I Miss The Old Internet
I miss the old days of social media.
When we’d post without a second thought — our average-looking lunches, our blurry nights out, our bad angles and good times — and not give a damn who saw it.
Before every caption was strategic.
Before every post needed purpose.
Before every story had to sell something.
The early internet was messy and magical and real.
This curated, optimised, “content strategy” world feels… heavy.
It feels like the opposite of what we came here for in the first place.
The Beginning of Connection
I still remember the first time I connected to the internet. I was 11 (25 years ago!)
That hum of dial-up, the grainy glow of the monitor. Suddenly, the whole world — every question, every idea — was right there at my fingertips. It felt like magic.
No surprise I built a career in digital marketing. The internet was my playground, my portal. I grew up with it, was shaped by it, and in many ways, helped shape it back.
But lately, I’ve started to feel a kind of quiet (but getting louder every day) resistance.
Like I’ve become a citizen of a world I’m no longer sure I want to live in. And I don’t think I’m alone in this.
A Generation in-Between
At 35-turning-36, I know I’m part of a rare generation — I've heard of it being referred to as the 'bridge generation'.
Old enough to remember life before the internet, young enough to have built our lives on it.
We are the translators between two worlds: those who still don’t know how to open a PDF (no offence, Mum!), and those who have never known a world without Wi-Fi.
I think back to when I was young, and mobile phones were just starting to appear. My dear dad (bless him) wary ahead of his time, warned they’d invite a kind of privacy invasion we’d never be able to un-invite. I laughed at the time, thinking he was just being an old fuddy duddy. But now, I think he was onto something. It all started with the damn phones.
What We’ve Lost
I feel a real sense of grief for what we’ve lost.
For lazy afternoons in the garden without a single notification.
For conversations uninterrupted by screens.
For days that didn’t need to be documented to feel real.
Today, everything’s ‘content’.
Even our most human moments come with a silent prompt: “Should I post this?”
And it breaks my heart a little to think the next generation won’t know what it’s like to truly disconnect. For many (if not most), their photos will hit the internet before they even understand what the internet is.
The Bigger Questions
I don’t think we’ve begun to understand what our constant online exposure is doing to us — as individuals, as a culture, as a species.
The addiction it’s creating.
The disconnection it’s causing.
The division it’s amplifying.
We tell ourselves the internet is neutral — that it just reflects who we already are. That “it’s not changing us, it’s exposing us” (as Gary Vee says)… But how can we really know that?
How can we know the agenda of algorithms, or what big tech is truly optimising for?
How can we trust the very systems we built, when we barely understand them anymore?
And now, as AI steps onto the stage, I can’t help but wonder... where does it all lead?
And more importantly, how do we use it to make us better, not just faster?
A New Kind of Internet
Maybe the question isn’t how to escape the digital world, but how to humanise it again.
To create and share in ways that feel real.
To make content that connects, not just converts.
To tell stories that sound like people, not robots.
That’s what I want Wildbrand to stand for. That's the legacy I want to create here.
A new kind of digital presence; one that remembers where we came from.
Maybe the future of branding isn’t about being the loudest online or producing the most content at breakneck speed.
Maybe it’s about being the most human.
At Wildbrand, we’re on a mission to bring the human back into the brand-building process.
To remind people that connection still matters — and it always will.
