Escape by Marie Le Conte review - Now that we doomscroll, surfing the web belongs to a distant age

Being on the internet in its early years was like being at the best party ever held - all the most interesting people were there, having fun while everyone worked out what this new thing really did and what it was for.

The internet now is slick and stage-managed, guided by the hidden and not-so-hidden hand of the Algorithm. Its early DIY spirit has been pushed out by the force of advertising dollars and the possibilities of global commerce. We don't surf the web anymore - we doomscroll.

Marie Le Conte looks back at the time the internet went from being a place she hung out with and made friends to a place shared with work and adults. Now the grown ups have joined in, the internet has lost its sparkle. But don't forget some of the grown ups now themselves grew up online.

Le Conte, a French-Moroccan journalist in London, writes she was born in 1991, the same year as the World Wide Web was opened to the public, bringing the internet into people's homes. Le Conte writes of growing up with the internet, a member of the first generation where stripping away an online life leaves no life at all - and with no real memory of how life was before.

The generation that had this unique experience, Le Conte says, was born between 1985 and 1995. Any earlier, you would remember a pre-internet life and any later, you wouldn't even know there was a difference.

I was born in 1998, the same year Google was set up. I recognised the internet Le Conte described - blogs, message forums, text-based chat, a list of websites visited consciously before the era of endless suggested scroll - but I was too late for the best bits of the party.

Le Conte describes a time of hedonistic anonymity, websites like Omegle, which partnered you with a random person for a text- or video-based chat. Confessional and personal blogs. An audience removed from your real-world persona. No one was checking to make sure you were who you said you were - or that you were giving your proper age. Personality shaping stuff.

The internet was also house-bound. Le Conte makes a nice observation that saying you were AFK - away from keyboard - now, when there was likely a smartphone in your pocket, would be silly. Not that long ago, it was much easier to turn off a modem and step back into real life.

Now there's the thing: real life. I cannot see the online world as anything other than not real life. Perhaps that's my personality or the time I was born. But the kids who came after me - with no memory of waiting patiently to watch Play School at 3pm on a television, renting videos for the night, going with Mum and Dad to collect snapshots processed from film in the city or just having to wait to find out stuff, instant answers not always in reach - might not make the distinction like I do.

It's probably a silly distinction now. The change to human thought and work, communications and relationships as a result of the internet has been profound - even if you're too young to know the difference. I spend a large part of my day at work using the internet, and a considerable amount of my own time, too. But like Le Conte, I know it has changed because it wasn't always this way. It felt like we used to have more control.

Le Conte's book - which reads like a long and clever email from a friend, quoting interesting people - does not wallow in nostalgia but is at its strongest describing the potential the internet had in those years when fewer adults were in charge. There was a period when Le Conte scored free tickets to London Fashion Week, having registered with the press office with her blog. She had not written about fashion before and didn't write anything in the years she went. The ruse was up when organisers wanted to see what she had to show for her complimentary tickets. You wouldn't get away with it now.

The internet is no longer somewhere to easily muck around with few consequences. See: conspiracy theories, fake news, the return of fascism and immature jokes being the cause for dismissal when found online a decade later. And I'm sure the 36-year-old Finnish Prime Minister might have a thought or two after the controversy over her dancing at a party was stoked by a video shared on the internet. The separation between social spheres is gone, too.

"How can the internet feel so small and personal when deep down, it is so obviously boundless, cold and uncaring?" Le Conte asks. "One moment, it feels like we were handed all the power in the world; another, it becomes clear that none of this every truly belonged to us."

Le Conte writes near the start of Escape the 2020 experience, when suddenly people were holding work drinks online to avoid the pandemic, made her want out of an online world converging with an offline one. It's not the party it once was - now the people you make fun of online might well hear you do it. While I still find it hard to comprehend online and life and real life as one, online life has come to demand more of the behaviour expected in real life.

The notion that things were "better when I was young" is a heady one that most often isn't true. But in the case of the internet, it probably is right. To be young on the internet in the 2000s was to be let loose in a choose-your-own-adventure wonderland, where they were still figuring out the rules. Sure, it wasn't the safest, but most got through unscathed - just different, maybe, to how they'd have been without internet exposure. Now it's a path guided more and more by dark forces, platforms desperate to hold the attention of young minds and shape them with clever psychological trickery.

Le Conte has witnessed that decline and fall but stays logged in - it's certainly possible she will have tweeted three things in the time you took to read this - and good luck to any journalist who thinks they can extract themselves from the internet anyway. The internet has shaped Le Conte's generation and the ones that followed, whether they wanted it to or knew it would.

But, remember, it felt harmless at the time.