On a humid Friday evening in Nairobi, when the city is still shaking the dust of another workweek, something unusual begins quietly on the edges of the internet. It’s not a trend yet not the kind that earns a meme, a remix, or a headline. It’s a flicker: a handful of TikToks stitched together from Lagos, a thread on X written in Sheng and Portuguese, a Discord server of 200 strangers sharing voice notes like postcards. No one calls it anything yet. But if you look closely, you can feel a cultural weather shift.
This is where the next big thing always starts—not with virality, but with a gathering of people who believe that the internet can still feel human.
For the past three months, a new movement—if movement is even the right word—has been forming across African online spaces. It’s called The Slow Internet. Not “slow” like Safaricom downtime or buffering on an abandoned 4G tower. Slow like: intentional, intimate, unpolished, unoptimized for engagement. Slow like: anti-clout. Slow like: remembering that the internet was once a place to connect, not perform.
At first, it looked like another micro-trend. Everyone thought it was nostalgia some Gen Z longing for 2014 Tumblr aesthetics, grainy selfies, playlists titled feelings I don’t text about. But within weeks, something else became clear: people were tired. Tired of being watched, measured, algorithmically sorted. Tired of turning their lives into content factories. Tired of performing for timelines that rarely clap back.
And so, in small pockets, they began carving out softer corners of the digital world.
In Nairobi, this shift shows up in ways subtle enough to miss unless you’re paying attention. A creator with 300K followers suddenly begins posting blurry photos captioned only with a date. A college student in Thika runs a Telegram channel called roomtone where strangers send five-second audio clips of their day rain hitting matatu windows, the thrum of juakali metalwork, a mother laughing on the phone. No comments, no likes, no algorithm. Just sound.
A DJ in Rongai streams 30 minutes of unmixed music at midnight every Sunday; viewers drop in, drop out, nobody speaks. A Nairobi-born software engineer in Berlin builds a micro-blogging site that limits every user to one post a day no edits, no deletions, no metrics. You speak once, and the internet listens or doesn’t. It doesn’t matter. The point is: you posted for yourself.
If the slick, optimized side of the internet is a stage, The Slow Internet is a whispered conversation in the back of the room.
What’s fascinating is that this shift isn’t happening only in Kenya. But Nairobi wired, restless, chronically online feels like the perfect place for it to catch fire. Because no city lives in the tension between hustle and burnout quite like Nairobi. It is a place where you must be visible to survive, but visibility is its own kind of cost.
This is why the movement resonates. It answers a quiet question people here rarely say out loud: What if being online didn’t have to feel like being watched?
A few weeks ago, I interviewed a 23-year-old creator named Kendi, who has been experimenting with what she calls “digital quietness.” Her X account has 40K followers; her TikTok has double that. But lately she’s been posting nothing but screen recordings of her Notes app short fragments, never more than a sentence:
“I think we lost the plot when we started posting to prove we’re living.”
“Softness is a rebellion.”
“I want to be unsearchable.”
Her followers don’t know what to do with these posts. They stitch them, duet them, argue with them, try to turn them into discourse.
Kendi shrugs. “I think people want meaning again,” she tells me. “Not content. Meaning.”/
And maybe she’s right.
Because beneath all the chaos of digital culture beneath the noise, the trolling, the midnights spent doom-scrolling TikTok until your brain feels like a cracked screen there is a hunger. People want to feel small again, not in the sense of insignificant, but in the sense of unburdened. They want intimacy without surveillance, connection without metrics, presence without performance.
It’s ironic, of course. The internet was built to connect us. Then we built platforms that rearranged connection into competition. But every few years, something shifts. A counter-culture emerges. A rebellion forms. And if you watch closely, you can always catch its spark at the moment when people decide they want their lives back.
That’s the thing about culture: it moves quietly, then suddenly.
By the time Nairobi timelines start naming this shift by the time the memes land, the think-pieces drop, the brands swoop in with watered-down versions it will already be old. That’s how internet culture works. The real story is always in the early stages, in the quiet rooms, in the uncaptioned posts, in the people who are tired of being extracted from.
Right now, The Slow Internet feels like a refusal. A refusal to be optimized. A refusal to be a product. A refusal to be loud just for the sake of being heard.
But it’s also an invitation.
An invitation to reconsider how we show up digitally.
To ask who we are when no one is counting.
To imagine an internet where intimacy is not a performance but a practice.
Some say the movement won’t last. They argue that the internet always trends toward noise, commercialization, spectacle. But maybe they’re missing the point. In every era of digital life, there have always been people carving out hidden corners blogs, private forums, locked accounts, IRC chats, Finstas, group chats that outlive relationships.
The Slow Internet isn’t trying to dominate culture. It’s trying to preserve something essential within it.
And perhaps that’s why it feels like the next big thing because it’s not a trend but a correction. A recalibration of the relationship between technology and humanity. A reminder that we built these platforms, and we can rebuild how we use them.
One day soon, someone in Nairobi will give it a name. A hashtag will emerge. A playlist. A micro-series. A meme. Suddenly, everyone will say they saw it coming. They’ll write threads. They’ll debate it on TikTok. Someone will call it overrated. Someone else will claim they started it.
But for now, it lives here quietly, beautifully, in the pockets of the internet still untouched by the need to impress.
For now, it’s just a flicker.
And like all important cultural shifts, it begins before the feed knows your name
Sure Media Magazine 