Bad Internet

I knew I was 'done' with the internet (at least, in the way I used to use it) because, of all things, Strictly Come Dancing.

If you're new around here, you should know that I am a big Strictly fan. My love for it has only increased in the last five years or so. I can now competently tell the difference between a normal tango and an Argentine tango. I can guess the scores from the judges with almost perfect accuracy. Ask me my top five jives in the history of the show! Go on, ask!

(please ask)

2025 has been an interesting one because it's been the first year in a long time where I genuinely couldn't tell you who was going to win it. Usually, from about halfway through, I'll have a good sense of who the champion will be; this year felt like it could be anyone's game. On a Saturday night, I like to pop online and read people's comments in real time. If I'm sitting on the sofa, with my kids half-watching and my husband not really watching at all, I want other people who understand the context and the history and the in-jokes to experience it with. It's a social show, I feel. It's one that requires discussion. But this year was insufferably toxic.

There's always been negative bullshit around Strictly online. Unfortunately, racism, sexism, and ableism rear their heads like a dripping, oozing hydra every year. But this time, I've noticed that the volume of negative comments is so much bigger. Everyone's so critical.

It started, I noticed, with professional dancer Dianne Buswell and her pregnancy. Under every post about her dancing, I saw thinly-veiled judgment posing as concern: 'Every time I watch her dance, I worry about her baby.' 'Time to hang up the dancing shoes until after the baby arrives!' 'It's just wrong.' and look, I may have made a few jokey comments about how I was essentially a slug during both of my pregnancies and could barely walk, and I was very curious about how she would adapt her dances for her growing bump, but this stream of negativity really shocked me this year. (I could talk forever about the infantilisation of pregnant women, but maybe that's for another post.)

And then I started noticing that negativity, nitpicking, and criticism about absolutely everything. The judges are too loud. Too annoying. Their outfits are weird. They're undermarking! They're overmarking! The pre-dance VTs are cringe. The dances are cringe. The song choices are cringe. The contestants are taking this way too seriously. But this one is being way too flippant, don't they know how serious this is? This choreography is awful. They're dancing way too fast. There's too many tricks in this one. On, and on, and on, and on.

The negative feelings were so bad this year that another professional dancer, Nikita Kuzmin, had to make a statement about it defending his partner because she is, and I shit you not, too good at dancing. (I'm being a bit facetious here, there's a long-standing history with Strictly viewers and how they feel about previous dance experience. If you want to know, you can ask me about it. I beg of someone to ask me about it.) Underneath the post requesting fewer rape threats and such, someone left the comment: I dislike this idea that every negative comment is 'hate'.

And I guess they're not wrong.

There's an obvious distinction between criticism and hate. Pure hatred, I would say, is the kind of homophobic, racist, misogynistic, appalling things that occasionally get thrown towards a contestant, the kind of comments that are absolutely beyond defence. The rape threats, the death threats, the insults, the sneering little jibes that serve no one. 'You have to make it all about you.' 'Oh, are you pregnant? We hadn't realised. 🙄' 'Don't like her dress. It's not exactly flattering.' I imagine a scenario in which these people come across their targets in real life: 0% chance they'd even have the guts to approach them, let alone say it to their face. These people are the cowardly custards of the world. Let's not waste too much time on them.

But there's something else going on, not just in Strictly, but in every single aspect of life. And no, it's not 'hatred', necessarily. It's just ... misery.

I spent a week or so studying some extracts from Clough's Amours de Voyage recently. In this epic poem, the main character, Claude, is an insufferable prick. (I did not use this terminology in my essay.) Terminally dissatisfied, he swans around Italy looking at some of the most beautiful and interesting places in the world, and he sums them up like this:

'Rome disappoints me still, but I shrink and adapt myself to it ... merely a marvellous mass of broken and castaway wine-pots. Ye gods! What do I want with this rubbish of ages departed?'

And to think, all this before Trip Advisor was even a thing.

