“Solitude, the very condition which sustained the individual against and beyond his society, has become technically impossible.” — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man.¹

Internet sobriety is what I call it. Or The Refusal. I’m pretty sure I didn’t kick cigarettes, then booze and pills, just to end up addicted to a ‘Like’ button. I’m also relatively certain I have gone my entire life (now 64 years) without ever owning a motor vehicle not to finally succumb to a Grand Theft Auto habit. Nevertheless I was hooked on the internet for 35 years — same length of time smoking cigarettes consumed of my life — before pulling the plug. The problem isn’t technology addiction; it’s addiction technology. I for one, am sick of being dicked around by those code-crushing bros in California.

1.

My addiction started relatively early, demographically speaking, since I was then living with a girlfriend (10 years my junior) who became an IT professional in the mid-‘90s. (Left to my own devices, I might have skipped the whole business, at least throughout the ‘90s; I say this with confidence because, intrinsically hating machines, I avoided driving. And owning a telephone.) She first took a computer course at a local college (‘C Programming’ I believe) after her (rich) father gifted her a PC. (They seemed a big investment back then.) Her final class assignment was uploading a domain. She had the code all figured out but needing ‘content’ (any content), she suggested I put online my latest project (which, I am almost embarrassed to admit, was a utopian socialist pamphlet [presently archived, without my consent, at the Wayback Machine site]). I remember seeing my ‘author’ photo glowing on what resembled a tiny TV screen and contemplating the idea, as she brought it to me, that ‘the whole world’ could now view it along with my mighty thesis.

Imagine what Edward Bellamy would have made of that. I was hooked.

I should add some supporting personal details to make fully appreciable how the internet got its hooks in me. In a word, vanity. Ever since I was a small child, I was determined to be (and certainly thought of myself as) an ‘artist.’ Sometimes a visual artist, sometimes a music guy, sometimes a writer, and various combinations thereof; a regular bohemian. And although I once considered myself avant-garde, spending hundreds of hours of editing musique concrѐte concertos along with scribbling esoteric philosophic chapbooks, in the back of my mind there was always the big public recognition payout to come. In a classic variable-ratio schedule of reinforcement, I perpetually received just enough supporting prompts to continue my endeavors — starting with English teachers praising my poetry in English class while flunking everything else, then going on to producing well-reviewed nationally-distributed indie 45s in the punk and, later, grunge eras while consistently failing to ‘break through’  (or break even). Finally hanging it up with the futile (and increasingly expensive) pursuit of ‘rock notoriety’ when I turned 35, I reached a quintessential crossroads of adulthood. Instead of ‘going back to school’ as almost all my peers chose to do, still high on my clippings from Alternative Press and Maximum Rock N Roll, I decided to ‘go purist’ and write poetry; while the New Yorker passed, there were no shortage of variable-ratio schedules of reinforcement with all the small university literary journals available to a sensitive soul unwilling to gracefully grow up into the middle-aged mediocrity destiny intended. Indeed, the entire edifice of civilization, including the capitalist paradigm, is structured on the certainty that most people will not be nova hot success stories.

Meanwhile, it was 1995 as I recall. That was the year the guy from ELO got the Beatles ‘back together.’ I remember hearing “Free As a Bird” for the first time, as muzak, piped overhead the produce section at the local Stop ‘n Shop. That was pretty underwhelming. A far bigger deal that year was something called Windows 95 which was extremely important to my girlfriend who drove us to the local Best Buy to buy a copy. The store, which I had never entered before, resembled a grotesque metal cathedral, with gigantic Windows 95 billboards suspended overhead from skyscraper beams. Bigger than the Beatles. Then came the local Apple store (which moved into what used to be the neighborhood tavern which hosted the town open mikes) with its candy-colored Macs and all the televised hype, set to music by U2, urging people to ‘Think Different.’ Of course, as a card-carrying formerly avant-garde, presently socialist poetry dude, I was unamused by that.

2.

