As I write this, it is 20 years since the events of 9/11, and the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Some recollections:

As I look back, I remember something very important, personally speaking. Not only were we glued to the TV, we were hitting the refresh button on our web browsers, desperate for updates from New York. But it had an impact closer to home: would the UK be attacked (actions were certainly taken to close areas)?

Hours passed, and I was still online, perhaps a little drunk. And something struck me. I had realised that online publishing, blogging, whatever you want to call it, was an opportunity. Shaken by the ashes of the World Trade Center, it occurred to me that the internet was my chance to become a writer, and make money on my own terms.

The problem was, I didn’t know how to do that. I could write a little, but the making money bit… that was another country (and arguably one that I anchor off these days without going ashore). Another problem: I wasn’t alone.

In the intervening years, hundreds, if not thousands of journalists, bloggers, voices, the approved blue ticks of Twitter and beyond, have had a platform – the internet – to push thoughts, ideas, agendas. Imagine if Al Queda had had that opportunity before 9/11. What would the impact have been? What would the reaction have been to invasions of the Middle East supporters of Al Queda at home? Given there was some considerable opposition to the invasion of Iraq and the fabricated WMDs, it could have been very embarrassing for Blair and Campbell, way beyond the death of David Kelly, and endless marches.

The Internet Is a Huge Responsibility

Twitter in particular is a key culprit here, but the problem goes wider.

Frankly stupid, regressive, moronic ideas have been allowed to germinate, spread, and interfere with offline discourse like some digital Japanese Knotweed, strangling logic, sense, and the principles of the enlightenment. Blogs, Facebook, YouTube, even the pages of supposedly respectable, mainstream publishers have been subverted by lunacy, whether on the topic of gender, race, democracy, or more recently, finding a balanced approach to COVID-19.

Bin Laden should have waited.

It is inconceivable that the conductors of these areas of confusion, the directors of the modern discourse, the lunatics of logic, would have been given a second glance in the era of the printed press. Straight in the bin for their deranged pamphlets.

But with the internet, social networks, sharing, and trending, these ideas are allowed to breathe and while utterly insane, manage to attract support from the similarly simple minded, or those with personal agendas that would have seen them committed a generation ago.

Twin Towers tribute

The fact is, we can’t cope with the internet. Social media is essentially what happens if humans become telepathic. The result is a morass of madness, the barely coping versus the coping the wrong way, with a small sliver of sanity struggling to stay afloat around the edges.

Bulletin boards, email, file sharing, a vast resource of reference and reading… the early internet was wonderful. That internet we had in 2001, providing the most up-to-date news we’d ever had, fulfilling that desire for information – that was arguably the best time for the internet.

As social media grew, every single opinion was inexplicably given credence (thanks Tumblr), and those ideas went mainstream thanks to graduating idiots being given jobs at prominent publications, we lost the magic of the internet.

Has the Magic Gone?

No one wants thousands of people to die on the same day again. Yet somehow, if the internet is to avoid sliding into a dumpster of depravity, it needs to change.

Too many people have free reign to utter manic irrelevances unchallenged. Society, the real world life we all enjoy (where the overwhelming majority are not, say, on Twitter), is suffering, thanks to media companies and politicians amplifying those with disorders of their sensibilities.

I probably sound like an HG Wells novel with some of the phrases I’ve used to describe the utter bullshit perverts, Islamists, racists, and literal communists utter on the internet. Is it intentional? Well, it made you think, didn’t it?

The internet – and to a smaller extent, social media – still has the time to revise, change course, and head back to sanity. But to do that, people have to take responsibility for their repulsive thoughts, attacks, and photo sharing. As long as there is anonymity allowed, and the moderators remain wholly unable to behave in a balanced manner, this isn’t going to happen.

Magic cannot be destroyed, but it can be lost. It is not lost on me that in an age where I can support my family thanks to online publishing, the magic that first attracted me to the internet 20 years ago is sadly missing.