Hegarty, K. (2026). “When did the internet become this awful?”: the idea of decline in internet histories. Internet Histories, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2026.2760136
Summary
Hegarty names and theorises a pervasive but under-examined discourse: the internet decline narrative (IDN), the now-dominant idea — crystallised in terms like techlash, enshittification, and slop — that the internet has gotten worse over time. The article argues that IDNs have become a central mode through which the recent history of the internet is narrated, doing historiographical work (periodising a threshold of decline, assigning blame, imagining counterfactuals, identifying lost ideals) alongside political, affective, and commercial work. While granting that IDNs often voice legitimate concerns and can spur alternatives, Hegarty contends they sit uncomfortably with internet histories’ commitments to plural, non-centric, user-centred accounts — ironically reproducing the corporation-centred teleology they claim to reject. The call is to study IDNs as situated cultural forms rather than simply endorsing or rejecting them.
Key Contributions
- Coins and theorises internet decline narratives (IDNs) as an analytical category for a widespread but under-examined discourse.
- Identifies four characteristic features of IDNs and three types of work they perform (political, affective, commercial).
- Introduces the notion of “Manichaean internet history” — histories framed as a cosmic struggle between villainous corporations and helpless masses.
- Shows how IDNs challenge the internet histories field’s commitments to plurality, non-centric accounts, and user-centred approaches.
- Sets a research agenda for studying decline discourse as a situated cultural object shaping policy (e.g. social media bans) and imaginable futures.
Methods
Conceptual and historiographical analysis rather than empirical study. Hegarty close-reads popular discourse, journalism, and bestselling non-fiction (Doctorow’s enshittification, Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism), uses vernacular decline talk from four r/nosurf subreddit threads as illustration, and engages internet histories scholarship to position IDNs against the field’s methodological commitments. Historical survey and statistical data on early internet access inequalities (ABS, GVU Center, Statistics Canada, Our World in Data) are mobilised to puncture “golden age” assumptions.
Findings
- Decline talk about media is longstanding (print, cinema, comics, TV); internet-specific decline narratives date at least to early-1990s Usenet complaints about commercial “newbies.”
- IDNs became dominant around 2018 after Facebook–Cambridge Analytica, building on the dot-com crash and the 2013 Snowden revelations, and intensifying with Twitter/X’s transformation and the generative-AI boom.
- Four defining features: a temporal-evaluative frame binding harms to decline; an expansive scope treating the whole structure as rotten; specification of a decline threshold; and attribution of blame to Big Tech and/or failed regulation.
- IDNs cast users as passive victims (manipulated, addicted), leaving little room for agency, resistance tactics, or grassroots alternatives.
- The “old, good internet” of the 1990s–2000s served a smaller, wealthier, more male and more educated population — any pre-mass-access golden age describes an advantaged minority.
- Drawing on Payal Arora, IDN pessimism is largely a Western affliction that overlooks creation and resilience in the Global South and risks “pessimism paralysis.”
Connections
This paper reframes the anniversary/techlash essay genre as itself an object of critique, sitting naturally alongside platform-critique and infrastructural-history work such as Rogers2026-zz, Tornberg2026-im, Helmond2026-ll, Hepp2026-oi, and Petre2019-zh. Its interrogation of the “misinformation panic” as a periodising frame for decline speaks to the broader recalibration of misinformation-exposure claims in Budak2024-ef, Allen2024-av, and Nyhan2023-gb, which similarly push back against sweeping narratives of a degraded information environment.
Podcast
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