The Internet You Missed: A 2025 Snapshot

There are many internets. There are internets that are bright and clean and whistling fast, like the trains in Tokyo. There are internets filled with serious people talking as if in serious rooms, internets of gossip and heart emojis, and internets of clowns. There are internets you can only enter through a hole under your bed, an orifice into which you writhe.

It’s a chromatic thing that can’t hold a shape for more than an instant. But every year, I get to see the internet through the eyes of subscribers to The Intrinsic Perspective. The community submits its writing available online, and I curate and share it.

The quality was truly exceptional this year—I found that they all speak for themselves, and can all be approached on their own terms, so I organized them to highlight how each is worth reading, thinking about, disagreeing with, or simply enjoying; at the very least, they are worth browsing through at your leisure, and finding hidden gems of writers to follow.

Please note that:

• I cannot fact check each piece, nor is including it an official endorsement of its contents.

• Descriptions of each piece, in italics, were written by the authors themselves, not me (but sometimes adapted for readability). What follows is from the community. I’m just the curator here.

• I personally pulled excerpts and images from each piece after some thought, to give a sense of them.

• If you submitted something and it’s missing, note that it’s probably in an upcoming Part 2.

So here is their internet, or our internet, or at least, the shutter-click frozen image of one possible internet.

1. “Wisdom of Doves” by Doctrix Periwinkle.

Evolved animal behaviors are legion, so why do we choose the examples we do to explain our own?

According to psychologist Jordan Peterson, we are like lobsters. We are hierarchical and fight over limited resources….

Dr. Peterson is a Canadian, and he is describing the North Atlantic American lobster, Homarus americanus. Where I live, lobsters are different.

For instance, they do not fight with their claws, because they do not have claws…. Because they do not have claws, spiny lobsters (Panulirus argus) are preyed upon by tropical fish called triggerfish…. The same kind of hormone signaling that made American lobsters exert dominance and fight each other causes spiny lobsters to cluster together to fight triggerfish, using