Next thing I knew, I got addicted to updating my utopian pamphlet on a weekly basis. Give or take a new photo insertion. And, check it out, even some emailed correspondence from other utopians. Cool! From there, I ran a daily propaganda blog, complete with subscription APF copy and all the photos of Labor Day marches I could cop off the online ‘bourgeois’ press. Cut and paste 10 headlines before the baby wakes up and then upload an evening edition after baby goes to bed; who needs to sleep more than 3 hours when it’s so much fun? And ‘socially important,’ too. (The proliferation of site counters and quantified subscribers quickly turned the internet into a status contest.) Then I added a newsgroup forum which took my habit over the top. Even if baby was screaming blue in the face, wanting to go out to the park (like normal people), there I was tap tap tapping on the keyboard, losing all sense of time and perspective. I would soon learn, the internet is for people who can’t handle reality.

As you might have surmised, I was a stay-at-home parent. This was 1998 or so. Meanwhile, my spouse — now a network engineer for a little cyber cafe which brought internet to our town in the ‘Dot Com’ heyday — was working from home, mere inches from my candy-colored Mac (Merry Christmas, Craig!), tap tap tapping on her monster Dell. Ostensibly, she was ‘rerouting routers’ (or something like that) in between her exponentially addicting dedication to what she called a ‘Furry Muck’ domain. I have to admit, deep as I was into Karl Marx, I didn’t pay much attention to her particular thing, other than noting sometimes she would receive in the (snail) mail really cheesy fantasy illustrations in expensive frames called ‘avatars’ from guys she ‘Furry Mucked with.’ My indifference was just as well with her — my spouse was pretty quiet about her personal adventures on the internet (often snapping off one tab for another whenever I entered the room). Although physically occupying the same space — an office room upstairs in an upper-middle-class house (obtained through an especially serendipitous IPO check) — we both inhabited entirely disparate planetary systems irradiating from two separate spaceships. For years.

Debating political ideology, as I did on a technologically sophisticated international forum (called McSpotlight), tightened the variable-ratio screws on me. First there was the pressure — mainly self-generated and almost entirely in my head (and the heads of my opponents) — of performing for a vast audience (if not present in time, then ‘for posterity’) of impressible partisans, all keeping score. Then there was the attention demanded by the rapid responses coming in from every comment. Getting the ‘last word’ was always a few taps away. A slave to the Zeigarnik Effect (in which uncompleted tasks are more cognitively cogent than resolved ones), I found myself glued to my computer as time accelerated as it always seems to do on the ‘net. The line of civility — as you might imagine existing between Marxists, anarchists, libertarians and right-wingers — was ever strained (however staunch the moderation). Sometimes it seemed like a grand convocation of middle-class married incels; in those days, a certain level of affluence characterized web access. Once I met online a fellow-Marxist debater who, as it happened, was passing through my town; would I care to put him up for the night (waiving my wife’s apprehensions)? It was quite the comradely visit, a great example of ‘making connections’ through the world wide web. “Workers of the world, log on!” the CPUSA urged. Only a week later, the guy who ate my home-cooked spaghetti and slept in my daughter’s play room was suggesting online I should have my ‘bourgeois ass hauled off to a gulag’ for veering into Trotskyist deviation. Other flamers added more intense rectifications for me. It was shocking how cruel and immature the abuse could become — and, weirdly enough, that was a part of the hook. As Jaron Lanier phrased it, “Social media is biased, not to the Left or Right, but downward.”

A year-and-a-half of that was enough for me. Of course, there was also the variable ratio game of pornography, which raged through the late ‘90s. Let us not forget, the internet was invented by, then financed by and currently is owned by only dudes, all of them white, many of whom are psychologically maladjusted. Facebook started off as an electronic forum for ranking ‘hot girls,’ for example. (Less than 5% of engineers at tech companies are women.) I don’t think it was entirely coincidence that this was the era of Bill Clinton and Harvey Weinstein. (And the ladies had their own versions of getting turned on.) But, for the most part, with jpegs (and certain videos) loading so slow, the internet was still a world of written words. The educated were the first in; presumably they (meaning their grandchildren, many of whom attend elite schools such as Montessori and Waldorf, which eschew computers in their classrooms) will be the first out. (This may be soon as the New Yorker just announced “the internet isn’t fun anymore” [October 9, 2023].)