Anyway. Claude is, underneath this pretentious veneer, a conflicted person. He knows he is a coward and a snob, and sometimes, he hates himself for it. But he is so negative and critical that it becomes very difficult to even enjoy reading about him. He has a terrible case of something I like to call Miserable Git Syndrome.

Miserable Git Syndrome is what happens when you see literally everything through a negative lens. Doesn't matter what it is you're viewing: all of it is wrong somehow. A granny playing Skyrim and having the time of her life? Unrepentant boomer. A long-distance boyfriend surprising his girlfriend at her graduation? She's probably cheating on him. A woman taking in foster kittens? Doing it for clout. It's what happens when your first reaction is a negative one. It's like poison infecting the brain.

And look, I've been on the internet since the '90s. I know what it is, and I know how people are. It's not a new thing, Miserable Git Syndrome. What startles me is that it's absolutely everywhere. We used to make fun of, say, the Star Wars fandom because nothing is ever good enough for them, and they seemed to despise the franchise they professed to love. Now it's everywhere. It's literally everywhere! Everything is Star Wars! And I hate it. (Not Star Wars itself, I think it's alright.) I just want to go back to when people actually seemed to enjoy things sometimes. You know?

And at risk of sounding like I'm advocating for toxic positivity (ew), I do remember a time in which the online Strictly communities, as much as they had their gripes, were generally happier than they are now. And I see the same thing happening everywhere. Doom and misery and general grumpiness.

There was a period of time in which the internet was, on the whole, not a total doomfest. I don't think I'm alone in yearning for that. In the newsletter Garbage Day, writer Adam Bumas talks about this phenomenon in 2025's biggest trend was 2015:

'Everyone wants to take a mulligan on the entire last decade. To turn back the clock to the web circa 2015, with the hope it can somehow undo all the horrors between then and 2025.'

I've seen this sentiment expressed quite often. In fact, I've expressed it quite often. In a post from early 2024, I said (and I'm sorry to quote myself, it makes me feel like a bit of a pillock), 'I do believe the internet is going to get dramatically worse over the next ten years or so.' I came to the conclusion, then, that it would be better if everything reset to the late '90s, if we went back to forums and individual websites instead of social media.

(Speaking of, my friend Jono sent me this link to Old Web Today. It's worth a look if you want a nostalgia bomb. Unironically, I want to make my website look like this.)

Do I still believe that the 90s internet would be better than this? Yeah, I do. I do believe it would be better. Will we go back? No.

As Adam Bumas concludes: 'As much as we’d all probably like to, there’s no going back.' Whether it's 2015 or 1999, we can't hit an undo button. We can't untangle the internet from social media. So now what?

It matters, what we do from here, because I don't believe we can allow Miserable Git Syndrome to become the norm. It used to be that you could put something online and deal with an amount of haters; they would rise to the surface, like scum floating to the top of a saucepan, and you could rely on the community to simply scoop them out and toss them in the sink for you. Now, you can't escape Miserable Git Syndrome even in something as lighthearted and fluffy as a Saturday night show about the Charleston. With that and the AI apocalpyse, it's hard to see how the internet will be an appealing place to visit at all.

And yet, we're all addicted to it. (Including me. Especially me.) Is it any wonder that we're all so gloomy?

As Paddy Murphy puts it in the excellently named Only A Slave Measures Their Worth By Their Productivity:

I’d wake up and let the worst parts of the world shout into my skull before I’d even taken the first piss of the day.

And there are more and more people feeling this way. All stuck in our little loops of activity, desperately looking for dopamine. Knowing that it's bad for us and coming back again and again. The bad news, I swear, it changes us. I know people who have become deeply, almost darkly cynical compared to how they used to be; I am convinced that their steady diet of internet gloom has done it. Even if you ruthlessly curate your feeds, the misery, the cynicism, the endless critical sludge, it gets to you eventually. So why are we doing it? Phone addiction reminds me quite strongly of being in an abusive relationship: the phone creates the problem, but presents itself as the solution. 'My social media addiction really revolved around wanting relief,' Murphy continues. I think there's something in that. Of wanting to feel something. Of filling a void with information, only to find it's silently poisoning you, over time.

