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Some thoughts on the one claim in Paul Kingsnorth's 'Against the Machine'
that it's hard
not to agree with...
could have undone so many
souls. Inferno ct.III. (Probably)
Now I grant you, vague correlation is not causation.
I also grant you the question of mental health and how we represent the statistics and their cause is up for debate, although one would point out that taking regular photos of your own face for the validation of strangers is hardly likely to produce a robust self-esteem, neither is TikTok or all the other spawns of the selfie world...
Yet the fact is there are many other things going on that clearly contribute to at least some degree of mental health crises, all of which stem from the fact that we exist in a place that makes platforms like Instagram where you put pictures of nothing but yourself for random people to look at and measure by like count seem apparently perfectly "normal"...
This along with all the other social media platforms the output of which is for the consumption of strangers instead of our friends and family, where for some reason the dynamics default to their lowest common denominator of detached self-projection, the Dantean world of shades, the waste land, the place that you're in right now:
The idea that the Internet is the root cause of a huge range of seemingly terminal problems in the modern world is one of the claims made in Paul Kingsnorth's recent book Against the Machine (which I reviewed here), he says unequivocally:
Naturally, this is a claim that can't really be made without contradiction, since Paul Kingsnorth is a Substack bestseller and I like most people who read it bought his book on the Internet, 1 thus he and I can't really think it's bad in the way eating raw chicken was bad, or else we just wouldn't use it.
Although most of us have little choice but to suffer this paradox, if I conclude at the end of this article, as - spoiler - I may well do, that the Internet has in fact been a worsening net bad for humanity, you still read it online.
For better or worse, here we all are, in the Internet...
If we're going to make claims about how much we need to unplug, the obvious response is "go on then, you first."
Yet cards on the table, I kind of agree with Kingsnorth's conclusion.
Or rather, I accept the contradictions of it but on the whole I think the Internet has done more damage than good, said selfies and all they represent really are responsibly for a huge amount of harm to a generation and more self-perception.
I'm
not entirely convinced it's going to get better, and I think the
only solution is an individually ascetic attitude to our own use of
it, a conclusion on which I must confess I myself am probably too
often a hypocrite.
Jonathan Haidt for example has written extensively about the decline in the mental health of the young, citing the rise of smartphones as the only possible cause, but has also been accused of over-generalized confusion of correlation and causation that throws the baby out with the bathwater.
A lot of these arguments thus depend somewhat on feeling.
At this point I could do a Freya India and
post some clips from awful TikTokers as a way of
demonstrating the fall of a generation with the prose version of a
sigh and an eye roll, although such pieces are designed to appeal to
those who already feel the decline. 2
The winners of the Internet are people whose contribution to the world is not just negative but drives division and erodes values, from Andrew Tate to Bonnie Blue, or people like Candace Owens.
Agree with the generalizations of Jonathan Haidt or not, the mental health of younger generations have clearly plummeted, and agree with the selection bias of Freya or not,
The problem seems to not just be that we use the
Internet like a kind of enormous library of information exchange,
which you would argue is where its main benefit comes from, but that
we use it to exercise our unmet social impulses and the latter has
become entangled with the former.
Rather like natural selection, algorithms set environmental rules for what survives and what doesn't, an environment of feast of famine, red in metaphorical tooth and claw.
It has become like a supermarket full of addictively delicious but damaging foods that multiply every time they are bought, and the supermarket has been flooded not just with adults but children, the young, the unsupervised those prone to compulsion and addiction, and all their choices are made without real social accountability.
Not only that, the Internet feeds back to us those people who use it the worst as if they represent what is normal, recalibrating our sense of the disastrousness of the world.
Those who moderate their time on it, don't engage in incendiary ways or even dare to decide to use it as little as possible disappear from existence, while those who respond in the most divisive and incendiary ways are those who are represented to you.
Then those people are used by another group as symbols of everything wrong with the world, naturally using the same incendiary means to say so, then those people are by someone else, and so on.
