Thank God the internet is still around. Not just as a pool of data for training large language models, but for people. Including all the fine and slightly older people who built the net, one page and one site at a time. We wrote stuff, made links and connected. Found the others. Made friends and created communities, big and small, networks and meaning. And had so much fun doing so. We are still here, most of us. Some have gone elsewhere, a few have passed away, but I know for a fact that most of all the inspiring, crazy, smart, provocative folks are still around if you look. Good news!
The Enshittification of the net is very real. The ‘social’ platforms i 2025 are generally awful, hollow places and getting worse. Everyone knows, or more importantly, we all feel it while we keep using. Dopamine loops, bad AI ‘art’, fake news, trolls, dark patterns for a dark online time. It all feels off, and that feeling has been growing steadily, especially over the last 2-3 years.
One of my favorite authors Douglas Rushkoff has been with us for the whole ride, chronicling, championing and criticizing online culture for 30 years, following all the ups and downs (the last few years mostly downs). This has been slightly depressing to follow, but in one of his monologues on the highly recommended podcast Team Human, he talks about a vibe shift happening. No one is in charge of all the chaos, so might as well make some good stuff here and now. One can always do a personal vibe shift, and maybe others will follow? Will you?
Two non-connected things prompted me back onto the internet, both happened on Saturday (31st of August 24). I had a nice day-sized conversation with my friend Thomas (Mr Danish Internet number One) and as usual there was a wide range of topics, both looking backwards and forwards. We chatted about quirky online personalities from the 90s, but also about what AI might be like in five years time (sorry, we don’t have a clue). Our talk made me miss some of that energy, and left me with a feeling of loss, something valuable got lost along the way. And to be honest, I have not had very much creative energy for a while (more on this in a coming post). The other prompt came via Tina Roth Eisenberg aka Swiss Miss, and she wrote on X;
I miss the innocence of the early blogging days. No trying to monetize your audience. No algorithms. No funnel talk. It was fun and playful. People were genuinely excited to share their weird obsessions and interests. I will forever try to recreate that corner of the internet.
I used to visit Tina’s site quite often, but had forgotten about it. It’s still running along with a few of the other classics like https://kottke.org and https://daringfireball.net Tina featured my LEGO fail whale back in the day (thanks for all the traffic, it’s been freakin’ 15 years but the link still works!) Earlier in 24 I had a couple of delightful videochats with Yiying Lu, the woman behind the iconic twitter fail whale. She keeps the spirit alive doing great visual stuff like designing emojis and working with Adobe, Pantone and others. More good energy!
I used to love making things online. Had an early blog with oh so many hyperlinks. Did guest blog posts. Wrote a weekly satire website with my friend Martin Haubek. Hosted a collaborative magazine slash community on Google Wave of all places (look it up dummy, or look at this danish link). Wrote a lot of columns and articles on internet culture, dot-com mania and a ton about VR, computer graphics etc. Made a personal newsletter with a thousand subscribers and some commercial newsletters with 100.000 subscribers. I have hyperlinks in my blood. And I’ve written a ton of tweets/x posts over the past 17 years, a few of them rather good. No regrets. But Twitter/X is not the place it used to be, still pretty great for news on AI, art, music and culture, if you know how to filter aggressively.
This is my first site in English, hoping a few new readers will join. And sorry not sorry if my English is a bit broken here and there, some of that may even be on purpose; I remember a conference in NYC 1998 where an online magazine editor told us that they kept some of the slightly broken English in just to keep that an authentic human voice in the articles done by foreign writers. I always liked that idea. Even more so now that most of what we read online has been through the AI wordgrinder-machines like Grammarly or ChatGPT (not this post though).
I’m launching today with the most basic of basic WordPress website. It feels right and I think it would probably be good to start writing more and longer in public again. But it takes time, so it would be much appreciated if you want to support my site. Not quite ready for an open comment section at this point, but do send me a mail or DM if you have inputs, feedback or just to say hi. Thanks for reading all the way, good to be back.
See you soon ❤️
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