The Internet Is Disappearing — and You’re Not Supposed to Notice

by Lloyd Lewis for Art of FACELESS

The internet isn’t dying in a dramatic blaze. There’s no explosion, no single moment you can point to and say that’s when it ended. It’s disappearing quietly, behind login screens and subscription walls, inside apps that call themselves communities while training you like a laboratory rat.

And the most disturbing part is this: most people have been convinced this is progress.

Once upon a time, the internet was messy, slow, decentralised, and alive. You owned your space. You chose your tools. You left when you wanted. You linked outward instead of being pulled inward. Now, almost everything happens inside gated estates owned by a handful of tech corporations whose business model depends on one thing only: keeping you inside the enclosure.

They don’t call them cages. They call them platforms.

They don’t call them behavioural experiments. They call them engagement.

They don’t call them prisons. They call them communities.

But if you can’t leave without losing your audience, your archive, your identity, your income, your social graph — you’re not in a community. You’re in a holding pen.

We are living inside carefully engineered psychological environments designed to optimise compliance. Infinite scrolls. Variable rewards. Artificial scarcity. Shadow bans you’re never told about. Algorithmic punishments that feel personal but are entirely automated. You don’t misbehave — you simply stop being shown.

Like lab rats pressing levers, we are trained to chase visibility. We learn what kinds of words are safe. What images trigger suppression. What opinions quietly sink. We adapt without being told we’re adapting. We self-censor without a single law being passed.

This is the genius of the system: you don’t need to be silenced if you can be gently redirected.

Every major platform now follows the same pattern. They promise connection. They deliver dependency. They present themselves as neutral infrastructure while actively shaping culture, speech, aesthetics, politics, sexuality, and art. They extract your labour — posts, images, thoughts, relationships — and sell the resulting behavioural data upstream to advertisers, governments, and AI training pipelines.

You are not the customer. You are the experiment.

And the experiment only works if you stay inside the maze.

That’s why the open web had to be quietly dismantled. Personal websites replaced by profiles. RSS replaced by feeds. Links replaced by “don’t send people off-platform.” Search replaced by recommendation engines. Discovery replaced by algorithmic permission.

We didn’t lose the internet all at once. We lost it feature by feature.

Now ask yourself this: when was the last time you clicked from one independent website to another, following a chain of human curiosity rather than an algorithmic suggestion? When was the last time you felt lost online in a good way?

If that feeling is gone, it’s because it was designed out.

The enclosure isn’t just technical. It’s psychological. These platforms cultivate learned helplessness. They teach you that building your own space is too hard, too technical, too lonely. They encourage the myth that “no one will find you” unless you stay inside their walls.

That myth is a lie — but it’s an effective one.

Here’s the truth they don’t want you to internalise: you don’t need permission to exist online.

You don’t need a platform to publish. You don’t need an algorithm to validate you. You don’t need metrics to make your work real. The internet still exists underneath the mega-platforms, like a buried city. Domains still work. Blogs still work. Email still works. Static pages still load faster than any app. Print still exists. Zines still exist. Physical space still exists.

The problem isn’t access. It’s confidence.

The escape doesn’t require deleting everything overnight or pretending these platforms don’t exist. That’s performative. It changes nothing. The real move is quieter and more dangerous to them.

You use the mega-platforms sparingly.

You treat them as loudspeakers, not homes.

You post fragments, not your life’s work. Teasers, not archives. Signals, not substance. You never build your house on rented land. You never let the platform be the primary keeper of your memory.

Your real work lives elsewhere — on your own site, in your own files, in formats you control. The platform becomes a relay station, not a destination.

This is how you chew an escape hole.

Not with rage. Not with purity tests. With strategy.

Every time you move one piece of your creative life off-platform, you weaken the enclosure. Every time you link outward instead of inward, you remind people the web still exists. Every time you build something small and personal instead of optimised and scalable, you break the spell.

The tech bros don’t fear critics. They fear irrelevance.

They fear people who no longer need them.

The future of culture will not be built inside corporate communities pretending to be towns. It will be built by people who remember how to make rooms, corridors, back alleys, and hidden doors.

The internet is disappearing — but only if we let it.