Stop decapitating yourself
Disembodiment on the internet.
For the last fifteen years, we’ve all been subjects in an experiment that tries to answer a very stupid question: What happens when the human animal spends increasing amounts of time on the internet?
It’s the exact kind of reckless pseudo-experiment that Mr. Beast, archdemon of the world wide web, would happily film for millions of views.
Since the early 2010s, we’ve been creating art, building communities, running businesses, fighting fascism, embracing fascism, arguing, gooning and, of course, doomscrolling - online.
But as the joys of the internet rapidly decrease thanks to a handful of ketamine-fuelled billionaires unable or unwilling to discern between building something good and something addictive… I find myself asking, ‘What the literal fuck am I doing here?’
I don’t hate the internet. I’m madly, deeply and painfully in love with it.
I’ve made lifelong friends on Discord, I enjoy a career that can only exist online and whatever is wrong with my humour is thanks to the internet. I was here from the early flash cartoons (launch ze missiles!) and I’ll be here watching TikToks my grandkids send me on my deathbed before I’m liquefied and turned into a cooling agent for my local AI data centre.
But recently the internet’s addictive vice-grip has been loosening. Every time I see a paywalled New Yorker article or some soul-crushing misinformation, I feel myself taking +1 psychic damage. It’s subtle, almost imperceptible, but it’s there. Like, have you noticed that every website looks the same now? And why does your favourite YouTuber sound like a bastard child of P.T. Barnum? (“Roll up, get your $97 courses here!”) And let’s not get started on the fastest growing TikTok account that solely produces AI-videos of Fruit Love Island.
But as fast as those doubts appear in my mind, they vanish. Replaced with another meme. Then another. And another.
It’s all so disgustingly wonderfully stimulating.
But maybe I don’t want to be perpetually stimulated like a lab rat. Maybe I want to spend time in places that are slow and, dare I say, a bit boring. I want to exist in my own world. The one right in front of me. I don’t want someone’s commentary on reality. I want to experience reality. I want to touch it, smell it, taste it.
I want a real fucking life.
When I go online, it’s a form of self-decapitation.
I remove my head and shoot it through cyberspace. I’m no longer sitting on my wonky desk chair in Sheffield. I’m standing in a dojo watching Woody from Toy Story perform a blood-soaked finishing move against Shrek. A second later, I’m browsing a shop that exclusively sells cursed dolls. Then I’m listening in on public conversations between people who have fallen in love with ChatGPT. All of this in the space of around fifteen minutes.
Meanwhile, my body is locked into a permanent hunch, slowly expanding as my BMI climbs to new, exciting heights. I imagine my profile to look like a Wotsit in the rain. My hip hurts. My shoulder aches. But in just a few moments, all that suffering will be gone as I leave my body behind. Good riddance.
It’s the kind of dystopia that makes Mark Zuckerberg cream his jeans (the ones carefully selected by a team of PR-professionals to prove that he has human legs). In fact, Zuck rebranded his entire company to chase his dream of getting us to leave our reality and enjoy new ones sponsored by Coca-Cola and Lockheed Martin. The Metaverse was his swing at owning the entirety of our existence - one that did away with physicality and replaced it with dead-eyed avatars and depressed moderators. He truly believed you could package life into a pay-to-play digital platform.
What a prick.
Fortunately, he was wrong and lost over $85 billion on this hubristic folly (admittedly, Meta has made over $700 billion in revenue since then thanks to their ad platform, which, FYI, makes a huge chunk of its income selling people physical objects in the real world. Go-fucking-figure).
Regardless, the truth is clear: the internet can’t hold the entire weight of our existence. Its band of perception is too thin to encompass the interactions and emotions a human needs to feel to be whole. When everything comes through the same screen - shopping, news, entertainment, friendships, work, sex - it all bleeds into one another. It becomes vapid and unmemorable because the experience of each individual thing lacks any texture. Whether you’re watching an Oscar-winning film or betting on the apocalypse - you’re doing it from the same screen, in the same position, with the same immediate outcome: more staring at a screen. Like Bo Burnham says, it’s a little bit of everything all of the time - except none of it is defined.
And yes, we can tolerate that for a while. The internet is a part of life. But it can’t give you everything, as hard as it tries. If you try to build your entire existence inside the internet, things start to get very weird…
The internet hates context, and that’s a big ol’ problem
When I talk to you online, I don’t see your face. I don’t catch a glimpse of your expression changing. I don’t see your nervous energy, confidence, awkward pauses, or shifts in body language. You’re just text on a screen to me. This is how “flame wars” start: the endless dogpiling and battles fought on platforms designed to stoke the flames because our rage literally makes them billions of dollars. On the internet I have no idea who I’m talking to. Not really. I don’t know what kind of day they had. I don’t know if they mean the things they say or if they’re just trying to win some internet points. I don’t even know if they’re real or not. All I know is that they made me MAD and now I’ve got to write a 500 word cutting retort!!!