And don't get me wrong, there's plenty about modern life that is absolutely worth feeling shit about. It is very hard to be positive when you are worrying about money, for example. (I always say, in response to the old saying 'money can't buy you happiness', 'but it can buy you security, which is a prerequisite for happiness.') I'd never tell anyone to just, like, cheer up. I've been battling depression and anxiety for well over a year now and I am fully aware it doesn't work like that. It's also very hard to be positive when you're in constant physical discomfort (again, hi! that's me!).

There are also things that are worth criticising. We should be calling these things out, confronting them, campaigning against them. Your list might be different, but here are some of mine, off the top of my head:

Things worth being miserable and angry about

• Drivers who never seem to bloody well look behind them when they are reversing/drive through red lights/seem to have forgotten they are in a massive machine that is easily capable of killing someone
• Politics (in general)
• Social media (in general)
• The growing gap between rich and poor
• Billionaires
• The current vitriol against disabled people in our politics and media
• Christian nationalism
• The obvious things (racism, homophobia, violence, etc)
• Children having their every living moment broadcast online without their consent or permission
• Children in poverty
• Climate change
• Plastic in our lakes and oceans and bloodstreams
• The possibility of war
• The cost of living

Things not worth being miserable and angry about

• Musical artists changing their direction slightly
• Films not being as good as you want them to be
• Judging panels on reality shows not being completely impartial
• Games being a 7, rather than a 10
• Games being given a 7, rather than a 10
• Games not having enough attractive women in them
• Celebrities/influencers being a bit too confident
• The wrong voice actor being cast in a franchise you feel quite fond of
• A Twitch streamer/TV series/film/game/any media in general not catering to your exact needs

I'm not saying you can't be angry about lots of things at once. You're complex! You contain multitudes! And all of this sounds very obvious and basic. I'm just saying that you're too angry about the wrong things. So a judge gives a 9 when you would have given a 6? Who gives a shit, really? It's TV. Just turn it off. It's a mild irritation, not something you should feel furious about. So a game isn't quite what you wanted it to be? Stop playing it for a bit, come back to it with an open mind later on, and if you still don't like it, play something else. These things are, objectively, not a big deal. There are so many things in life you could feel awful about at the moment. Don't do this to yourself. Don't tie yourself in knots about pointless nonsense. Don't let everyone tell you everything sucks, because it doesn't. It doesn't. Some things do, but a lot of things don't. Okay?!

You can have legitimate complaints about something. Obviously. You don't have to love everything all the time. Toxic positivity is toxic for a reason. I think one of the key things is volume. If you're looking through your phone now and the majority of comments you've left online are negative, it might be time for a rethink. It's probably not doing you any favours, in the long run, to view the world like this. We're here for such a short space of time. If a hobby isn't bringing you joy anymore, if a TV show has become something you watch because you hate it, if you're only consuming YouTube videos so you can spend hours reading bitchy comments about it online later, just stop. it. You do have the freedom to pursue things that make you actually happy, genuinely happy, in your soul. You deserve more than being tossed horrible little bits of dopamine by billionaires who depend on you being so addicted that you can't even tell how unhappy you are anymore.

How do we fix the internet and make it, you know, less like a factory for transforming otherwise nice humans into Miserable Gits?

The solution, for me, is returning to the internet as a place that I visit, rather than a thing I have access to all the time. I know how susceptible I am to hoovering up bad news. I have to cut myself off. (Now I only get my bad news when I sit down at my laptop. Which isn't ideal but is better than having it on my person, constantly, at any given moment.) My screen time settings are locked down, and my husband has the password. The only thing I can do with it is to communicate with the people I love, read school notifications, and listen to podcasts. That's literally it. I don't have YouTube or Netflix or a browser. If I want to Google something when I'm out, well, I can't. I have to rely on my comically terrible survival instincts instead.

