The Internet is Broken
So Stop Using It
Everything is broken. — Bob Dylan
The last few days have shown me that the internet is indeed broken. And it’s breaking you, too. But the internet didn’t break this week.
It has been broken for years, and we’ve known about it for that long. But after the Kirk shooting, it has become abundantly clear. The internet is a bad place. It’s a broken place. And it isn’t good to be here.1
Since its widespread adoption, the internet has operated as a sort of “Ring of Gyges”. In Plato’s Republic, Glaucon tells the story of Gyges, a shepherd who finds a ring that makes him invisible. An otherwise normal and honorable man, once hidden from sight, he seduces the queen, kills the king, and takes the throne. The point is this: if no one can see us, we will do what we want without fear of consequence.
The internet is our Ring of Gyges. It makes us invisible. And we are no better than Gyges. We use our anonymity for hatred, insults, and tearing each other down.
With a veil of anonymity, people find themselves typing out and publishing words that they would certainly hesitate to say out loud or in person. Time and time again, on countless YouTube video comments, Reddit threads, and dozens more online places, you need only a few seconds to browse to find this sort of horrible talk. Words which would never be tolerated in a public square or amongst family and friends.
Those who perpetrate these sorts of comments feel perfectly fine doing so because of the lack of any real consequence. Use a racial slur or insulting language to someone’s face and you risk getting punched in the face. There is no bodily threat when you reply to someone's tweet. People become bolder and bolder.
You won’t believe what I’m about to say!
And this problem of anonymity is only exacerbated by the “attention economy” where the words that cause the biggest reaction usually get the most clicks and attention, that account “blows up” or goes viral, and suddenly the platforms are making much more money off these kinds of things than they were on cat fail compilations that were (rightly) all the rage in the early 2010s.
You’ve probably heard all the terms before: click-bait, rage-bait, and now we have grief-bait. The biggest internet platforms feed off this negativity and encourage it. Arguably, this encouragement from the platforms is explicit. But even if you will not admit that, you must admit it is implicit given that people do indeed get “click-baited” and “rage-baited” and creators are rewarded for creating “engaging” content that gets clicks.
Suddenly, you find yourself leaving a negative comment on a post about a news story that has nothing to do with you or your community, insulting someone you’ve never met about a position you assume they hold based on a few words they wrote on the same post. And it just escalates from there.
Unfettered capitalism and the commodified, isolated self
Everybody knows the fight was fixed / The poor stay poor, the rich get rich. — Leonard Cohen
Cui bono? For whose benefit? Largely, just the corporations running these platforms. Meta, running Facebook, Instagram, and now Threads, has no interest in cultivating real community. (If it did, it probably wouldn't be a tech company?)
Meta is interested in selling your attention, which means optimizing its platforms for
(a) companies to advertise and sell their products, and
(b) keeping your attention for as much of the day as possible to make as much money from your attention as possible.
This MO is well-documented,2 (this is literally how the companies make money! You don't pay for the account) as is the extraordinarily detrimental effect this has on young people.3
If recent events have taught us anything, it’s that this is a problem that is spilling into the real world. In the aftermath of Kirk’s death, there was an overwhelming online response.
In America, every user-created-content-focused platform (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, etc.) was pummeled with posts about the shooting and peoples’ responses. Many were shocked, saddened, and grieving. Others were less so. And a sad few were, to some degree, have some sort of positive reaction.4 Which is just wild.
I have no doubt that “the internet” has affected the minds of those who view this as anything other than pure tragedy. It dehumanizes others. Instead of human beings, you see usernames, profiles, and images. People somehow become less real, less valuable, less human. You become disconnected from the humanity of others. And that’s not what any places is supposed to do.
Place and Commons as the only solution left
Place is supposed to unite us, to remind us of the ways we can have things in common. In the commons. The common ground on which we stand, neither mine nor yours, both mine and yours, in common.
