The (beautiful) internet I grew up with no longer exists.
I was born in the 70s.
I left high school in 1991 — the era of dial-up modems and Bulletin Board Systems. Small, strange, deeply specific corners of the internet where enthusiasts gathered around shared interests.
You didn’t “build an audience” back then.
You found your people.
Or maybe more accurately — they found you.
At that point, the web felt … human.
Sparse. Slow. Intentional.
There was space.
And because there was space, there was signal.
You could feel it when you stumbled across something that mattered — even if you couldn’t yet explain why.
Rough edges. Personality. Taste.
It felt like something someone had made … not something optimized into existence.
⦿
There was a moment — early on — where a small team of misfits (John Carmack and John Romero) at id Software did something unusual.
They built a game … and gave part of it away — the old shareware model.
It spread quietly.
Copied. Passed around. Shared between people who recognized something in it.
And if you were one of them, like I was — you didn’t hesitate.
You called in … or mailed an order … and bought the rest directly from them (I did).
No publisher.
No retail shelf.
No middle layer taking most of the upside.
Just a tiny team … and the people who got it.
People like us.
Romero’s stepfather didn’t believe game development was a real vocation.
“You’ll never make any money making games,” he’d say. “You need to build something people actually need.”
And yet…
At its peak, Wolfenstein 3D was pulling in around $200,000 a month.
Then DOOM arrived — the real “holy shit” moment…
… and within a year, they were doing millions a month.
They’d accidentally built a money-printing machine.
Not because they “marketed” better.
But because they controlled the relationship.
They built for the people who felt it — people who cared.
⦿
Then something changed.
Not all at once — but gradually, then suddenly.
By the mid-2000s, the architecture of the internet began to shift.
Platforms scaled. Feeds emerged. Algorithms took over distribution.
The web didn’t just grow — it reorganized itself around attention.
And over time, something subtle — but important — was lost.
Not access.
Not reach.
But atmosphere.
Today, the public internet doesn’t just feel different.
It often feels … hostile.
Bots.
Slop.
Trolls.
Algorithms amplifying outrage because outrage travels further than nuance.
This isn’t a bug.
It’s the system working exactly as designed.
And the incentives are clear.
Be louder.
Move faster.
Publish more.
Compete harder.
Spend enough time inside that system and — quietly, almost imperceptibly — it starts to shape how you think.
Not just about marketing.
About your work.
You stop asking:
What is worth building?
And start asking:
It doesn’t feel like a compromise.
It feels like … adaptation.
Iteration.
Playing the game. Toeing the line in order to compete.
⦿
But underneath it, there’s often a quiet friction.
A sense that something isn’t quite lining up.
You care about craft.
You have taste.
You’re not trying to “win the internet.”
You’re trying to build something that matters.
And yet…
The environment seems to reward the opposite.
Noise.
Urgency.
Endless output.
And increasingly…
Because attention, it turns out, isn’t neutral.
Some of it compounds.
Some of it corrodes.
Most people accept this as the cost of being visible.
They tolerate:
- trolls
- bad-fit customers
- constant, low-grade friction
As if it’s just … part of the deal.
It isn’t.
Not quite.
Something else has been happening.
Quietly.
Almost beneath the surface.
Continue (Page 2 of 7) →~ André
P.S.
I’ve received a few emails asking — wondering — why the yellow gradient, only only on this page?
While I prefer not breaking the ambiguous spell of the implicit — and this letter has many — I’ll make an exception this time.
Two reasons.
First — yellow is my favorite color. :)
Second (and more to the point), I borrowed the gradient from the home page — it’s the only other place on the site where it appears.
It’s meant to signal a transition. Something new. Potential. A kind of “sunrise.” The beginning of something.
On the home page, that marks entry into the World.
On this Invitation page, it’s a similar threshold — this time, moving from the outer world to the inner.
That’s it. No more spoilers.
