Good Internet: Struthless

Megan Bidmead

15 Feb 2026 — 3 min read

As I said last month, I've been feeling pretty negative about the internet as of late. It's hard to hang onto optimism when everything feels tremendously crap. It turns out, what I needed was a friendly Australian man to tell me that human creativity is great, that making stuff is useful, and that you should believe in both yourself and others to bring beauty into the world.

Enter Struthless! He is this Australian man! And his channel has had a real positive impact on my life and the way I want to see the world. I couldn't start the Good Internet series with anyone else.

Struthless is the internet nickname of Campbell Walker, a dad, illustrator, and author of the bestselling book Doom and Bloom.

I see Walker as a kind of grounded positive force for good. Nothing about his message is empty. He is the kind of person that has wrestled with some dark shit and walked back out of it clutching hope in his fist. I'm not sure this imagery is quite working for me, but do you get the gist? This is the kind of positivity that acknowledges reality, rather than running away from it. I should have probably just said that last sentence, that would have summed it up better.

The vision of the channel is to encourage people to make stuff. That when the world feels cold and frightening, when you're flitting between anger and frustration and overwhelm and emptiness, when you're feeling run down and exhausted, the answer is to just make stuff. Replace doom scrolling with creativity. Back yourself and your ideas and run with it.

Campbell is coming to very similar conclusions to me about the internet, social media, and modern life in general. He's part of what I consider to be a wave of people intentionally seeking a slower, less instantly gratifying, but ultimately more fulfilling lifestyle.

If you're a creative person, you might be wondering what the point of it all is. Why bother to keep making stuff now? And in comes Campbell with the obvious answer: because it's good for you. And because it matters.

I've been thinking a lot about deconstruction lately. In Christian circles, this word occasionally conjures fear. Some feel threatened by the prospect. I felt threatened by the prospect. Deconstruction relates to the tearing apart of a thing, and that sounds violent, disruptive, unfriendly. There's a lot of talk about reconstruction, too. 'Don't deconstruct without reconstructing!' is the advice, but too often, that advice doesn't mean build back your faith better, it simply means come back to roughly the place you were at the beginning.

But on the whole, they're right. Deconstruction is necessary, but so is the reconstruction. Nature abhors a vacuum. If you don't consciously rebuild something in a gap, something will rush to fill it regardless. I see Campbell as a reconstructionist, a rebuilder, someone who is able to look at the rubble and see an opportunity for something new within it. We need people like this, I think.

Go check out his channel, buy his book, dive into his world, take what resonates with you and let it sit in your heart for a while, and see what the outcome is. I reckon it'll be good. <3