the dead internet

or, the emptiness

Sometimes I share works in progress with my cowriter Kyle Muntz or the Broken River Writer’s Collective and sometimes they share things with me (this is the only good part of having writer friends) and sometimes someone sends you something that’s very similar to something you’ve written before.

The Broken River Books Collective Primer

In this instance, it’s a piece called Heat Death of the Internet by Gregory Bennett published at takahe. It’s a brief and simple piece but it gets at part of the annoyance and frustration of being a person who uses the internet most of the day, which describes probably every single person reading this now. Me included.

An excerpt:

You want to order from a local restaurant, but you need to download a third-party delivery app, even though you plan to pick it up yourself. The prices and menu on the app are different to what you saw in the window. When you download a second app the prices are different again. You ring the restaurant directly and it says the number is no longer in service. You go to the restaurant and order in person. You mention that their website has the wrong number and the woman behind the counter says they have to contact the company who designed the site for changes, which will cost them, but most people just order through an app anyway.

It’s a pretty good little piece.

And while I could write a whole thing about this, I suppose I may as well share what I wrote a few months ago which has now become a book.

Originally, I was writing an essay for this here newsletter about the internet and artificial intelligence but it just kept growing and growing until it’s become book-length. I’ve pitched it to a publisher so we’ll see what comes of that.

The following excerpt is from about 60 pages into the essay but I think it stands alone well. The rest of the book deals with a great many topics, including Robinson Jeffers, Rene Descartes, Rebecca Solnit, Ursula K Le Guin, near death experiences, Catholicism, and so on.

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During Covid, a friend of mine bragged about how they had not left their apartment in months. They wanted me to know and understand how seriously they were taking the pandemic.

            All well and good.

            Never once did they seem to consider that their ability to remain in their apartment without risking infection or infecting anyone else relied upon them forcing gig workers and hourly employees to risk infecting themselves or infecting others. The shoppers that scoured the grocery store or who made their salads and burritos at fast casual restaurants didn’t have the luxury of working from home. The delivery drivers who had to stop in the restaurants or grocery stores to pick up orders and then drive to your home to leave it outside so that you never had to even consider the fact that real life people are out there doing these tasks based upon your whims.

            Did you ever consider them?

            Beyond calling them heroes on Instagram or Twitter, did you ever consider what you were forcing other humans to do while you criticized anyone not taking the pandemic as seriously as you?

            How dare these people go out in public. Why can’t they just stay home and be a real hero like me, who has seen no one in weeks?

            You put them there.

            You forced them into shops, into the street. And then you called them scum for being there.

            We were all in the pandemic together, or so we blithely told ourselves.

            We sat alone in our houses. We poured ourselves into our screens. Into our TVs and laptops and phones and we confused this for connection. We typed with our thumbs and all ten fingers. We left voice notes and recorded videos. We used Zoom to talk to our friends, to play board games, to do happy hours. We played games online and hung out.

            And when we finished one task, we picked up our phones and stared at it, swiping our filthy fingers across the glass screen. In just the right kind of dark and light, we saw our reflection and recoiled and maybe set our phone down for a minute. We stared at our wall. Then at our TV, at whatever we were watching there. Then we let our eyes fall to the laptop cradled by our legs as we sat lotusly on our couch as the sun fell and night rose and the glow of the moon made us feel alone and so we picked up our phone again and tilted it just so, avoiding any errant reflection of ourselves while we scrolled past memes, past ads, past sad birthdays where no one was there, past ads, past pictures of your friends cat, past ads, past your best friend’s newborn, past ads, past ads, past ads, past some calamity happening far away.

            And when the clock told us it was late enough to go to bed we closed our laptop and turned off our TV and went to our bed and pulled the covers high and curled our body fetally like we were once more enwombed and we thumbed open our phone now held three inches from our face and let its glow shrink our pupils to dots while we scrolled past ads and we scrolled past a famous person monologuing about staying strong and staying connected and we scrolled past ads and more ads and we saw our friends spiraling and we thumbed them a heart emoji and messaged I’m here if you need anything and we scrolled past ads and some screengrabs of funny tweets and we sent that to a few of our friends and some of them even responded right away with a heart or laughing emoji and we scrolled past ads and some more ads and this one we clicked on and we scrolled past women exercising in tight fitting clothes from low angles and ads and sponsored content and ads and women pushing you to their onlyfans and men selling some workout plan or business course and ads and ads and ads and when we got angry enough or when our eyes unfocused for a moment and we looked at the time we finally set our phone down in the bed just a foot away from our faces and we tried to sleep and when we couldn’t we took an ambien and grabbed our phone and eventually put it down again and found sleep or some approximation of it before we woke up to our phone vibrating its alarm and we grabbed it and thumbed over to responses to the memes we thumbed over to our friends at 2am and no one said anything beyond the emojis and we got up and went to the bathroom and scrolled through ads and workout routines and sponsored content for diet regimes or healthy snacks or almost naked women or the newest Marvel movie and sometimes we even saw our friends and their family and pets and then we wandered over to our work laptop and booted it up and answered a few emails and since we were home we turned on the TV and let that run while we answered emails and even sent some of our own and sat in meetings no one cared about and we scrolled and we scrolled and we typed on our laptops and decided we’d try watching all six seasons, finally, of The Sopranos because why not and we scrolled through the best parts and we answered emails and we ordered lunch from the taco place and some bemasked guy working precariously brought us our tacos and left them at our door and we ate it with our phone in our other hand and we scrolled past ads and workout routines and diet regimes and we wondered if maybe we were getting fat and one of the ads was for some dumbbells and we bought those and we scrolled past ads and we began counting calories until it became depressing and we ordered Animal Crossing for our Switch because everyone was playing it and we scrolled past ads and we answered emails and sent a few of our own and sat through one more meeting on mute so we could watch The Office again because The Sopranos was too confusing and we hearted and laughing emojied the memes our friends sent us and work ended so we closed our work laptop and pulled out our real laptop and scrolled, always scrolling, forever scrolling, and every time we looked up from our phones, from our laptops, away from our TV, we were alone.