In medieval times, the commons was where locals could take their sheep and chat with each other while their livestock grazed. Once the feudal system took effect, lords took over the commons and separated villagers from each other. There was no longer a commons, but a strict hierarchy of property rights which still carries over to today.
The commons was a place to share what we could not own alone. Fields, water, stories, burdens. The commons was where we learned that life was lived in common. The internet promised a new commons, but delivers only placelessness: an endless scroll, a privatized square owned by corporations, fenced off and sold back to us in ads. It too has been taken over by feudal lords that now control where, how, and what we speak.
What we need is a place like the Greek agora. Not just for trade and communication, but debate, the sharing of ideas in a common space.
When our place becomes place-less, like the internet has, we no longer have anything in common.
For example, you don’t “own” your Instagram account, your Facebook account, your Google Drive or Docs, your ChatGPT conversations, your YouTube channel. You have very little control over it. You can’t have a conversation online without going through some corporation.
This is not a partisan issue: the left (at least in theory—in practice, it doesn’t seem so anymore) don’t like big profiting corporations that the everyday person is beholden to; the right value personal property rights, freedom of speech, etc. All things that these internet corporations attack and manipulate for their own advantage. It’s not even subtle.
Lies and Licenses
When you pay for a Kindle book on Amazon, the button says “Buy Now”, which indicates that you’re... buying the book. But you’re not! You’re just buying a license to access the book, which is subject to terms and conditions which can change at any time.
This also means that Amazon can decide that “this book isn’t available anymore” and remove it from your reading devices! The same is true of music streaming: whenever Spotify does anything Neil Young doesn’t like, he pulls his music from the streaming service. And then you can’t listen to it!
Digital ownership is no ownership at all.
I could publish fifty articles vehemently disagreeing with Neil Young on all his most sensitive topics, but my LP of Harvest is still going to be there when I get home. The books I’ve bought can’t be removed from my home when some corporation decides I shouldn't be reading it anymore.
People in Places
You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. — Bob Dylan
When I present my opinions amongst my friends, I’ll get a pretty immediate reaction if what I say went too far. And they’re my friends, my family. They’re not going to leave my life for saying one or two things that go too far. (Now, if I keep going down that path and their admonitions don’t help curb my views, then perhaps they will leave me alone. But at least they had the opportunity to try.)
More and more, we are seeing our opinions influenced (almost entirely!) by what we experience online, and then discovering a chasm between our newfound beliefs and the people actually around us. This can be genuinely cognitively disturbing because when you're online, you feel as if everyone is agreeing with you. And then when you present those ideas in the real world and they are not warmly received, you either have to assume your friends/family simply aren’t as educated as you or you simply turn further away from them and further online. That’s not good.
The best and worst thing about the internet is that ultimately, nothing here is real!5
Turn it off and turn to your neighbor.
Live your life in the world. Be amongst real people. Talk with them. Find things out through word of mouth, not from your algorithm. Have your views challenged by the questions of your friends, your family, your community. Go someplace and talk about it.
Or just go to a concert and leave your phone in the car.
You’ll just be a heck of a lot more happy.6
This is precisely why I’ve shifted almost all my writing to The Void (a print publication) and now consider this online publication a “Field Office of the Real.” I’m only here to encourage you to leave. For me, this is no longer domestic soil.
See this article from The Center For Humane Technology
Obviously, many parts of the internet have real consequences. Work emails and documents, for example, have real and important outcomes. But let’s limit our internet use to editing documents and sending work communications rather than uploading our entire social lives there too, yes?
There’s certainly going to be a “detox”. You may find that as soon as your turn off the internet, there is a huge void where you don’t know what to do with your time. This can be intimidating. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” as Kierkegaard would say. Don’t worry. Don’t give it. You’ll notice the positives pretty quickly.
I've been having similar thoughts about returning to print and in-person interactions. Is the Void only available at Barnes and Noble?