Somewhere in '98 or '99 I fired up ICQ for the first time. Take it into account that I was living in Hungary, a 14 years old boy, and while I was learning English since I was 6, the teaching methods in Hungary focus on grammar and not real life skills, meaning I was lagging 5-10 years behind American and British trends. By the way, this is still the case with a lot of Hungarians. It was incredible. I was able to search for people based on interest keywords, age, and so on. Back then not everybody lied all the time and practically everyone was allowed on everything. This meant both wonderful and atrocious websites, but that is for another day. You were able to message everyone out of the blue without worrying about spam filters or friend requests.
The internet, at that point, felt like another world, a place where you were able to surround yourself with the people you longed for, not with the ones fate threw at you in school. A place to retreat to.
It took me 20 more years to even learn about BBS systems, those never reached Hungary. It must have been incredible to live through the BBS era. "BBS: The Documentary"1 is a fantastic watch.
Soon I made a website, and it felt like a significant achievement: it was mine, I actually crafted it, it looked the way I wanted it to look, and so on.
It looked like we were going towards a world with a fantastic, useful internet.
In the beginning of 2012 we made a trip to Ireland and England, and many of the amazing places we visited we found using Panoramio2 on Google Maps. The Dark Hedges3, for example, much before it got featured on Game of Thrones. Without Panoramio I never could have discovered those locations, and since it's shutdown, it became quite hard again.
In the same year, the promised land of useful technology still existed. Gtalk talked XMPP, Facebook talked XMPP; everyone talked XMPP. RSS and Google Reader was big, and Google still had "don't be evil" in it's manifest. Augmented reality was on it's way. The relevant Wikipedia article4 shows a photo of a HTC Desire, a 2009 phone, displaying AR navigation5.
But a few months later the only community website I ever really loved and belonged to6 shut down. I wrote about it a while ago that maybe the reason for that site and it's community to work as well as it did that it was it's mixed reality roots7: a community with an entry point from the web, and with entry points from parties and events organised. You could start in one and continue in the other.
And then Google Glass debuted. It became of the most hated gadgets ever created, and with that, the dreams of a usefully connected world seem to have died. Meanwhile the clouds of endless consumption of worthless goods were gathering.
In 2007 the iPhone was presented and brought upon the insanity of being constantly distracted by notifications. In 2009 I had a company Nokia E528. It was tiny, loud, the battery lasted a week easily, and it even had a surprisingly decent Nokia Maps navigation with Hungarian TTS. It was internet capable: with Opera Mini, I could read the news, it had an email client, and so on. For a company phone, it was perfect; a far cry from the glue-and-glass attention seeking monstrosities everyone carries now.
Seven years later, in 2014, something happened that killed any remaining promise of the mixed reality that would have served the people. Maybe a CEO conference, maybe just death by a thousand papercuts. The article "Get your loved ones off Facebook9 was triggered by the 2014 changes in Facebook's policies. Google Talk was discontinued in early 2015, Facebook also dropped XMPP by then.
In 2015, Pokémon Go debuted. The FOMO of "Gotta catch them all!" has been making people drop serious money on "collectables" probably since the dawn of time, but this one was new. You'd have to walk or go to physical places to interact with them or with others at the same location. And it was even teaching about local curiosities that were marked for those special spots.
But this wasn't really that useful AR that I longed for. It wasn't a simple, configurable heads up display that would, say, show my friends on a map, show events that might be are happening around me and would be open for me, or one that could be the local guide of curiosities and history. One that tells me the story of a building just by being there and looking at it, that would give me augmented navigation, that would allow me to connect with people in both worlds easily. It was a gacha game during a time when it wasn't yet clear how many, many things are, quietly, also made to track your behaviour, your location, your habits. The notion that the internet became, or was becoming, an enshittified cesspit didn't sink in just yet.
It's 2026 now and I see Ray-Ban Meta glass commercials everywhere. It's an even creepier device10 - it's made by Meta after all -, than the Google Glass was, yet somehow, it's ... OK now?! People live stream jackass moments with it, and we're cheering. Everyone got used to record anything they see, all the time, and being recorded, all the time.
Walking up to random strangers with weird questions, live streaming it all. Your car is will be mandated to record you in the EU from mid 202611. Instead of stopping a fight and pulling people apart, just record it and upload it. I get that in some cases, the recording is useful, even needed, but it can't be a priority over de-escalating a situation, and that's just one example.
How did we get here? Why did that useful internet promise die? Is it all just human greed, is it negligence, is it entertaining ourselves to death12?
One explanation I've heard is that in the early days the internet was less accessible and so it contained like-minded people. But it's hard to understand how we got from the collaborative internet of SOPA/PIPA internet blackouts13 in 2011/12, when the internet was already quite accessible to most, to being OK with AI generated posters for your kid's birthday party, willingly uploading the photos of involved kid into the machine that'll most likely store it forever for facial recognition.
Here we are, in the now: an insane amount of streamed, recorded video, using absurdly powerful machines that shamelessly trying to spy and gather as much information on us as possible, willingly in our pockets, and virtually not a single option to publish my live location to a select few friends in case we're about to bump into each other, without something selling me out, exploiting me, tracking me.
That is unless you are a wizard of words and your friends are listening to you, and you manage to self-host a server for them. Which I do, an XMPP server for friends & family, but not many others do, even though they should. It lives on a former thin client in my home, under a chest of drawers.
It could be me though. Maybe my definition of useful is a far cry from the averaged definition of useful. Maybe some people are looking forward to on-the-fly AI generated targeted video ads and streams with zero collective experience, and a reality fragmented into bubbles and oblivion.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7nj3G6Jpv2G6Gp6NvN1kUtQuW8QshBWE\*↩︎
https://petermolnar.net/photo/northern-ireland-the-dark-hedges/↩︎
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality#/media/File:Navit_Reality_View_next_to_reality.jpg↩︎
https://petermolnar.net/journal/amikor-az-internet-felfalja-magat/↩︎
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/meta-ai-glasses-may-get-creepier-and-apps-that-detect-them-arent-perfect/↩︎
https://autofreak.com/eu-driver-monitoring-cameras-mandate-2026/↩︎
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death there's also an amazing comic strip about it, which has an interesting background: the creator was asked to redact it, essentially because it summarised the whole book in one go: https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/amusing-ourselves-to-death/ but if you look around, you can find it, eg https://biblioklept.org/2013/06/08/huxley-vs-orwell-the-webcomic-2/ still presents it.↩︎
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA↩︎
This entry was written by Peter Molnar, and originally posted on petermolnar dot net.
