The internet is not the answer to any of your questions. It’s a depressing cybersphere saturated with images of Kim Kardashian, inane chatter about Instagramming someone else’s #brunch, shady organisations that gather your data before selling it to people who use it to hone their advertising techniques, and all-powerful websites like Amazon operating at record efficiency while treating workers like machinery. It’s a cut-throat, winner-takes-all marketplace where everyone has a personal brand and nobody gets paid for their creative output. It’s a money-spinning, cynical, anger-driven Twitter mob who will take you down if you so much as express the beginnings of an opinion.

God, the internet is awful. Why haven’t you clicked off this article, closed your laptop and left that artisanal coffee shop already, free to pursue your nobler dreams?

This was the general consensus at an event I attended last week to help launch Andrew Keen’s new and much celebrated book, The Internet is Not the Answer. In a nutshell the outlook was this: Facebook and Twitter are bad for your mental health; Uber and Airbnb are taking good hardworking people’s jobs; Reddit is replacing news publications with rumours (and nobody minds); and Google – which controls nearly 90% of the market in Britain – is doing all sorts of underhand things with your information that nobody quite knows about and you probably wouldn’t even want to if you did.

In a sense, I have to agree. I have never gained any valuable insights into the world by scrolling through my Facebook feed; “Laura is lovin Ibiza with the best boyf in the world” has not added to my consciousness in the same way as reading a passage from Plato’s Symposium. And yes, I do find it vaguely terrifying that if I mention Topshop jeans in an email to a friend, I then find them advertised on screen when I next search for something on Google. I’m ready to agree that Spotify doesn’t pay its featured artists adequately, and that Uber has gone down badly with anyone who drives a black cab around London.

These are all obvious surface problems with the online world. People’s social lives are constructed into little media-friendly facades – but then it never was the done thing to reply to “How are you?” with a long list of everything from your fear of open spaces to your grandmother’s haemorrhoids. Reddit is full of rumour-mongering – but then gossip has always existed in the real world too. People are losing their jobs left and right to robots and algorithms – but such is and always has been the way of technological progress.

As someone who was once memorably told by a fellow Twitter user that he wanted to “shove a rocket up [my] vagina”, I never really imagined myself arguing against the claim that the internet is not the answer. Scrolling through listicles on BuzzFeed hasn’t widened my knowledge base, getting regularly insulted across every social media platform hasn’t bolstered my self-esteem, and every time I read about another celebrity’s supposedly deficient “bikini bod”, I feel genuinely depressed. But there is one major thing that I owe the internet: my career.

And that’s why I have a fundamental problem with the latest fashionable claim that the internet systematically ruined our lives and society, that we all sleepwalked into a hyper-connected dystopia. It may be an often irritating, frustrating place full of raging Twitter users, but it’s a much more meritocratic one than the society I see outside my window. Interesting content gets shared between people on social media, regardless of who produced it, with no connections needed.

If you grew up, as I did, in a single-parent family in the north-east, hundreds of miles from anywhere the media pays attention to, you can still create yourself a platform and promote it on a more or less equal footing with someone doing the same thing in a boarding school whose parents are shacked up in a £3m house. Not every worthy online venture is a success, of course, but a lot are – and many attract the attention of publishers, talent scouts, agents and record labels.

Andrew Keen’s book rails against the supposed loss of creativity, but writers, musicians and artists now make their money in other ways. They are paid less for their content directly: often, articles and songs have to be given away for free. But real-life experiences now come at a premium. Concert tickets can sell for hundreds. Speaking engagements are lucrative. While unpaid internships and parental connections are more important in the outside world than ever, all you need in the digital age is an internet connection to have a chance at making it. With access to the world wide web, a person is no longer trapped at the bottom of the social ladder with no way up in sight. It’s a chance, not a guarantee – but it’s something where there once was nothing but luck.

Corporations that eat up small businesses and abuse their employees are not a problem with the internet; they are a problem with capitalism. The cybersphere that privileges Google and Amazon is a reflection of our existing society, rather than a gross addition to it. Keen argues that the most important thing to do is to take control of the internet, and impose sensible restrictions on it, while in actual fact it’s the bankers and tax dodgers in the real world (hello, HSBC) who need to be brought into line. The online world can wait.

The United Nations declared internet access a human right four years ago because it recognised that the information and opportunities are socially and economically important. Of course, the internet may not look like the answer to someone already at the top, comfortably evangelising about the mistakes of Mark Zuckerberg. But for those at the bottom, it’s not just an answer – it’s a lifeline.