The internet's creative spark has been systematically extinguished by commercial optimization, argues a new essay mourning the loss of the web's amateur golden age. The piece opens with the author's realization while hearing "I Don't Wanna Wait" in a grocery store—a modern song that itself cribbed from O-Zone's "Dragostea Din Tei", the 2004 hit behind one of the internet's earliest viral moments.

Gary Brolsma's lip-syncing "Numa Numa" video represented everything that made early internet culture special: spontaneous, unpolished, and driven by pure joy rather than algorithmic optimization. Today's TikTok landscape features endless choreographed content serving the platform's algorithm, but the genuine fun is absent. The author traces this decline through platforms like Newgrounds, early YouTube, and early Facebook—spaces that once felt authentically amateur in the best possible way.

The essay argues AI slop didn't descend on a healthy internet but rather arrived after years of platforms teaching users to create, film, and think like machines. Marc Andreessen, noted as someone who "did more to popularize the Internet and to destroy it," recently observed it's becoming easier to identify what wasn't written by AI. The author concludes the dead internet theory no longer feels like a joke—the best is over, and with it went the faith that the next thing would be better.