was the internet a mistake?

a coin flip for salvation.

My brother once said to me that the internet either saves a person or ruins a person.

Naturally for me there existed a strong pushback against that sentiment, being born in 99’ and one of the first generations fully immersed in the internet from childhood onwards, I’d always felt that the internet was something of a faithful companion; something I couldn’t live without.

Through a childhood in the mountains of Appalachia and a family with more issues than times magazine, it’s easy to say that spending time at a computer was my own personal means of escape. Not wanting to really engage with many of the people around me, I jumped on the early internet surfboard and found myself meeting and interacting with people globally who I often found way more interesting than those who I met in my real life.

Now, I realize it’s because the coinflip resulted in heads, and I was one of the people who found themselves saved.

But did the internet really save me?

Or has it done more harm than good in the years since I’ve watched it grow alongside me?

Connected In The Age of Convenience
Or; How Convenience Becomes a Form of Burnout.

If you were to ask most people my age whether they like the internet or not, I’m sure you’d find that most have a fairly positive perception of it. To many, the internet has brought simply too many good things to be ignored. And who could blame them? Memes, communities, online safe spaces, and mass access to information all have become someone’s favorite part of the newly formed online culture.

The sheer convenience of checking when a store is open or closed, having anything you need shipped right to your front door, finding a restaurant on Google Maps, or learning a new craft such as leatherworking by having a professional walk through their processes on the screen. It’s true that all of these have contributed to a greater accessibility of knowledge and added to the list of the new innovations provided by modern technology.

But what we see as the internet now lives in stark contrast to the internet I found myself surfing when I was younger. The modern internet feels as if it is an empty husk of what used to be flourishing user-created communities and content. Forums for niche subcultures and topics connected like-minded individuals in what felt like a more involved process, where even the design of a website could feel unique.

Instead, what is felt, is an internet meant to serve the uses of a modern technocratic world. Old user-made forums now find themselves replaced with social media run by billion dollar corporations, the lines of subcommunities blurred by algorithms and hashtags.

This homogenization of online communities has led to what feels like a Library of Babel, the user is flooded with so much new information that it becomes overstimulating, and growing acquainted to this constant overstimulation creates effects such as “doom scrolling,” a modern term referring to a person’s inability to stop themselves from continuously scrolling through an endless sea of posts and wasting often hours of the day.

Included and heavily contributing to this library of Babel is the advent of modern generative AI for both images and language.

How can the user begin to examine reality when realities lines are blurred and indecipherable, and when nearly everything you interact with on the internet is or could be, in some form, fake?

This carelessness about the shape of the internet’s cultural form has significant implications for severe Blowback in the future. The amount of traffic the internet sees from both non-human and human users alike is accelerating the planet towards a grim picture of the future. Modern AI models are highly inefficient, leading to rapid carbon emissions and water consumption, just so a user may ask if it’s okay to add eggs to an omelet.

To make things worse, literacy rates across America have continued to significantly decline, leaving the average adult reading at or around a 4th grade reading level, and only 28% of adults on average read at least one book a year. This is no doubt because of the constant ingestion of media which offers little to no challenge for a person’s mind.

Internet used to be an escape,
now the escape is reality.

According to a theory that exists on the internet called the “Dead Internet Theory,” the internet as we used to know it died in or around 2016. This is because at that moment, half of the entire traffic of the internet was no longer human, whether it was “good” bots which monitored the internet’s status and did quick maintenance, or“bad” bots such as spammers, hackers, and other programs with malicious intent.

The fact that this estimate took place in 2016 is the most fascinating part, as now almost 10 years later, it’s impossible to know just how much of the internet’s traffic is human anymore, as entire social networks are filled with accounts entirely built on emulating a convincing human. All so these accounts can leave falsified positive reviews for products, sell generated content through advertisements, or to inflame communities and participate in culture wars on social media.

Now putting aside the conspiracy parts of the Dead Internet Theory, it really does beg the question of how and why we’ve allowed the internet to come to this point. What has been formed within this new emergent culture?