            Utterly alone.

            And we told ourselves it was the pandemic, that we’d get together when everything settled down, when people stopped dying, and we ignored the fact that we rarely saw our friends even before the pandemic, that we ordered delivery more often than we went out even in 2017, let alone in 2020 or 2021.

            We ignored the fact that our phones had become the center of our lives, that leaving the house without it made us anxious, made us tense, made us wonder what we’d do while we waited in line, while we rode the bus or the train, what we’d do in any single moment of silence or stillness in our life.

            And I could write at length about the way our phones have colonized our lives, how social media conquered our attention, but do I even need to?

            Can you tell me the last time you left your phone at home when you ran errands? Do you even leave it inside when you go get the mail? When’s the last time you took a shit in peace, without staring at your phone, without swiping your fingers along the glass that you put to your face while you hold it one foot away from the shit coming out of your asshole?

            Our phones have become our constant companions.

You know this.

            You don’t even need me to say it.

            And yet I feel that I must. I must rub our disgusting faces in the fact that we are giving up our lives, every ticking second, to vast technology companies who care only about keeping your eyes on the glow of your screens so that they can show you one more ad.

            Your attention is precious, yes, but even worse than losing every second of thought to your phone, to social media, to technology companies that have built a vast rat trap so they can sell us ads, is that we have all confused the fact that we’re all simultaneously using the same website for connection.

            I have heard it in every mouth of every person I’ve ever met: I just keep it to stay connected to my family, to friends who live far away.

            And does it work?

            Do you feel closer to them when you see their posts emerge in a sea of ads and sponsored content or horrifying news from some place you’ll never go to, where you can have no impact?

            Our technology has developed in sprints, each new thing a marvel, and yet the outcome of most of this is that we spend more and more time alone. More and more time staring at a glowing screen while you sit alone in your room, on your couch, in your car, in the bathroom, and someday you’ll cry for the hours and weeks you spent trapped inside your phone, inside their rat trap, and the child version of you would be appalled to know that when you became an adult you shut off your life to stare at a chunk of metal and plastic and glass that required untold human suffering to land in your hand, that requires vast warehouses full of overheating computers housing the sum total of the internet funneling carbon into the air so you can occasionally interact in the most passive and indirect way possible with friends and family.

            The pandemic is not Covid-19.

            It’s loneliness.

            A wasting disease.

            And it is a disease.

It takes everything from us.

Slowly, it strips our humanity away from our bodies and leaves us rotting in our own isolation.

            I have felt alone my entire life. Even when I’m with you, a part of me feels alone. Trapped. Completely subsumed by my addiction to my disease, to loneliness.

            It has robbed me of so much.

So much beauty and glory.

            And the tragedy of this unbelievable technology that we carry around in our pocket is that it is the best delivery system imaginable for this disease. Every day, we choose to isolate ourselves and lie to ourselves, convincing ourselves that this is human connection, that we are part of something, that our time spent on Twitter or Instagram or snapchat or TikTok or whatever new platform exists whenever you’re reading this was worth it.

            That any of this meant anything.

            That it was for something.

            That thumbing the share button or retweet button or hearting or liking something was the same as activism, as political agitation. That passively scrolling past a picture of your niece or grandmother was the same as spending even one fucking second with them.

            That all those hours and days spent alone meant anything except that we were alone.

            Abjectly and absolutely alone.

            And when we grow desperate enough for real connection, for something true and alive and real, we don’t know what to do or how to do it. Our loneliness and isolation leaves us in a strange state of helplessness where the only solution we can think of is to use the devices imprisoning us to unshackle us. And so we type into our phones or into our laptops some combination of words that will offer a solution for our isolation, for the lack of intimacy and friendship and love in our lives.

 As Anton Jäger explains in Automated Intimacy in the 2024 Winter Issue of Jacobin, companies like Replika and other AI chatbots are here to fill in where human connection’s left off. A technological solution for a human problem created by technology.

            After screaming into the void through googling for love, we come across some promised AI that will speak to us in friendship, in romance. And even though Eugenia Kuyda, the creator of Replika, was uncomfortable enough with the sexualized interactions users were having with the chatbots that she disabled the feature, she ultimately decided to give it back after furious outcry from users.

            And now they sit alone, talking to ghosts, believing in love.

            In connection.

            That this is life.