There's a reason you've all heard of self proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate and not all the other people from his school class who went on to be perfectly normal people, and that reason is the Internet.
Yet not only have you heard of him, ten million
people follow him on Twitter.
It's on the Internet that someone like Candace Owens can claim dinosaurs are "fake and gay" and that there is a "Christ conspiracy" because only paleontologists ever find dinosaur bones, and that no dinosaur bones were found before 1850.
The fact that this is demonstrably false, that amateurs are actually responsible for the majority of specimens in museums, or that plenty of dinosaur bones were discovered before 1850 (I grew up not far from Lyme Regis, where Mary Anning discovered an ichthyosaur when she was just twelve and went on to discover plesiosaur and pterosaur skeletons, she died in 1847, presumably some time after being initiated into the conspiracy), or that an actual global conspiracy by all paleontologists without a single whistle blower for centuries would be logistically impossible.
Why the word "gay" is involved I have no idea but Candace Owens has five and a half million YouTube subscribers.
She is currently under legal action for
extensively claiming Brigitte Macron is a man, claims that
are both personal and entirely pointless, driven by the incentives
of the Internet: culture war signaling, attention seeking and plain
old greed.
People like Russell Brand or Brett Weinstein became popular in the podcasting arena for purporting an interesting middle ground before veering into extremes so ridiculous they seem almost to be caricatures.
This entire effect was compounded by the role of
lockdowns and their decimation of public trust, lockdowns that
themselves would not have been possible in an age where we could not
be atomized into our online presences and drip fed the news while we
waited to be told when and if we would be allowed to walk the dog
more than once a day.
The dynamics of platforms like OnlyFans have had a huge effect on bringing porn further into the way of the young, not just by exposing but incentivizing it, and people like Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips have become well known names.
A generation have been brought up being shaped socially, culturally, politically and sexually by the dynamics of the Internet.
Of the baby boomer generation 71% said they
regularly played outside, today it is 27% and decreasing. 6
A survey conducted in 2016 showed that 75% of children in the UK are
getting less time outside than prison inmates, and that's now a
decade ago, it's surely worse. 7
Young people spending most of their spare time on
social media tells you that they are drip fed social interaction in
a bubble that clearly does replace the social existence of the real
world, as we are all pressured to do.
I'm writing this on the Internet, and there are many good things that come from it, although I am in my thirties and I have never once regretted that I had a childhood without the Internet and teenage years without a personal computer or a smartphone.
A profound problem we have with our relationship to technology is that a need for profit and turnover drives both positive innovation but also refuses to stop at benefit.
If Apple or Mark Zuckerberg had their way you'd never stop looking at the world through their meta glasses or Apple goggles, technology is driven forward by the mega wealthy and their dystopian dreams of a techno-future and is carried into fruition by the constant need for more.
I have a computer I only bought the year before lockdown, when I login to Substack I am told I need to update chrome, if I try to update chrome I'm told I need to get a new mac.
A few years is a technological lifetime, and my
perfectly functional computer is already old news and more is needed
not for reasons that prove their benefit, but for reasons of an
insistent mantra of turnover, the thing that gives us the good but
that we are unable limit or control, a fact that does not bode well
for the AI we are creating whose risks may be far greater than the
effects of the Internet.
The idea that we can opt out for most of us is not an option even if it was entirely desirable or good given there clearly are some beneficial resources and uses, and if arch-technology hater Paul Kingsnorth hasn't, there's hardly any hope for the rest of us.
But we can decline those things we don't need, moderate our own participation and minimize our use.
I do think all of us should opt out of social media in its entirety, at minimum from Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, all of which are unequivocal rot that no one has an excuse to be using.
It's depressing to see how much of the Internet now leans towards social media, even Substack has added Notes over recent years, and in recent weeks things like trending bars have appeared.
I fear it won't be that long before it's another
site on the same list, such is the pull of the algorithm black hole.
...is something we should all anticipate with great excitement.
But I'm not sure you do...
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