that shut down my Twitter and Instagram accounts after forty-five minutes of daily use. And still, on occasion, I’ll disable my social media blockers, and I’ll sit there like a rat pressing the lever, like a woman repeatedly hitting myself on the forehead with a hammer, masturbating through the nightmare until I finally catch the gasoline whiff of a good meme. The internet is still so young that it’s easy to retain some subconscious hope that it all might still add up to something. We remember that at one point this all felt like butterflies and puddles and blossoms, and we sit patiently in our festering inferno, waiting for the internet to turn around and surprise us and get good again. But it won’t. The internet is governed by incentives that make it impossible to be a full person while interacting with it. In the future, we will inevitably be cheapened. Less and less of us will be left, not just as individuals but also as community members, as a collective of people facing various catastrophes. Distraction is a “life-and-death matter,” Jenny Odell writes in How to Do Nothing. “A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can’t think and act.”
Of course, people have been carping in this way for many centuries. Socrates feared that the act of writing would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls.” The sixteenth-century scientist Conrad Gessner worried that the printing press would facilitate an “always on” environment. In the eighteenth century, men complained that newspapers would be intellectually and morally isolating, and that the rise of the novel would make it difficult for people—specifically women—to differentiate between fiction and fact. We worried that radio would drive children to distraction, and later that TV would erode the careful attention required by radio. In 1985, Neil Postman observed that the American desire for constant entertainment had become toxic, that television had ushered in a “vast descent into triviality.” The difference is that, today, there is nowhere further to go. Capitalism has no land left to cultivate but the self. Everything is being cannibalized—not just goods and labor, but personality and relationships and attention. The next step is complete identification with the online marketplace, physical and spiritual inseparability from the internet: a nightmare that is already banging down the door.
What could put an end to the worst of the internet? Social and economic collapse would do it, or perhaps a series of antitrust cases followed by a package of hard regulatory legislation that would somehow also dismantle the internet’s fundamental profit model. At this point it’s clear that collapse will almost definitely come first. Barring that, we’ve got nothing except our small attempts to retain our humanity, to act on a model of actual selfhood, one that embraces culpability, inconsistency, and insignificance. We would have to think very carefully about what we’re getting from the internet, and how much we’re giving it in return. We’d have to care less about our identities, to be deeply skeptical of our own unbearable opinions, to be careful about when opposition serves us, to be properly ashamed when we can’t express solidarity without putting ourselves first. The alternative is unspeakable. But you know that—it’s already here.
Reality TV Me
Until recently, one of the best-kept secrets in my life, even to myself, was that I once spent three weeks when I was sixteen filming a reality TV show in Puerto Rico. The show was called Girls v. Boys: Puerto Rico, and the concept was exactly what it sounds like. There were eight cast members total—four boys, four girls. We filmed on Vieques, a four-mile-wide island, rough and green and hilly, with wild horses running along the white edges of the beach. The show was built around periodic challenges, each team racking up points toward a $50,000 jackpot. Between competitions, we retreated to a pale-blue house strung with twinkly lights and generated whatever drama we could.
My school let me miss three weeks of high school to do this, which still surprises me. It was a strict place—the handbook prohibited sleeveless shirts and homosexuality—and though I was a good student, my conduct record was iffy, and I was disliked, rightfully enough, by a lot of adults. But then again, the administrators had kept me at the school even when my parents couldn’t afford the tuition. And I was a senior already, because I’d skipped grades after my family moved from Toronto to Houston. Also, according to rumor, the