I don't believe we can turn back the internet and make it good again. It's too late. Social media is drowning in negativity, rapant consumerism, and bots talking nonsense to each other. I can't keep filling my mind with it. I have websites I like to visit - blogs and stuff - and I sign up to all their email newsletters, so I don't miss them. And when I'm ready to visit the internet, I log on, and I read the things I want to read, and visit the communities I want to visit. I reject the notion that we need to visit the big hitters like X or Meta to be informed. If I'm going to a new country, I'm not going to hop off the plane and head straight to the tip. I'm going to visit the places I have been looking forward to seeing, and I'm going to come home relaxed and sunburnt and poor. (The metaphor fell apart slightly at the end but you see what I'm saying.)

Ultimately, for me, phone detoxes don't work; they're useful, but if I allow myself a little bit of doomscrolling, I'll fall back into the deep end. I'm a bit of an all-or-nothing person, sometimes. In this case, when it comes to phone use, I opt for nothing. It's not perfect, but it'll do.

I do want to say something here that I think is important. It's okay to not like things. What is a Saturday night for, if not for lightly poking fun at the stupid bits of a TV show you're watching? You're allowed to cringe at stuff. I, for one, almost cringed myself inside out watching Strictly a couple of times this year.

The key, I reckon, is balance. Because alongside the cringing and the teasing, I also found laughter and happiness there. It's a healthy mix of everything.

This time last year I was quite deeply depressed. I had stopped feeling anything, really. Joy, pain, any of it: depression was a black hole pulling everything into its orbit, leaving me numb. As a result, I was quite negative about most things. If that's you, I want you to know that things can get better. Unfortunately, with health care in general in the UK at the moment, you will have to advocate for yourself, loudly and consistently. You will have to fight to be heard, sometimes. And you'll have to dig deep into yourself for the remaining small spark of your old self, and grab onto it, and allow that part to put the energy into making yourself better again. You'll have to make different decisions. You'll have to actually take care of yourself. It might not feel natural. You might not feel worth it. But you are. In a year's time, you might feel completely different. Don't give up on yourself.

And if you're not depressed, but you're just kind of cynical and hate a lot of things for some reason? It might be the internet that's doing it. So that's something to think about. If Mark Zuckerberg waltzed into your home and followed you around, reading out loud a constant stream of bad news, repeatedly showing you an obviously fake image of a sad-looking grandad gazing at a birthday cake, and nagging you to 'like him so that he doesn't feel lonely', you'd phone the police and have him arrested, wouldn't you? You might even take out a restraining order. Something else to think about.

And if neither of those things are applicable? You might be an OG Grumpy Git, the ones that have always existed, throughout time. Not sure what to suggest for you, really. Have you considered getting into Star Wars?

(Only joking, omg)

The Strictly final was last night. I won't say who won. I know people who read this and who might not have watched it yet. But I enjoyed it. And I cried, obviously.

At the end of the day, these people have gone on national television and risked making absolute tits of themselves. They've advanced their careers and made money, yep, but they've also taken a big bold risk that many people wouldn't be capable of. I watched the whole final with a stupid grin on my face and I'm glad it exists, as a small, sparkly hiatus in the darkness. I'm grateful for all the things that bring me joy, even if they're not perfect, even if they're something as seemingly pointless as dancing a good jive on a Saturday night.

The Ghost of Newsletters Past

This Time in 2023: I talk about films and sex and stuff in Kaleidoscope: On Sexuality and a Letterboxd Obsession

This Time in 2024: I think about burning things in The Shortest Day: The Day The World Stands Still

More Stuff on Ko-Fi

I've been attempting to make little vlogs through Advent! (Key word being 'attempting'.) This week, I got locked out of my house, I put my clothes on inside out, I wrapped presents, I screamed a song, and I got a festive tummy bug. Hooray! You can watch them here, if you like.

And as always, if you like my work and wanna throw me a little Christmas tip, you can do so on Ko-Fi as well.