How to recapture the joy of the early internet | Michael Sun

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. We spend a lot of time talking about the ways the internet and social media are destructive, ruining our attention spans, our ability to connect, our ability to discern truth from fiction. But with all this knowledge, could there still be a way to live happier lives online? Like all Gen Zers, writer and designer Michael Sun grew up online and he knows the dangers. But in his talk, he shares why he thinks it's possible to create a modern internet that It lets us be vulnerable and connect with others in a more positive way and enjoy the randomness that life and the early internet has to offer.

0:54Let me tell you a story. This story begins in the summer of 2008. It's one of those scorching summers where everything stops and time itself seems suspended. I'm 11 and sitting in front of the computer for days on end, melting into my chair. Somehow my dad has found this website that he claims is this cool new virtual reality experience, and I'm 11, which means I still trust my dad. So I hop on this site, right? It's called Exit Reality, which is exactly what I want to do, because it's 42 degrees outside and there's no air con in our apartment. If you know what second life is, it's kind of like that.

1:39You can make your own avatars in the most rudimentary 3D graphics I have ever seen in my life. And then supposedly you can meet with and talk to other avatars in this endless expanse of digital landscape engulfed in a permanent sunset. But because it is 2008, everything freaks out when you press any button. and the lag is enough to give anyone anxiety. I mean, I already had anxiety as an 11-year-old, so it made me want to literally die. But I persevere, even though there's nary a soul in sight. I key smash my way through pixelated deserts and abandoned streets and then in the corner of my screen, something appears.

2:24Someone appears. Their avatar is wearing a leather jacket and a mohawk, so I approach them and I'm like, hey, nice mohawk. Once again, I'm 11, so please withhold your judgment. I'm begging you. We start chatting and he tells me his name is Tommy. And then he asks ASL, which of course means age, sex, location. And obviously I'm like 17, male, Canada, even though I'm an 11-year-old boy living in northwest Sydney. we add each other on msn and we start talking for hours a day i'm talking hours since both of us are horny teens or twins in my case with absolutely nothing better to do he tells me his favorite band is death cab the cutie and i'm like oh my god same even though the only thing on my ipod is Coldplay.

3:19And then suddenly we fall out of contact. I'm not sure how it happened, but it was devastating, pulverizing. One day we were talking for hours and the next we just weren't. My first real heartbreak, though certainly not my last online boyfriend. Now, you might be wondering why I'm telling you this story, and it's not just because I love embarrassing myself on stage. Tommy, if you're listening, please DM me. I'm desperate. No, I'm just kidding. I'm telling you this story because I know you have a similar one, especially if you also grew up in the days of the early internet, right? Maybe you also got your heart broken by some guy you'd never met, or maybe you were less dramatic than I was and just made a friend on Club Penguin, or, God forbid, Habbo Hotel.

4:07What I'm saying is this. We should return to the days of the early internet, the wild west of the internet, where everything felt a little looser, a little jankier, a little more spontaneous, where you too could meet the love of your life and get ghosted as an 11-year-old, where discovery still felt possible. Here's the thing. The internet as it is right now is more restricted than ever, right? More corporate, more buttoned up, more difficult to find things outside of what we actually want to see and what's fed to us algorithmically. I'm an internet culture writer, and my screen time is 12 hours a day, which means I'm clinically insane.

4:50But even if you use the internet like a normal amount, I'm sure you'll have noticed that the internet today is a very different place to what it was 5, 10, 15 years ago. The internet as it is right now is both faster and harder than it ever has been. If you're on TikTok, which I think most of you are, you'll know that microtrends pop up at the speed of light, then disappear into the ether, never to be spoken of again. As an experiment, I wrote down a list of things that were going viral on TikTok about a month ago while I was writing this talk, right? Here's that list now. The Hunger Games, okay.

