darwinism in a digital context—have ensured that only the “fittest” platforms survive. The winners take all, and the rest fade into irrelevance.

This raises some troubling questions:

• Will more big tech companies merge, consolidating even further?

• Are all tech ecosystems destined to form dependencies akin to queen bees in a hive?

• And most provocatively, will the Internet as we know it even exist in 20 years?