Err yeah, everyone over 40 can. 

Well, duh; I was talking about the more modern generation. Secondly, I am 40, and JANET began helping students in 1983.

The Internet in and of itself is fine. The old Internet was a fun place... mostly. It had its awful places, but those were mostly contained, and it's always had problems with things like trolls as well as toxicity in fandom spaces, but those spaces were smaller and easier to manage (e.g., message boards like this one). But things didn't really start to go to shit until the rise of algorithm-focused social media platforms combined with the widespread adoption of smartphones. Everything got overly centralized into a handful of platforms, said platforms were often poorly moderated (probably in part due to their size), lots of people ended up in these fringe bubbles that they were driven to by the algorithm, and most of them are run by narcissistic tech bros who turn a blind eye if not outright encourage their platforms to bring out the worst in people.

But from its early days on through to the current era, there's still great things that come out of the Internet. For example, indie animation is thriving. We got creators like Vivziepop and studios like Glitch putting out quality animation. Hazbin Hotel & Helluva Boss are and probably will forever be in my Top 5 cartoons ever, and I'd never want to give them up for a future where indie animation wasn't able to be easily distributed. Same for indie games. So many great titles that might have never seen the light of day if it wasn't for the Internet. I finished Hollow Knight a couple of weeks ago and now I'm working on Silksong, and those are some damn good games (if a bit difficult in spots). Also, Mega Man was able to get a revival thanks to MM9 doing well on XBL and PSN, and if you know me you know I'm a big Mega Man fan. And while I don't play online multiplayer games all that much anymore, I've built a reliable social circle on XBL over the past 20 years.

I think the internet has had a net negative effect on mankind.
While the access to information has become so much easier, that is not exclusively positive. Too much misinformation gets spread, and people eat it up, and even real information is not something we should be flooded with 24/7. And then there are all the other negative things. I have literally met people who’s brains have been completely ruined by the internet. Boredom has become rare, even though that is a very important thing for the brain, now we have constant entertainment, and often poor entertainment such as doom scrolling. People seem more lonely than ever and they fragment themselves into smaller groups. It has made us more divided. Privacy is also gone, as is the free market, now a handful of companies just own everything. And soon AI is so good that we will be bombarded with even more garbage information that is not even made by humans. We won’t even be able to tell what is real and what is not anymore.

So yeah, society in the second half of the 20th century seemed to be heading the right way - the internet put an end to that. The internet mostly worked well from 1991-2007 or something, before smart phones and social media. Now it’s mostly a burden.