The End of the Extremely Online Era

Commonplace Newsletter #109

In 1988 the Berlin Wall would have seemed like a permanent and enduring part of the city, an inevitability. Its guard towers, checkpoints and blockades had been up for 27 years and the ideology that led to its construction had been in the ascendancy for over 70 years. Only the oldest citizens could remember, dimly, a time before Communism. And yet a mere year later the wall was pulled down and less than a year after that Germany was formally reunified¹.

This is the way it goes- things appear to stay static for years and years and then everything changes all at once. Such is the nature of momentum and chain reactions and the compounding of small results into inevitable grand transformation. In the midst of it we are oblivious, complacent, living each day as it comes and then we find that suddenly everything is different and our old way of life recedes into a mere memory.

Some obvious examples of this: at one point, not that long ago, the vast majority of adults in the Western world wore hats and smoked cigarettes and attended church every single week. Now they don’t. At one point most people worked the land and travelled (if they travelled at all) by foot or horse and any form of loan would be viewed as shameful usury. Now they don’t. Whether you see these changes as good or bad is irrelevant, the point is that on a long enough timeline the only certainty is change. Everything is in flux.

Now, of course there are still farmers and cigarette smokers and hat wearers and credit-refusers around today, but they are a minority. Their moment in the sun has passed. The zeitgeist has left them behind, for better or worse.

I mention all of this as a prelude to making a prediction which as I write this in late 2023 will sound insane. Ready? I think that this whole smartphone scrolling, content consuming, ubiquitous posting, Extremely Online thing is going to go the way of the Fedora, or the Marlboro smoked at cruising altitude in economy class. In the end it is all going to fade. This may not happen for a good number of years, but I truly believe it will happen. I think we’ll look back on this time decades hence and shake our heads at how ignorant and naive we all were to collectively torpedo our attention spans, our social lives, our decision making, our childcare, our dopaminergic reward systems and our environment with these pocket-sized touch screen pacifiers and all that they contain and imply.

Crazy, I know. But it’s what I believe. I can see the signs. Because let’s face it the only thing crazier than a huge sea-change like that would be if things continued on and on just as they are right now.

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I am biased, I’ll admit that. I want the internet as it exists today to end. I think it needs to. I try my best to be objective and even-handed and yet behind every social, political, cultural and artistic issue that I ponder today I see The Internet in its current form, I see Web 2.0 (for lack of a better term) again and again and again as the culprit, as the determining factor.

Children are anxious and confused and lack the ability to utilise initiative and pay attention because for many of them their parents and their teachers have abdicated responsibility for guiding them to screens and apps. The parents do this in many cases because they themselves are swamped with their own bombardment of emails and notifications from their own ever-present devices that demand virtually every moment of their time. Families are divided when various members go down separate non-overlapping rabbit holes of ideological nonsense. Communities devolved into loose networks once we collectively opted to interface with our fellow humans almost exclusively via network effects driven social media apps. When everyone is chained to a screen, when they are perennially plugged in via earbuds or headphones then serendipity and chance encounters become nigh on impossible. And such things are the cornerstones of a life well lived.

And the worse part about all of this is that commentators and social scientists and psychologists have been talking about these issues for well over a decade now. It’s old news². I suspect more than a couple of readers rolled their eyes as they read those two paragraphs above. I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been said before, many, many times.

We are in the inevitability phase of Web 2.0’s lifecycle. The Wall is up, the barricades are manned and the Stasi will be here forever. It’s just the way it is. Nobody, I would argue, is having a great time at this moment and many (if not most) people are burnt out by the perpetual agitation that comes from the fear-mongering news cycle, by their feeds filled with posts they didn’t ask for, by the algorithmic interference and the nudging and the fact that nothing that they see on their screens can even be trusted.

Everything is fake, or at least potentially fake because even accepted ‘facts’ don’t exist within a vacuum. The castle is built on sand. Nothing on social media and by extension the news (which is essentially elongated retweets delivered through the mediums of print or television sets) can be trusted. These are the preconditions for an online version of psychosis and yet we wring our hands and wonder why people have time for conspiracy theories.

And this is before you throw A.I. into the works which is an amplifier and accelerator of fakery. Nothing can be trusted yet the Content Industrial Complex (which has essentially replaced art and culture) demands that you have very, very strong opinions on the more-than-likely fake (or at least strewn with facts skewed to the point of being fake), bot farm driven, algorithmically amplified events of the day.

This is just not sustainable. Hence my prediction.

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Now that was gloomy, I know. Perhaps I am overstating the severity of the situation but if I am doing so it is only because I have spent too much time online, which kind of proves my point.

I am biased as I said, and can only view the present moment from the vantage point of my own life. At least for now I am a writer on the internet and though I try my best to limit my exposure to screens and avoid becoming an Extremely Online Millennial, this stuff still bleeds through. I see people glued to their phones while walking down the street all day every day, I see the constant fretting and the avoidant behaviour and the lockstep fashion choices. I see the narrow state of the offerings in the new releases section of the bookshop. Interesting new live music is conspicuous by its absence.