Perhaps an unhealthy diet for the consumer of these online tools.

Has it created a crave for convenience and shortcuts?

A desensitization to “spam” and low-effort content?

A lack of care for the contents’ intentions and consequences?

This is of course only naming a few potential issues.

The vast majority of online users may say they couldn’t live without the internet, but even if this is said in irony, the fact is it really might be true.

And thus, we arrive at burnout.

What makes us stare at our phones screens and swipe away the hours, ingesting an overwhelming amount of information, but somehow peeling away from this addiction and barely able to remember a single video?

It’s really a curiosity, mostly because I myself know exactly how terrible or bad it is for me, and yet I still find myself accidentally endlessly scrolling through YouTube shorts, the time flying nearer to my morning alarm.

Byung-Chul Han describes in his book “The Burnout Society”, a society which is hyperactivity aware of their own burnout and still yet participates in this exhaustion and tiredness willingly. This society is guided by the ideas of firm meritocracy and achievement, where one compares themselves to everyone and everything based on their own achievements vs. those they observe. The result of this is that every person gets tired in complete isolation, unable to speak about their tiredness and unable to see others’ tiredness as well.

What Byung-Chul Han is speaking on here is not a form of tiredness that comes from failing to pushback against tasks or responsibilities, or from other external factors, but instead an exhaustion formed from overextending your own identity and ego. It is an “overidentification with too many tasks.” Which have already been internalized.

My interpretation of “overidentifying with too many tasks” through the lens of the internet is simple. Everytime we see someone who we have deemed as successful or happy, our rigorous internalized critique of ourselves begins. “I am the same age as this person, why do I not have a home of my own, a successful freelance studio, the money, the fame…” and through this comparison, we become both frustrated with our own selves and accomplishments, and we begin to burnout.

Where the internet, and namely, social media comes into this is that it brings to the user more of these successful depictions algorithmically because of a culture built on “meritocracy,” views, money, watchtime, popularity, successful business, mercedes benz with a 2k gold chain. When a culture becomes purely commodified, one will find themselves inadequate for not having anything they see someone else have. A case of our highly individualist culture rearing its ugly head.

And because we see so much success in these strangers online, packed into short form content where every 10-60 seconds a new envy is unlocked, we simply want to do everything. We over-identify with too many tasks, and when we fail to meet the results we wished for, we feel as if we aren’t doing enough and need to work harder. We internalize the problem.

I’m not immune to this, in fact you’ll find the topics of this packet are entirely because I am currently attempting to bring myself back from the edge of this exhaustion.

Internalizing the problem here is a key issue because we are attempting to internalize something which is, more often than not, not at all our fault in the first place. By making the source of the problem ourselves, we ignore a thousand separate factors on why we couldn’t accomplish a certain idea. (For example, we feel we haven’t saved enough money or worked hard enough to own a house, but ignore the state of the housing market and economy which prevents us from owning a home at a young age while hammered with student debt and grocery costs. Is it really our fault we can’t save money in the first place?)

This goes as deep as the notion of laziness itself, something which was born out of a capitalist culture which demanded labor and work from us. The true idea of laziness does not really exist, and instead is the culture of “not doing enough” crawling back into our internal critique of ourselves.

Byung Chul-Han also tackles the case for the importance of idleness and meditation in our lives in Viva Contemplativa. He argues that idleness is necessary in our lives (and by that, he means true idleness, not the modern notion of hyper-stimulation through constant exposure to new or old media.)

Perhaps we need to downsize.

Human society was never meant to be as large as we have come to be, in Ecology of Freedom by Murray Bookchin, he argues that humans have subverted first nature, which is the concept of nature in its original or untampered state, and instead have created what he calls second nature.

While this statement might be considered obvious, something I often think and question as an anarchist is how things have managed to not only form into this configuration of society, but also how we have successfully been convinced that any other form of society is impossible. It’s only natural to push back against criticism of what you’ve seen as the default since you were born, but there comes a point where the denial of alternatives becomes more intention than subconscious.