5:28Vodka pasta sauce, flavoured water, water talk, and unicorn syrup, being a la-la-la girl versus being an okay-okay-okay girl, I mean, none of these words are in the Bible, right? If you cast your mind back even further, the trends become even more meaningless. I'm talking coastal grandma aesthetic. I'm talking frazzled English woman. I'm talking the return of twee, pasta chips, whimsy goth, dark academia, barbie core. What do these words even mean? We are cycling through content at such a velocity that things become old news the second they hit the feed. Even me standing here right now telling you that things are happening faster, you guessed it, that's old news too.

6:13To quote one famous meme, everything happens so much. All of this means that it's harder to see the things that we actually want to see. We're losing control. This is not new. But what if there was a solution? What if we could turn back time? What if we could bring back some of the features that made the early internet so utopian, so lawless, so full of spontaneous connection and random experimental zeal? Well, we can. So the first solution is the Galaxy Brain solution, of course. It's to repurpose our existing platforms into spaces that feel like the early internet again. Like, for the past couple of years, I've been turning to niche Facebook groups as replacements for the early internet forums of the 2000s.

7:10I know I'm going to sound like the world's oldest Zoomer right now, but back in my day, we had these forums with message boards where you could message people about your specific interests, things like Fall Out Boy and other emo bands, countercultures and various subcultures, PlayStation games, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The past decade or so, a smorgasbord of Facebook groups have popped up kind of in their place. They act very similarly to these forums. There are groups for public transport stands. There are groups for architecture heads who just really love stairs. There are groups for sharing disgusting photos of terrible food.

7:49I mean, there is a group for everyone, okay? There is a group called Subtle Asian Traits that many of you might have heard of. and it's literally just a group about being Asian. And it has two million members, making it one of the biggest Facebook groups, right? Now is the peak time of absolute chaos. We are living in a time when everyone, even your aunt's friend who keeps sending you minion memes, has left Facebook, which means the only people left in these groups are truly the most desperate, the most committed, the most insane, the people who have thrown all caution to the wind and said, who cares to any given conventions of social media?

8:32These spaces are completely shielded from the frenetic, demanding nature of online life today. You can choose whether to post or not, whether to engage or not, whether to take things further or not. You most likely won't know anyone else in these groups. There are hardly any celebrities either in these groups. No one's in it to be seen. Being in these groups is truly like experiencing the last, almost, utopia online. Now, there is also an easier solution. But you need to bear with me, okay, because I know it sounds super dumb. The solution is to talk to your friends. And I promise I don't mean this in a kind of, get off your phones, we live in a society kind of way, okay, promise.

9:23I mean talking to your friends and asking them what they're listening to, what they're consuming, what they've come across on their feeds. The worst thing about the algorithm is that it's so tailored to us that it can feel inescapable. But the best thing about the algorithm is that it's so tailored to us that no two feeds are the same. Your friend is listening to a song that you would have never encountered. Your parents are on a side of YouTube that you didn't even know existed. Your aunt's friend is still sending you minion memes, okay? I want every person in this room to try one thing after this.

10:01Open up your phones, you have permission, open any app, and show the person next to you the first thing on your feed. You might be surprised at how strangely vulnerable the experience is and also how surprising the results are. I mean, this is how I found out that my partner's TikTok feed was 90 % musical theatre content, which made me question all my life choices. But ignoring that, looking at your phone and looking at someone else's feed can help us bring back the randomness of the early internet. Think back to me and Tommy, for example. What we shared was a random fleeting encounter which couldn't have happened anywhere else but online or at any other time but the early internet.

10:47That phase might be long gone, but we can still bring back the emotional high of spontaneity, of discovery. So go forth and be crazy again. Go and have your heart broken by some guy who lives three continents away from you. Go and discover a corner of the internet previously hidden from you. Go and be a tween online again. And go and turn the clock back to 2008. Thank you.

11:21That was Michael Sun speaking at TEDx Youth Sydney in Australia in 2023. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Sarmar-Nivon. It was mixed by Christopher Fazey Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.