People are very worried about “the internet” these days.

They don’t actually mean the internet, though, which at this point is guaranteed global infrastructure on the level of clean drinking water. They mean the cultural layer of online media services and its institutions. Now that people who grew up with internet access are becoming olds, they’re really worried about losing it as a lifeline.

Which is insane, because the time to have been worried about that was 10 years ago. Things online are great now. Soon, they’re going to be better than they’ve ever been before.

The problem is that the internet of 10 years ago still exists, and its incentive structure rewards complaining without doing anything about it so much that people aren’t choosing to participate in the internet of right now. They will, though, because the worried people are definitely right when it comes to the internet of 10 years ago, which is where all the highly capitalized interests are concentrating their destructive power, because 10 years ago is where all their power came from. But they’ll never stop the internet of right now. The internet of right now is invincible.

The internet of right now is always the internet of right now. It was 30 years ago. It was 20 years ago. Frankly, it also was 10 years ago, I promise, though a lot of people had us worried there for a decade. But the thing is, there has been a lot of progress in the meantime on internet-of-now technologies, and it’s time for people stuck in 10 years ago to start paying attention again.

I’m talking, of course, about the worldwide web.

Here at Tiger Pajamas, we’re lifetime Web Site People. We used social media, don’t get me wrong, but they were always just very large websites with native clients to us. We used them to find links to stuff, and when the links were to good websites, we loved that. We clicked the links. We bookmarked the websites. We have and maintain our own websites and blog on them, like we always have, and the reason we started a Web Site Company is that we’re more excited about websites — specifically, Web Sites — than ever before.

Not everyone our age in internet years stuck with the program to the same extent. I’d say the typical narrative among Web Site People these days is, “Remember when the web used to be good?” There is a chorus of this sentiment gradually building to riotous volume. Here is a really long list of blog posts much like the one you’re reading right now — and I haven’t read them all, ngl — but the predominant sentiment seems to be, “the internet of 10 years ago has ruined everything, but I believe we can fix it!”

I consider that a noble sentiment, but mine is slightly different. The internet is forever, and because the internet is what it is, the web was fine, is fine, and will always be fine.

People who have been moaning about how the death of Google Reader “killed RSS” or “killed blogs” were just Twitter addicts in denial. There was never a moment when that actually happened. The RSS service I use to this day — Feedbin, long may it reign — launched like a week after Google Reader died, and I’ve been using it ever since. In fact, I’ve been reading the same blogs ever since, because the blogs I read were good, and while some of their writers did become Twitter addicts (whomsteth amongst us), almost none of them gave up blogging, because blogs rule.

Now, certainly it is the case that blogs rule so much that social media companies have tried to kill them by essentially banning links. A lot of online cultural institutions fell for the social media fairy tale and have been mercilessly killed for their mistakes. Many more are on their last legs. And here is where you might expect me to start writing about how everything is social media’s fault, but I’m not going to do that. Who CARES about social media? It’s just one of several entertainment media. It’s like TV, but “better,” meaning worse. The reason people confuse it for “the internet” is because social media pretended to be the web, and people fell for it.

It also brought a ton of people online, though! Smartphones made that possible, and social media apps provided the reason it happened. The difference between 10 years ago and now, in terms of online life, is that real life happens online now. It’s not just the bad entertainment zone anymore. It’s where you talk to your mom and buy socks and find out about what’s happening on your block later. This makes sustainable human scale possible online now, and the tools for that are the web. The actual web, not the pretend web.

Again, technologically speaking, this could have always been the case. Web culture has never gone anywhere. It’s just not how most people came online because there was something much louder going on with more peer pressure to participate in it, and the vast majority of people whose first online experience was social media simply haven’t found out about the web yet. But they’re about to.

Believe me, I understand why social media bent the incentive structure for online media. Scale, surveillance, reach, and advertising are a potent combination. The era of a billion people on a single website really messed with people’s economic intuitions. It made it seem easy to shave off even just a microscopic slice of a pie the size of the entire planet and feed yourself forever on it.

Here’s the thing, though: Have you ever gone viral? It’s absolutely terrible. It’s like being alone in your house, and then suddenly the front door opens, and the worst people you have ever met start pouring in with their shoes on, kicking your cat and yelling at you, and they stay for three days. I understand that this makes it much more likely that you will be able to pick up some loose change off the floor of your house than it was before, when your house was empty, but this is no way for anyone but the most talented people on Earth to make a living, and that’s how those people have always made their living. Social media is a video game where you pretend to be a celebrity. And that can feel very flattering, but people who are still compelled by that are missing a much better way to live that’s taking shape all around them.

In the era in which we, the Tiger Pajamas wearers, came up, the only people online were outsiders. Blogging was invented by people who were putting up a freak flag because they knew their people were out there — because that’s who was online — we just needed a way for our people to find us. Blogging, linking, and emailing (and commenting, which is the only thing social media actually killed, and that’s good) were intentional acts of appearing to other people with whom you wanted to connect, and those signals meant a great deal.

What you have to realize is that those signals mean even more now, since even having those tools demonstrates caring more about showing up than creating a profile on a billion-person website does. And now that everyone is online and doing real-life stuff online, including maintaining real connections, online social and economic activity can work more like real life. It can have community-level density and accountability. And it’s not limited by geography. The web is the best of both worlds.

I’m not just talking here. I have a website, and it is a profitable business, and part of it is a members-only message board with almost 100 people on it that launched five months ago as of this writing. It’s not even a Patreon; it’s just a website. (The message board part runs on Discourse, some of the best software I have ever used in my life.) These people are from all over the place. It’s one of the most diverse communities I’ve ever been a part of. I felt that this was a mode of being together online whose time had come, I put up a website, and people came.

Yes, I met most of them on social media, but that’s because I was flying my web flag on there, and they are all so invested in having something better than social media that they are willing to pay me to build and host it for them. No, I am not going to take investors and scale this thing. That would make it bad! It’s good the way it is! It’s going to grow onesy-twosy as the people on there and I meet people — like for real, not in a Getting Followers™ way — and they want to be part of it.

This is what “the internet” can be like now if your goals are not poisoned by social media. If you are at the outset of your Web Journey and don’t quite know where to start, I’ve written some blog posts on that aforementioned website that seem to have helped at least 100ish people out:

• The Pirate Ship Model of Federated Social Media
• The Medium
• What to Do Online Instead of Social Media

And if you’re ready to take your own steps into Web Site World, give Tiger Pajamas a call. We’ll make a good Web Site for you.