Now imagine taking the entirety of the world and putting it into a convenient box that is always carried in your pocket. It’s simply too much, the system is beyond its load capacity both in an individual and collective sense.

It’s quite possible that the very fact that the internet was kept in smaller pockets and communities across individual websites and forums was the glue keeping everything together. Now that social media has taken the place of that glue, the house of cards is falling down with not much intervention.

Stepping outside of the internet in this case, I believe that this is also necessary in non-digital society as well. Humans as a species have always done better through small communities which form trades and other exchanges with each other. It’s not that a better society on a massive scale is impossible, as it most assuredly is, but it certainly becomes much more difficult to maintain each person’s individual needs when you are actively attempting to factor in 300 million, for example.

This massive online connectedness has instead led to a culture of loneliness, where we may have most people in the world at our fingertips, yet have never felt more alone. Solid proof of this is the covid-19 pandemic which spread throughout the world in the 2020s, as we all were locked within our homes and unable to leave, those who could spent almost all of their time online to attempt to replace their previous social lives.

Instead, most people found themselves feeling depressed and disconnected, even with all of their friends a phone call away.

So, Was The Internet Good For Us?

Possibly? Maybe?

Definitely not. Yet Definitely?

The internet has gone through so many shapes and forms since its inception only a short time ago, and it’s really impossible to say exactly where it’s going. Being a hopeless optimist, I would like to say that we can come back from all this and make the internet a good place again.

The internet was created so that techies could share code and access databases online. Then, it became an open source wild west, maybe even a society of thriving anarchism, as the lack of rules formed many communities and cultures.

Even the design of the time was extremely experimental and fun, it was a different era.

One could say it stands to reason that the internet was probably not good for us. Just like Icarus to the sun or the researchers of Babel, our endless want for knowledge can often be our undoing.

At the same time however, it doesn’t take too long of a search to find the well of amazing and wonderful things we’ve managed to create because of it. I certainly wouldn’t want to give away my days as a kid playing minigames in online games like Garry’s Mod and Runescape, finding friends in digital cities like Chernogorks in Dayz, or telling stories and sharing laughs in Counter-Strike surf lobbies.

Now I realize that I was simply “failing upwards,” to try to put an expression to it. I was lucky. I interacted with the good communities, found nice people, had great times, and learned a lot of life lessons on being part of a community and being good to the people around me. I think I came out alright given my youth was filled with a lot of problems.

I managed to be saved by the internet.

For every kid like me, there were others who fell into alt-right pipelines and became hateful. Others who were relentlessly bullied, and that didn’t stop in digital or physical spaces. Others who were exploited or fell prey to many scams and schemes. Others who found themselves influenced by rampant “incel” culture.

Others who were ruined by the internet.

It’s no exaggeration to say that I view these times with such nostalgic senses, but everywhere I go I hear less of my story and more of those who are ruined. It leaves me conflicted, like I experienced something special that nobody else really got to be a part of, and it’s sad that this era is gone now. Kids on the internet or gaming now are met with a consumerist culture.

Buy Buy Buy.

Skins, trash-talk, competitions,

and $20 Fortnite gift cards.

If you asked me 10 years ago if I’d ever hate the internet, I’d probably have said no.

“There’s no way I could hate all this!” I would say surrounded by an old Dell PC and a messy room, “Just look at all the fun I’m having!”

I would have never expected to become so anti-technology as I grew, but as I said before, maybe it’s not me that’s changed all that much, but instead what I watched grow alongside me all these years.

Untitled, Unventured, Unknown

What do you do when something is both,

when there are so many nuances and complexities?

When it can cause so much damage,

but also bring so much happiness?

Do you cut the cord and count your losses,

knowing that there’s some who might never find their escape?

Or do you leave it be,

hoping one day it improves?

Will it ever grow to be a utopia,

one which we always dreamed of?

Or will we continue to exhaust everything we have,

in pursuit of that utopian dream?