3.

In the late 1990s, there truly was a transformational sense of liberation with the internet. There really seemed to be a chance to sidestep, perhaps even demolish, the old gatekeepers with their cultural and ideological monopolies on mass susceptibility and expression. (Even my wife, a barely-closeted Republican, sounded positively hippieish when waxing euphorically about ‘open systems’ and stuff.) I certainly bought into all that; as a frustrated artist, it was what I wanted to believe. At the time, big bad mastodons like the New York Times were virulently anti-web, so that reinforced the idea that hipster losers like me, forever ignored by Rolling Stone and eternally rejected by the New Yorker, were on to something subversive. Yet, as Nicholas Carr observed, “It’s worth remembering that the earliest radios were broadcasting devices as well as listening devices and that the earliest phonographs could be used for recording as well as playback.” There was a dash of Sixties radicalism in the DNA of Silicon Valley, maybe first fomented by the merry Ma Bell pranksters. But, as I looked on the Battle of Seattle in 1999, like so many other sedentary revolutionaries in suburbia, it occurred to me that for every gas-masked anarchist throwing a teddy bear at a pig, there were three more fellow-travelers who watched the entire spectacle from AOL like it was the season premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Had the internet existed in the Sixties, ‘the Sixties’ may not have even happened.

Burnt out on politics (possibly bummed because Ralph Nader lost the election), I returned to my earlier love, rock and roll. This was the era of DIY archeology on the internet — the exposure given to Songpoems provides a good example — where clever collectors erected blogs devoted to sharing their arcane treasures with anonymous aficionados. There were only some 10,000 web pages back then — it was still possible to visit them all. I published an early, still-intact, Wikipedia page about 101 Strings. Reinforced from that, I researched and wrote the biography of the obscure, long-forgotten ‘one hit wonder’ band Bloodrock, who charted what was considered by mainstream rock journalists to be one of the worst songs of all time, a death dirge called “DOA” in early 1971 (the peak of Vietnam). Not only did I interview all six members (tracking them down on the ‘net), I became a frequent and close telephone correspondent of one member (who, dying of leukemia, wanted his ‘contribution to rock history’ immortalized on the information superhighway before he passed into history). That got me tap tap tapping away on my Mac for countless hours as the Y2K ‘crisis’ (a professional concern of my spouse a few feet away) came and went. In that time, any possible salvation for my marriage came and went, too. Although, as the ‘househusband’ parent, I learned to ace potty-training, bug collecting and paper doll cutting with my two little girls, almost all I remember from that era was updating my website compulsively. Not to mention listening to a running soundtrack on my iPod while stomping in puddles and feeding the ducks in the park with my kids. Or the funny feeling I had seeing my wife breast-feed the youngest while playing Tetris with zombie determination.

Now that an entire generation has grown up watching their caretakers eyeball their iPhones instead of them (squirming for attention in their strollers), do the above anecdotes sound less shocking. As Sherry Turkle put it, “We are embarking on a giant experiment in which our children are the human subjects.” What could possibly go wrong?

Returning to the posthumous saga of Bloodrock for a moment, let me conclude it with the band’s final curtain call, a one-off benefit concert — their first and only reunion in 30 years — to raise medical expenses for the expiring keyboardist. They finally became newsworthy again, one last time. Of course, as the author and webmaster of their extensive online bio, I was invited to attend the show (on the other side of the country) and blog the last chapter, all expenses paid. All the while I was trying to get through David Frick’s secretary at Rolling Stone. Nevertheless, I didn’t attend the show, nor blog the event for rock and roll posterity — it fell on the same date as my wife’s job interview at Google (on another side of the country), an occasion for some intensive parenting and moral support on my part. As it turned out, I failed to interest Goldmine (my publishing choice of last resort) in my reportage of Bloodrock; the legendary music journalist Lisa Robinson got the gig instead — cut-and-pasting my online Bloodrock bio text for some 90% of her copy.

Meanwhile, my wife got the job at Google.

4.

