Wrangling the World Wide Web

Something that’s at the top of my mind as we roll right into the second month of this year already is how I’m approaching the internet. I’ve come across more than a few posts recently waxing lyrical about the nostalgia of the 90s and how “maybe we did it right back then.”¹

A single point of access to the endless data being beamed straight into our caveman brains; evolutionarily adapted to look for berries among the ferns and lions among the grasses (and not at all adapted to fighting misinformation and addiction-inducing content powered by the world’s most powerful machine learning algorithms). Makes sense for that single point of access to be a physical location you can arrive at and (most importantly) leave as opposed to a square² slab that fits in our pockets and our hands.

Now, it’s 2026, and I’m a guy who loves the adventure of exploring the rabbitwarren that is the modern internet so I don’t know if I even want to keep the internet restricted to a computer in another room. However, I have appreciated the time I seem to have reclaimed in my life by simply just deleting the social media apps (and YouTube) off my phone. Now reader, don’t get it into your mind, that I think I’m somehow better than you, or that I’ve solved all of my problems…turns out those 2min rests between sets at the gym are boooorring without a thread to explore. But I have found that the friction of trying to use these social media apps in my phone’s native browser is just enough to stop me mindlessly scrolling for hours on end. Not all the time; sometimes I’ll get lost in a 45min ‘Would I Lie to You’ compilation on Facebook Reels, but often enough that I’ve seen my screen time significantly decrease.

I’m no saint, but it’s a work in progress.

I’m sure I’ll discuss this in more detail in a future post, but I want 2026 to be the year where I create more than I consume.³ By create though, I also just mean consider and then document my own thoughts and opinions on the topics I’m watching, learning, absorbing. I do miss the early days of the pandemic⁴, where hours felt longer, and my mind still felt hungry and curious. The notebooks I filled with ideas and thoughts, most left laying collecting dust, but perhaps I’ll flip through them again the next time I move and stumble across them as I’m packing boxes (any excuse to procrastinate am I right?). I miss the days spent in discussions with my mate, Tom, preparing and publishing the Tom, Stu and You Podcast where the format forced me to at least research (read: Google) a topic and spent some conscious, considerate time pulling on threads and emotions to package into a semi-coherent (🤞) opinion that I wouldn’t regret in the near future. That’s the intent I hope, nay, expect to bring throughout the rest of the year. This blog will serve as a digital record of success.