There's a particular kind of knowledge that disappears not because it's wrong but because the conditions that produced it no longer exist. The pre-internet world — and I mean the actual texture of daily life before always-on connectivity — is becoming that kind of knowledge. Not because the people who lived through it are dying off, though they are. Because the experiences themselves are structurally incompatible with how life works now. You can't stream what it felt like to not know something and have no immediate way to find out.

Friction was the defining feature, though nobody called it that at the time. Information took effort. You went to a library, or you asked someone who might know, or you simply didn't find out. Communication had latency built in — you wrote a letter, waited days, received a reply that might or might not address what you'd asked. Choices were constrained by geography, opening hours, physical stock. None of this felt romantic while it was happening. It felt normal. The constraints were invisible in the way that water is invisible to fish.

What those constraints trained was a particular kind of cognitive stamina. When finding information costs time and effort, you develop a relationship with the information you do find. You hold it longer because acquiring it required investment. You synthesise rather than accumulate, because accumulation is expensive. You commit to decisions because reversing them means repeating the friction. Research published in Frontiers in Public Health found that intensive internet search behaviour measurably affects how we encode and retain information — when we know Google will remember for us, we let it, and something in the cognitive chain softens.

I'm not sure "softens" is the right word. It's more like a muscle that adapts to a lighter load. It doesn't atrophy overnight. It just gradually stops being asked to do what it once did.

The spatial memory research makes this uncomfortably concrete. A study in Scientific Reports found that people with greater lifetime GPS use showed worse spatial memory during self-guided navigation, and that the decline was progressive. The more you outsource, the less you retain. This isn't generalised anxiety about screens. It's measured cognitive change in a specific domain, and it maps onto the broader pattern: navigation, arithmetic, phone numbers, directions to a friend's house. Each delegation is individually trivial. Collectively, they represent a wholesale transfer of embodied competence to external systems.

The social texture was different too, in ways that are harder to quantify. Relationships were local, bounded, and — this is the uncomfortable part — more durable partly because leaving was harder. You couldn't algorithmically replace your social circle. You couldn't find a new community by searching for one. You were stuck with the people near you, which meant you developed tolerance, negotiation, and the particular skill of maintaining connections with people you didn't entirely like. I'm not romanticising this. Some of those constraints were suffocating. But they produced a form of social resilience that frictionless connection and equally frictionless disconnection don't replicate. The exit costs created a kind of civic muscle memory. When you couldn't easily leave, you learned to stay — imperfectly, sometimes resentfully, but with a persistence that builds something. What it builds is hard to name. Continuity, maybe. The knowledge that not every disagreement requires a door.

There's something related happening with culture, and it troubles me more than the cognitive stuff. Before global networks, culture varied sharply by place. Music scenes were geographically specific. Fashion moved through cities at different speeds. Slang was regional. You could travel two hundred miles and encounter genuinely different aesthetic assumptions. The internet collapsed that distance, and what rushed in to fill the gap was algorithmic homogenisation — platforms optimising for universal palatability, training data drawn overwhelmingly from dominant cultural archives, trend cycles that now complete in weeks rather than years. The result isn't the death of diversity exactly. It's the flattening of it. Regional difference still exists, but it's increasingly performed rather than lived.

I've written before about objects that outlive their context — the particular unease of encountering something from the pre-internet era that still functions perfectly but belongs nowhere. A compact disc, a theatre programme, a paper map. These objects assumed finitude. They were made for a world where things ended, where events didn't persist in feeds, where places could close and stay closed. When I handle them now, the dissonance isn't aesthetic. It's temporal. They're evidence of a different relationship with time itself.

That temporal difference matters more than people tend to acknowledge. Digital platforms compress time into an endless present. Feeds refresh. History scrolls away. Nothing quite arrives and nothing quite leaves. The pre-internet experience of time was linear in a way that sounds banal until you try to describe what replaced it. Waiting was an experience, not a failure of the system. Seasons structured cultural consumption because distribution channels were physical. Anticipation — real anticipation, the kind that builds over weeks — required scarcity. When everything is available immediately, anticipation doesn't intensify. It evaporates. There was a rhythm to cultural life that physical distribution imposed whether you wanted it or not. Albums had release dates that meant something because you couldn't hear them early. Television programmes aired once, and if you missed them, you missed them. Books arrived in bookshops and either found you or didn't. This sounds like deprivation described from the outside, but from the inside it felt like structure. Things had their time, and that time was finite.

Nicholas Carr has been making versions of this argument since The Shallows in 2010, and his more recent Superbloom extends it into the social fabric. The concern isn't that the internet is making us stupider in some crude measurable way. The concern is that it's restructuring cognition and social behaviour so thoroughly that we're losing the capacity to notice what's changed. When the baseline disappears, critique becomes harder. You need a reference point to identify a shift, and if nobody remembers the reference point, the shift becomes invisible.

This is the part that feels urgent to me. Not the nostalgia — nostalgia is cheap and usually dishonest. The urgent part is the comparative function. Remembering what pre-internet life actually felt like — not a golden-age fantasy of it but the real experience, including the boredom and the limitations — provides a structural check on the present. It lets you distinguish between convenience and cognitive cost. It lets you ask whether frictionless access to everything has made us richer or just busier. It lets you notice that memory itself has changed shape, not through damage but through delegation.

Without that baseline, you get what I'd call passive inevitability. The assumption that the present is the only way things could possibly work. That algorithmic curation is simply how culture operates now. That constant connectivity is a law of physics rather than a design choice made by specific companies for specific commercial reasons. Every system benefits from the erasure of its alternatives, and the pre-internet world is the most comprehensive alternative to the digital present that most living people can personally recall.

None of this is about wanting the old world back. Plenty of it was terrible. Information gatekeeping was often unjust. Communication barriers isolated people who needed connection. Cultural insularity bred ignorance as often as it bred character. The point isn't that friction was good. The point is that friction was informative. It taught things — patience, commitment, tolerance of uncertainty, the ability to sit with not-knowing — that the frictionless environment doesn't teach and may be actively unlearning.

I keep coming back to something that probably doesn't belong in this argument. When I was young, you could be unreachable. Not dramatically, not by fleeing to a cabin — just by leaving the house. No one could contact you. No one expected to. The hours between leaving and returning were genuinely yours in a way that requires explanation now, which is itself the point. That availability wasn't a moral obligation. That silence between people wasn't a crisis. That the default state of a human being was not "online."

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