You probably already know this. Most of us have been catfished, scammed or Rick-rolled in our times. We’ve been told to not trust the internet since the mid-90s (ironically, by our boomer parents who now spend all of their time on Facebook sharing AI slop videos of dogs driving taxis with captions like “so cut e xx😍😍😍😍”).
But it’s getting worse.
An increasing number of corporations and bad actors have figured out how to actively harness this lack of context to distort reality and manipulate the masses.
Astroturfing has become a classic marketing move where corporations manufacture grassroots support for their products on places like Reddit and Instagram. They do this by purchasing thousands of cheap accounts and flooding social media with fake users spouting fake praise for their shit products. And with the advent of AI these bots sound pretty darn convincing. It’s gotten so bad there’s a popular theory that the internet is dead, with no real humans left, only bots haunting its husk spouting things like “Andor is not just a good Star Wars show, it’s a modern masterpiece!”
It’s not just corporations weaponising this lack of context either. Politicians are joining in too! Donald Trump loves to use a method called "firehose of falsehood" (first perfected by his bestie, the Kremlin) to blur the line between truth and fiction. It utilises high volume, multi-channel, rapid and repetitive content that’s completely unbothered by factual accuracy. In fact, contradictions are seen as a GOOD thing. If the story keeps changing (the January 6th riots didn't happen / it happened but it was antifa / it happened and they were patriotic heroes) you erode the idea that “what actually happened” can be proven. Nothing is true, everything is possible.
So, if this is pretty bad for people with fully formed frontal lobes, imagine what this wretched place does to our young.
Won’t somebody think of the children?!
Since 2009, depression and loneliness have DOUBLED in American teenagers: growing from 8.1% in 2009 to 15.8% in 2019 with other countries reporting similar. Their feelings of sadness or hopelessness are 50% higher than millennial high schoolers in the early 2000s (We had WWE and Paramore, I suppose).
This is not normal. Depression in youths is a sign of a sick society. Something has been causing this since around 2010… I wonder what it could be…
The iPhone launched 2007.
Instagram in 2010
Smartphones hit majority US teen ownership around 2012.
The depression curve bends upward right in that window. Simple.
Okay, maybe it’s not that simple. Existence is messy and the causal story is more complex than just “hurr durr internet bad”.
But…y’know. Hurr durr internet bad. We’re poisoning ourselves and we know it. The internet of today is not the same one from your childhood. It’s been optimised by the world’s greatest scientists and backed by the world’s most powerful people to extract and manipulate. Your attention is demanded nonstop, but you’re not given the tools to understand what you’re seeing, to place it in context, or to process it in a meaningful way.
And that lack of context is fucking up young people’s development. Reading facial expressions, managing body language - the whole register of embodied communication is learnt from childhood through adolescence, a lot of which is being increasingly spent on the internet. Our children are trying to develop social skills using a tool that excludes the very thing they’re trying to learn.
And it’s not just the kids! The depression curve has been bending upwards for us all. Millennials, Gen X and Boomers are all reporting increased social media usage AND increased depression simultaneously.
If the internet is stripping us from our bodies and trapping us in lonely prisons of hedonistic nothingness - how do we fix it?
Here are my top 10 ways to reconnect with your body…
Just kidding.
Look. I don’t think all criticism requires presenting an alternative or some kind of "action” to take. Pointing at something and explaining why and how it’s shitty, is enough in and of itself.
But I had a realisation recently. One that caused me to start catching myself before I mindlessly go online…
The internet is like a hyper-clip-show of existence. It only shows the most titillating parts: whether that’s a dancing dog, a naked woman or a beheading video. You don’t get to choose which it’s going to be. The robots do. The clips are so close together, so immediate, that you’re unable to really process them. To realise how empty and unsatisfying they are. Maybe you get close, just for a second. Maybe, you think, I should probably get some sleep. But before you’ve a chance, there’s a clip of Sydney Sweeney dancing in a Spongebob Squarepants thong.
Real life has a gap between the clips. The processing time. Nothing is that immediate. If you want some kind of satisfaction, you’ll usually have to commit a physical action to do it. If you want a beer, you need to get your fat arse off the wonky chair and walk to the fridge to get it. That takes time and effort which gives you a chance to review whether it’s a good desire to fulfil or not.
Don’t get me wrong, the real world is full of bad action and low-effort gratification but there’s a friction that doesn’t exist on the internet. In fact, the internet is purposely designed to be frictionless - so you can slip and slide your way down and never get out again. Anything you desire, or crave, or despise can appear to you in a click of a button. To prove my point, here’s a photo of me naked.
So, rather than run away from the friction, run towards it. Enjoy the delay in gratification. Be a bit bored. It’s where life, the real one, thrives.