Analyzing my online habits recently, I revisited a post I wrote a while back called “The Internet Is No Fun Anymore,” a reflection on my Gen X journey from the early thrill and excitement of the internet to the dispiriting digital reality we now inhabit. While my dependence on “the web” (do we still use that term?) has definitely decreased since then, it’s fair to say my behavior hasn’t changed that much. I still check my emails, RSS feeds, and social media sites religiously — an exercise that takes about five minutes, most days. When that initial check doesn’t serve up anything engaging, well, if I’m not careful I’ll slide into the muddled hellscape of Facebook, which provides a handful of friend updates before devolving into memes and sketchy links about hockey, politics, insane drumming, movie news, and traffic accidents. A churn of content, incidentally, that isn’t that far removed from the stuff my phone — which feels more and more like an autonomous sentience, steering my eyeballs to its trivial, mercenary whims — serves up to me.
Why do I keep doing this? Was the old internet really a haystack overflowing with shiny needles, compared to the Sturgeon’s Law on steroids of the modern attention economy? What am I even looking for, anymore?
Once I finally put some thought into answering that, the answer became (almost stupidly) obvious: I’m looking for legitimately interesting stuff to read. Whenever I robotically fall into this exercise, it’s intelligent, well written, illuminating long reads about the world that make it worthwhile. Social commentary that rewards my attention, gives me perspective, or articulates the nebulous, uncomfortable vibes I’ve been feeling over the past decade, in a way that empowers or edifies me. It might be Cory Doctorow expounding on Big Tech’s systematic wrecking of the internet; Laurie Penny, dismantling the decades of toxic gender politics that shaped my generation (and beyond); or a random article from The Atlantic or The Guardian decoding the fucked-upness of the contemporary political landscape, the most chilling of which was “End Times Fascism,” a soul-crushing read from Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor about billionaire “supremacist survivalism.” Unlike the random, ranting social-media discourse that spits polarizing nonsense back and forth, a feedback loop of partisan misery, these pieces — no less dark, but far more intentional and useful — lend coherence to the vague, undeniable awfulness of our historical moment. In a psychological terrain designed to bludgeon despairing inaction into our brains, intelligent arguments like this feel like arming up, building resilience against the onslaught.
One day, I decided what I was looking for on the internet could probably be found, in bulk, in nonfiction books. “End Times Fascism” is what steered me to Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, probably the most mindblowing book I’ve ever read. An extensive examination of the triumph of free-market capitalism — an imposed ideology that everyone alive today has been wallowing in for their entire lifetimes — it shined a light on the depth of unexamined subliminal conditioning modern Americans have been subjected to by entrenched political and economic forces since the 1950s. Those forces have been warping the world to its ends — which is to say, the ends of rich, powerful men — for as long as most of us have been on this planet. And they are the source of everything that is unforgivingly sociopathic about global capitalism in the 2020s.
The Shock Doctrine got me thinking about other fun things like media conditioning, normalized behaviors, societal infrastructure, systemic oppression. Whether it’s the economy, or gender, or politics, or sexuality, we are born and raised in a defined ecosystem that funnels us into prescribed ways of acting, thinking, existing. We’re trained up to participate in this environment, which may well be unnatural to many of us, and is actively harmful to most of us. Here I am, I thought, well into my fifth decade, barely swimming to the surface of understanding how we have all been programmed — and only now starting to recognize the ways we’re being programmed now.
“The Internet Is No Fun Anymore” didn’t even remotely go far enough. I could have written “The Internet is Actively Destroying Us,” since it has evolved into an instrument of control, and an active conspirator in a system of wealth extraction. This is one of the reasons (and there are plenty) that artificial intelligence is so sickening to me; it has so little to do with what we want or need, and everything to do with how capital can be increased for corporations and their investors, by controlling the media, building wealth for the few at the expense of the many. It packages feeding stolen content into a blender and repurposing it to create more clickbait as “innovation.” Fire all your artists, writers, data analysts, coders, and knowledge workers, automate your business, capture all the profits for yourself. Don’t forget to scorch the earth behind you as you go. (Want more depth about how terrible AI is? I mean, way, way more depth? Follow Ed Zitron.)
But Chris, asks the nonexistent reader, how is all this reading empowering or edifying? Isn’t this just a different flavor of the misery-inducing eyeball suck of social media? What is your point?
A fair question, and one I can’t fully answer, except that these “long reads” and opinion pieces and nonfiction books have made me feel…less programmed? Not as binary in my thinking? Less reactive, more philosophical? Even as recently as “The Point of Saying Anything,” I might have said “Republicans bad, Democrats good.” (Er, well, maybe “fair.”) But now I’m trending toward “Republicans very bad, Democrats less bad.” There’s still a big difference between an inexorable slide into hell versus an ineffectual holding action against it. My voting won’t change. But I’d like to think my discernment of motive is improving. Were things better under Biden, or Obama, or Clinton? Absolutely. But, more accurately, they were merely less worse.
It’s not like there’s anything profound about what I’m saying. Millions of people have woken up one day to find they’ve learned something and changed, or found a new way of thinking. But on another level, it’s terrifying to think that a random bloke of reasonable intelligence would require decades to untangle the notion that everything we think of as normal may in fact be very, very broken. And that the one and only way we’ve run an entire planet since the end of World War II? It might not be the right one.
I suppose it’s not encouraging that tons of people smarter than me haven’t been able to move the needle toward something better — and that there are plenty of people stupider than me who, even if they sense it’s all broken, don’t know why and have even worse suggestions for fixing it. The world has a long slog ahead of it, and it’s not going to be pretty.
But on a personal level, seeking insight into the problems — reading and learning and coming to a new understanding of where we went wrong, and how we might course correct — has had, despite the dire, intractable scenario we’ve found ourselves in, a bolstering effect. It’s not much, but I’ll take it.