The consequences of life lived online have bled through into the real world and this has happened because we have allowed them to. It’s a cliché to say that real life is now a temporary reprieve from the online, as opposed to the other way around. We pay the price for all of this via boarded up shops, closing pubs, empty playgrounds and silent streets as each individual stays at home each night, enchanted by the blue flicker of their own little screen feeding them their own walled in world of news and content and edutainment.

I believe it will end, this so-called way of life. Not through the Silicon Valley oligarchs spontaneously developing a conscience or being legislated into acting with a modicum less sociopathy. I don’t believe people will be frightened into changing how they act or suddenly shamed into putting their phones down for once in their lives. Such interventions don’t work with most addicts and more and more people are legitimately hooked on their devices than we are currently willing to countenance. No, I think this will all end, as T.S Eliot said, with a whimper. People will simply lose interest and walk away. Because the internet now is boring. People spend all day scrolling because they are trying to find what isn’t there anymore. The authenticity, the genuinely human moments, the fun.

The internet today is corny with its thumbnails and its clickbait and its myriad other deceptions, all conjured up to drive engagement. Bots (and humans who have been reduced to the condition of automatons) churn out content which is then commented on and distributed by other bots while real life humans sit in the middle of this transaction, lurking, scrolling, bored out of their minds.

The true innovators who made the internet fun, who set the tone and built the online culture in the first place have mostly burnt out, aged out or been banned. They reside in private communities like they did before the rise of the smartphone removed all barriers to entry for posting online.

I myself write online of course and I will continue to do so but save for this essay, this latest contribution to the thousands of terabytes of jeremiads that festoon the worldwide web, I don’t have much to say about our online world anymore. I’m tired of it. Half an hour or so a day is ample time to catch up with my online community of people and read the thoughts of those writers who I have personally verified to be human. Beyond that the wider internet just strikes me as a sad place. There is no energy there. The cracks in the wall are beginning to show.

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Earlier this year I went on a cheap holiday here in England, a few days away, sea air and big breakfasts and plenty of walking. Where I stayed was a university town, home to a big arts college and a marine biology campus and weather beaten natives working in the local shipping industry. It was a roughly even split between genuinely cutting edge hipster artists, natural science students, salt of the earth locals, shipbuilders and tourists.

And it opened my eyes.

On the second night I went to a pub which was filled to capacity with the above demographic breakdown. It was a great night out and the bar had an incredible and palpable atmosphere. Everyone was getting along, mingling, laughing. People were rubbing shoulders and raising glasses and nipping out into the fresh night air for crafty cigarettes. But something was off, there was something I couldn’t place my finger on. Some anachronism, some anomaly.

It took me a good few minutes of people-watching to figure it out.

No one was on their phone. No one.

There wasn’t a formal ‘no phones allowed’ policy in place, there was no agreement or enforcement or a set of rules. People were simply too busy living to care about turning their evening into sharable shards of content for the benefit of distant strangers³. The cool kid contrarians had realised that today true rebellion, creativity and authenticity can only be had away from screens. And the salt of the earth locals had probably never had much use for devices as their traditional way of life had remained largely intact. And besides, they worked with their hands all day anyway. And the tourists- of which I was one- saw this novel scene for what it was, a little glimpse of what could be. Of what will be.

When no one is using their phone and is not mindlessly filming and photographing everything in sight (above all themselves front and centre) to decide to then do so seems weird. Vulgar. Almost shameful. It’s only the current ubiquity of our devices that makes us not feel this way. And I suspect in their hearts plenty of people have always known that there’s something fundamentally not right with all of this and have simply not said anything for fear of ridicule or being seen as out of touch. Well, slowly but surely the mimetic tide is turning. Trends and culture are dictated by the coolest of the cool teenagers and twenty-somethings and here they were with no interest in being on their smartphones. Where they lead others will follow, slowly but surely.

My prediction may be too early, but I think it is directionally correct. The centrality of the internet in our lives will fade. Sure, we will still use it for banking, for sending off quick missives and for looking things up and so on. But the current culture of all day, every day screen time will fade. It will become passé, spurious, and something only an obsessive bore would waste all of their free time on.

The zeitgeist is shifting.

And I welcome it.

1. The speed of this political change is used to great dramatic effect the imaginatively funny and moving German film Good Bye, Lenin! which I unequivocally recommend you make the effort to watch. It’s worth your while.

2. For example The Shallows, Nicholas Carr’s definitive book on how screen use changes how we process information came out in 2010, a fact which makes me feel old.

3. The tragedy of inviting others to see your life through your eyes in this way- is that instead you only end up viewing your own life through the eyes of (often imagined) others.