The split internet: dead, alive, and ours to build

When I look at the web today, I see a strange tension. On the surface, it looks like the internet is thriving: billions of people online, apps exploding overnight, tech giants richer and more powerful than entire nations. But underneath, something else is happening. Mid-sized companies are collapsing. Independent creators are rising. And the experience of the internet itself is splitting into two very different worlds. We’re moving out of the corporate-dominated era of the web, but not into some open, democratic utopia. Instead, we’re watching two extremes emerge:

The mass internet, dominated by tech giants, optimized for ads, surveillance, and endless consumption.
The high-agency internet, where small teams and solo builders use cheap infrastructure, open-source leverage, and niche communities to create weird, opinionated tools for each other.

It’s a split that will define the next decade. And if you’re building today, you need to know which side you’re on.

The collapse of cost and the rise of agency

For decades, building software meant infrastructure, teams, offices, and funding. A simple SaaS product required servers, full-time staff, compliance consultants, and enough cash in the bank to survive the burn. That’s why mid-sized companies were dominant: they had the resources to turn ideas into reality. That advantage is gone. Today, for $20 a month on Vercel, you can run infrastructure that would have cost $80,000 a year and four employees a decade ago. For a few hundred dollars, you can open a Delaware C-corp through Stripe Atlas — a process that once took lawyers and months of paperwork. For nothing at all, you can build on top of thousands of open-source projects, or buy a polished template that saves you months of work. Code used to be expensive. Now it’s a commodity. That doesn’t make building effortless. But it does mean the bottleneck has shifted. Success is no longer gated by access to infrastructure or funding. It’s gated by something harder to fake: taste, clarity, community, and persistence.

Rethinking scale

The old web was about mass. Tens of millions of users. VC-backed blitzscaling. A “go big or die” mentality. If you weren’t a million-dollar company, you weren’t anything. The new web doesn’t work like that. You don’t need millions anymore:

To prove an idea, you need ten people who care enough to use it.
To build a modest living, you need a hundred.
To create a comfortable, stress-free life, you need a thousand.

Indie SaaS founders are doing this right now. People you’ve never heard of are making $10k, $30k, $80k a month solving one tiny problem for one tiny niche. No press coverage. No venture funding. Just a small circle of customers who care. This doesn’t mean scale is dead. It means scale is relative. And it’s finally achievable without selling your soul to investors or the ad economy.

The dead internet theory

There’s a phrase you may have seen floating around: the Dead Internet Theory. At its extreme, it claims that much of the web is now bots talking to bots, with real human voices drowned out by algorithmic sludge. Whether or not you buy the literal claim, you can feel its spirit every time you scroll TikTok or YouTube or X. The mainstream internet feels lifeless. The same recycled takes. The same engagement-bait hooks. The same algorithm shaping what you see, what you think, what you buy. It’s efficient, endless, optimized — and hollow. You don’t discover anymore. You’re fed. That’s the “dead” internet: mass-scale, hyper-efficient, but emptied of soul. At the same time, something else is happening in the margins. A different kind of internet is being built quietly, outside the spotlight. Small communities forming around strange interests. Indie creators publishing tools that don’t make sense to anyone outside their niche. Designers and developers putting out weird, opinionated projects that would never pass a corporate product meeting. It feels alive in a way the mainstream web no longer does. This is the split internet: one half optimized for surveillance and consumption, the other for creation and agency.

Where the danger lies

The strange thing is that tech giants are not the vulnerable ones here. Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft — they’ve already won. They own the infrastructure, the platforms, and the attention of billions. If anything, they’ll only get stronger as AI makes their moats deeper. The ones in danger are mid-sized companies. The bureaucratic, bloated entities with too many managers, too much overhead, and too little focus. The companies that can’t ship fast enough to matter, but can’t shrink lean enough to survive. This is where the indie wave is hitting hardest. A solo dev today can do what once took an entire team. Not by outbuilding giants, but by outfocusing them. By solving one pain point with clarity and speed, while the incumbents drown in process. When code is cheap, labor loses value. The future doesn’t belong to companies that can afford the most coders. It belongs to the individuals and teams who can make the right things with the least wasted effort.

When code is cheap, labor loses value.The future doesn’t belong to companies that can afford the most coders. It belongs to the individuals and teams who can make the right things with the least wasted effort.

The choice

If you’re reading this, you’re standing at the edge of that split. You can stay in the dead internet: scrolling feeds that rot your brain, working jobs that pay less each year in real terms, tied to systems that see you as a data point, not a person. That path feels safe, but it’s eroding under your feet. Or you can move into the living internet: building, publishing, sharing, and stacking leverage in small, compounding ways. You don’t need millions of users. You don’t need investor approval. You don’t need permission. You just need to start. Because the internet is splitting. And the side you choose will determine whether you spend the next decade as a pawn in someone else’s game — or as a player in your own.