The Internet: Part 2

Enters through unknowing eyes / Touch the keys it's in your mind / Can't delete it and soon you'll find / How bad you need it all the time - Death Grips

(A continuation from Part 1)

Fast forward to today. I am different than from when I first read about Paul Miller’s experiment in completely disconnecting himself from the Internet. The Internet is much, much worse than it was then, or so it seems. Maybe I’m only really starting to understand how terrible it is now.

From child porn to human trafficking  to censorship to corporate shills to advertising to surveillance to blind, sheer, unbearable stupidity, the Internet seems to me to be the worst of humanity in concentrated form. People obviously don’t experience all this every day; nevertheless it exists. Everything anyone has ever hated about the world is just a click away. Paul would argue, I think, that this is not the Internet’s fault, it’s people’s fault. I would argue that while that’s true, it simply doesn’t matter.

And despite this, I was in love with the Internet. I won’t go so far as to claim I was ‘addicted’ to it; there were never any explicit consequences, such as my grades dropping, from me reading too much Reddit. There were definitely worse cases than mine. However I was definitely rejecting other opportunities for the sake of net-surfing. There were other effects, too - I was starting to feel bored and restless all the time. I noticed my attention span starting to measurably decline. I never exercised, and I certainly didn’t care about my things like jobs or a career. These things obviously needed to change.

My clearest epiphany was brought to me a year ago by an untitled, ten-page website which starts out “The Internet is shit.” The website was outdated even then, but it still spoke to me, calling on society to try and forget the Internet as soon as possible.  After I read it I leaned back in my chair and just thought for an hour about every horrible, inane thing I’d seen. Then I thought for another hour about all the horrible, senseless, inane things I have seen. Paul, when he left the Internet, said he felt “overwhelmed” by the flood of information; I sat, overwhelmed at what I considered my own uselessness, and the uselessness of the entire system.

This is the new American nihilism, I thought. Why do we do this to ourselves? We create these purposeless systems, and use them without knowing why. Advertising and online publishing are  multi-billion dollar industries for absolutely no good reason, serving garbage topped with garbage to the masses.

After that, I started making an explicit effort to do things I found truly engaging first, and only fall back on the Internet when I had absolutely nothing else to do. It worked, sort of.

One of the biggest debates currently raging among content creators is ad blocking. With the release of iOS9, Apple’s built-in web browser Safari ships with content blocking hooks to clean away all but the least intrusive of ads. With this, the debate around the ethics of ad blocking has climaxed to a state of almost physical tangibility. Is blocking ads stealing? Can the Internet survive without them? What will happen to the mobile web?

I recently revisited Paul’s blog to see how he was doing, and to my surprise he had written down some thoughts on ad-blocking. It is a near perfect summary of some of my thoughts regarding the state of content on the Internet. It’s titled Maybe the web should die. It tells how the ad-blocking debate puts into sharp focus the sickly state of the Internet. Ads as they exist now are terrible and we need to be rid of them, but the Internet probably couldn’t survive on a subscription model because there’s nothing actually worth paying for. The only option left is to not have any more Internet.

I’ve been using the Internet less and less, but as of a few days ago, I decided to really try and make it permanent. I selected a list of sites that I browse often and started blocking them on my laptop using something called a hosts file. On my phone I just have to make a concentrated effort to not fill my head with garbage and instead do almost literally anything else except surf the web.

I encourage anyone reading this to pick any website they spend more than an hour on and physically block it, as I have done. It doesn’t matter if it’s enlightening, or noble, or if it ‘works’; I think we can all at least try a taste of Paul’s experiment and just see what we discover about ourselves.