I am increasingly distressed by what the internet is becoming — a hellhole.
Social media, in particular, has become an attention span-destroying, soul-crushing, outrage-manufacturing, mind-numbing machine. Every time I open Twitter I feel like I am in the domain of something demonic, something infernal. I feel the need to be on my guard while I surf Twitter or risk getting stung and falling into the abyss as the poison of self-righteous performative outrage courses through my veins. When Sam Kriss says The Internet Is Made Of Demons, it comes across as an outlandish claim but I'm very sympathetic to his concerns and I can accept his conclusions.
Anyone who knows me knows that I have been despairing about the state of social media and their effects on regular users for a while now. I think social media has been a net negative for humanity, I think that the promise of a more connected world on social platforms has not materialised. Quite the contrary. If anything, we’re more disconnected from actual people than ever before. And the void left by that disconnection has been filled with ever-increasing connection to these rectangular slabs of plastic and glass.
And yet, while we are still grappling with social media, something that poses a far greater threat to humanity than social media is here already. Generative AI is already here and it is accelerating the transformation of the internet into a garbage dump of mindless, meaningless, and mediocre content. The signpost to the internet for newcomers now should be the same as the title of Erik Hoel’s essay on the topic: Here Lies The Internet, Murdered By Generative AI.
Even kids are not safe anymore. In this essay, Erik Hoel spends a bit of time talking about what YouTube for kids looks like these days. AI-generated videos featuring parrots with four eyes and two beaks, incoherent plots, an utter lack of any cohesive narrative, and millions and millions of children drinking in this garbage. My friends and I mourn our childhood a lot. In particular, we always talk about how we had much better shows and cartoons to watch as kids than the kids in the last half decade or so have had. Unfortunately, things are only getting worse by all indications.
And yet, as dire as things are right now, I cannot share Sam Kriss’s certainty and declare definitively that The Internet Is Already Over.
I hold out hope because I know that the internet can be beautiful too.
I owe a lot to this strange technology. I’ve met people I would have never met otherwise while traversing the weird maze that is the internet, and those people have become threads without which the tapestry of my life’s story cannot be woven. I’ve learned things I would never have learned otherwise, and read books and essays that changed my life.
Even though the internet in its dominant form at the moment is designed to be a mind-numbing machine, my ability to think has been sharpened by engagement with the intellectually curious online. If my intellect is a knife, the internet has provided, amidst several perfectly useless but shiny pebbles, stones on which that knife has been whet.
As time has gone on, so much of what the internet is has become what Jakob Greenfeld describes as the dumb web, shiny pebbles incapable of whetting anything. And because this is the more popular face of the internet, it now requires conscious effort whenever we pick up our phones to find the places that make up The Smart Web. And places like that still exist to be sure. Places where people are still thoughtful and more interested in having meaningful, nuanced, and interesting discussions as opposed to mass-producing garbage tailored to algorithmic whims.
Dougald Hine refers to this part of the web as the Hand Made Web. The parts of the web that are not subject to the logic of winning by making content to please the algorithms that govern us online. Personal blogs are a good example of this. When I write on my blog I feel free because I don’t care about anything. I don’t care about SEO ranks, how many people read what I write and so on. I just want to write something that hopefully helps me clarify my thinking on the subject in view. So does David Perell, Paul Graham, Ekpegbue Stanley, Irina Dumitrescu, and everyone else who contributes to the handmade web.
Unfortunately, it’s easier to find your way to TikTok than to any of these places. But I am, perhaps foolishly, hoping that things will change. Somehow as the mania and insanity on social media reaches its zenith, regular people will choose more and more to participate less and less in the insanity of the dumb web and find refuge in the handmade web. However, who is to say that even the handmade web will not become insane given enough time?
Maybe this is what the internet is at the end of the day. Thanos but for the spread of digitally propagated insanity. Dread it, run from it, insanity arrives all the same.
Let us pray.