 | May 15, 2025 | | | | | | Remember when the internet was magic? | | |  | The fifth season of Understood is all about what happened to the internet. (Illustration by Good Tape) | | | By Roshini Nair | | | I don’t want to wax nostalgic about the early internet, but in some ways, I’m part of a very lucky generation. When I was young, the internet was a slow but magical marvel where I could try and find out very important things (i.e., the plot summary for Sailor Moon) before I got kicked off for using the phone line. We got a front row seat, watching the World Wide Web transform from its awkward toddler stage into something else entirely: it got faster! It could play animations! You could SKYPE people! And eventually, via smartphone, you could carry the whole world in the palm of your hand.
But over the years, the internet began to feel less like a small, imperfect library I sometimes visited, to a loud, rundown mall I was trapped in, stuffed with things I didn’t want to buy and people I really didn’t ask to hang out with. There’s a massive disconnect between the initial promise of the internet and what we actually have today — and Understood: Who Broke the Internet? is a deep dive into how we got here.
Host Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification for this precise feeling: that the app you first signed up for has gotten progressively worse but now you can’t leave. In the first episode, he gets into Google’s meteoric rise to default search engine, and then its deliberate decay to maximize ad revenue (because, folks, the longer it takes for someone to find something on search, the more ads they’ll end up seeing along the way).
The point of this series is to create a material account of what happened, naming these policies, and the extreme lengths tech companies have gone to keep people locked into their platforms.
And it’s not all depressing.
Doctorow sat down to chat with The Current’s Matt Galloway, and he had this to say:
This is not like recovering the lost art of a fallen civilization. These were policies we had to implement before in the last Gilded Age. It was done by people who were no smarter than us who faced challenges that were no greater than ours, and if they can do it, we can, too.
Here’s to a brighter future online. | | | | | | | | | | | THIS WEEK’S NEW EPISODES | | |  | Illustration of this week’s PlayME play, The Bidding War. (Art direction and design by Aza Jin, illustration by Diana Nguyen) | | | - Isn’t real estate hilarious? OK, well, how about darkly hilarious? This week’s PlayME features the play The Bidding War, a comedic take on the insanity of Toronto’s real estate market.
- Other People’s Problems is back after a four-year hiatus! This season offers an unprecedented look at therapy using psychedelics and psychoactive drugs. Listen to the first two episodes here.
- True crime listeners, rejoice! The newest season of Uncover is coming up! Listen to the trailer for Calls From a Killer here.
- You can binge all eight episodes of Hunt for the Anthrax Killer now!
- Listeners can’t get enough of our political chat House Party, so we’re extending the celebrations until June! Listen to new eps (in The House’s feed) every Wednesday.
| | | | | | | THE CONVERSATION STARTER | | |  | | |  | A meme featuring Pope Leo XIV greeting crowds, after being named the new Pope. | | | In honour of the release of Who Broke the Internet?, and the fact that we as podcasters are irretrievably part of the internet’s fabric, I’ve got a round-up of podcasts for the chronically online. - Some of you might have heard there’s a new Pope. A not insignificant number of you realized the Pope is from Chicago because you saw it in a meme. It’s okay, we don’t judge. Shout-out to our own very online Commotion team, who dug into why the internet has such an appetite for everything Leo XIV.
- If you want to know more about memes and also generally what the heck people are talking about online, check out Wow If True, hosted by two self-described meme sommeliers: tech culture journalist Amanda Silberling and science fiction author slash attorney Isabel J. Kim, Esq. They have episodes about the Water Bottle Industrial Complex, MrBeast, and Pokémon.
- WBUR’s Endless Thread is all about weird internet lore… like that time a Redditor in Sweden said that when he went over to his friend’s home, he was expected to stay in his friend’s room by himself as the family ate their dinner. It was truly a chaotic day on the World Wide Web (you just had to be there), and hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson get into the truth behind Swedengate.
- And if you haven’t already gone back and listened to earlier seasons of Understood, are you actually chronically online? Maybe you’re healthily online? We have a whole season about fallen bitcoin king Sam Bankman-Fried that also finally explains what a bitcoin is, and a season about the genesis of Montreal’s own Pornhub: the most visited adult site on the web.
| | | | | | | That’s all, folks. Safe travels surfing the internet,
-Roshini | | | Share this newsletter | | or subscribe if this was
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