The Slow Internet: Rediscovering the Web as a Reading Place
The case for RSS, personal blogs and email newsletters — the quiet parts of the internet where good writing still lives.
There was a period, roughly between 2005 and 2012, when the internet felt like a very large library with excellent lighting. You subscribed to a hundred blogs. You read them in the order they arrived. There was no algorithm deciding what you needed today.
Most of that internet is still there. It is simply hidden underneath the loud one.
The slow internet — personal blogs, independent newsletters, long-form essays published on someone's own domain, RSS readers quietly refreshing in a background tab — is still where most of the writing I love actually lives. It has not gone away. It has only stopped competing for attention with the parts of the web that shout.
The recipe for rediscovering it is simple. Install an RSS reader. Subscribe to twenty writers whose sentences you trust. Read them in the mornings, with coffee, before opening anything with a feed. Reply, occasionally, by email. You will remember what the web was originally for.
The internet has not made us worse readers. Certain products on the internet have. They are avoidable. Turn towards the slow web. It is still there.
