The internet is now malicious in the same ways that advertising is malicious
So the internet is full of ads and tracking, but that's not what this very short post is about. Why are advertisements bad? Modern advertisements are bad because they're all about emotional manipulation. There is a lengthy and interesting topic here, but for brevity the days are long past when advertisements were merely about informing you. For the last 30 years or more advertisements have been much more subtle in their approach and indirectly pull at some emotional string that really isn't related to the product whatsoever. These days, a lot of advertisements are the equivalent of clickbait: an outrageous an incorrect premise that is difficult to not internally rebut. (and in rebutting the absurd premise, you're ultimately siding with the advertiser who swoops in to also declare the absurd premise incorrect)
An individual advertisement is not really all that bad, but taken together you have an onslaught of minor emotional manipulations hurled at you daily; by an assailant which you can never rebuff.
It strikes me that the internet is quite a bit like this now. Advertisers and political actors have saturated almost all spaces online; side with these people, get upset about racial divisions, be outraged by X. etc. It's all so tiresome.
When I was a kid, in the 90s the internet was a true reprieve from the world. It's not like the internet was not nasty, but there was not a foreign state actor trying to get you outraged for the 90th time that day. So few people were online that whatever kind of cesspool it was, it was ours and was much less manufactured. You can go very few places without some interested party, sometimes overtly but often covertly attempting to sway your opinion or drum up emotional outrage. Much like advertisements, no individual attempt at manipulation is really that impressive, but almost no one is really well suited to stand against the onslaught of daily manipulations. And like advertisements, these cannot really be rebuffed. ie, if you had a local bully in your workplace you could stand up for yourself enough to either get him to shut up, or socially isolate him so much that his influence was totally negated. No such thing is possible on the internet. (and no the problem is not anonymity. That's a topic for another essay.) Now, the internet is a nastier and dumber place than the world. (there's great stuff online, obviously) but the internet taken as a whole is no longer an escape from the world. It's polluting the world; seeping into, poisoning your mind and the minds of people you know. Building up distance between the people you're geographically near, and isolating you in ways you scarcely understand.