The year was 2005 and, following some embarrassing media coverage (media mainstreamers still inclined to punish legacy disrupters), Google, the Scientology of tech, started headhunting females for a countermanding PR offensive. Plus, throwing some babes onto its campus would help keep all those code-crushing bros from venturing too far afield the silicon gates. Now that my youngest daughter qualified for Google daycare, employee 11,346 no longer had any reason to keep her eccentric househusband on retainer.

Stuck in Menlo Park without any prospects for gainful employment, I blogged about the entire collapse of my life for the schadenfreude kicks of 12 subscribers. As it turned out, my wife had been involved in a ‘cyber affair’ with various ‘Furry Muck’ people, and one or two colleagues IRL, prior to when our first daughter was conceived. My daughter’s unmistakable resemblance to one of these characters — who would lurk my blog for years — probably explained all the times at playdates other parents noted the strong dissimilarity of her features to mine. (She later graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a master’s in computer science.) This pointed to my path not taken — my temptation, way back in 1998 before my daughter was conceived, to leave my then-girlfriend and go join the intentional community Twin Oaks which I visited (while she was hooking up with another network engineer). Life is strange. Apparently it’s even stranger online. She was addicted to a bestiality role-playing game. The internet — especially now that it has gone mobile — is everyone’s announcement to everyone else that ‘I have better things to do and better places to be.’ But, as Lawrence Scott observed, “Despite being in many places at once, we’re not fully inhabiting any of them.”

When I found out the truth, accidentally clicking on an intranet folder of hers, I knew the marriage was truly shot when I offered to join in her organized delusional system online, and she demurred. A Google engineer soon arrived at our former home, yoga mat and bicycle in tow. From there, I finally went to Twin Oaks, chucking my candy-colored Mac (Merry Christmas, Craig!) in a nearby dumpster. Despite a few summer vacation visits and a plethora of snail mail (from me), my connection with my kids — not permitted social media — predictably dissolved within a few years.² Thinking upon my dead marriage, Cal Newport said it succinctly: “You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the ping-pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we’ve painstakingly adapted over millennia.”

I have no insights into the inner mechanisms of Google to proffer. (Information wants to be free but algorithms want to be secret.) My wife never commented on anything pertaining to Google other than that the dinners they served on campus were better than what I made at home. I believe she and her second husband worked there at least a decade and made a lot of money. As the decade commenced, news would occasionally leak out about rampant sexism at Google, or sleazy political practices, monopoly strong-arming, tax-evasion in off-shore accounts, or creepy surveillance tactics and a general malaise that increasing search centralization, ever automating, was making people stupider than they already were. What if Google was lying to us; how would we check? Like Philip-Morris, they had a respectable reputation for a good long run, though. I occasionally wondered what my ex experienced there — whether or not she ever regretted her Faustian pact — but mainly I viewed the whole hoopla as another in a very long string of corporate acts of hubris and greed. It was supposed to be the search engine equivalent of the Gutenberg press, or at the very least, the Whole Earth Catalog, but the internet ended up little more than another advertising shuck, this time predicated on the operant conditioning rhythms of variable-ratios. Was making a new ‘and improved’ boob tube — one that took your credit card number like Pac Man eats a quarter — really the best the Boomer and X generations could do? Instead of eradicating global hunger or poverty (or something cool like that), they settled for eradicating global boredom (and failed).

At least the old bastards got to stick a flag on a dead rock in space.

5.

I joined Twin Oaks — originally based on B.F. Skinner’s utopian-behaviorist novel Walden Two; established 1967, America’s longest-running secular community — in 2007, the year the iPhone was deployed. An ‘intentional’ community intending to filter out the corruptions of the silent majority, TV (like personal automobile ownership and all weaponry) was scrupulously banned; not even Monty Pylon or Sesame Street were permitted to contaminate the flower-power children. And this remained (technically) true when I arrived — excluding the fact that the personal computer, originally purchased for business accounts and membership outreach, was beginning its insidious yet inexorable domination over the previously intentional edicts of community culture. The first laptops appeared a year later in the possession of the tattooed, nose-ringed, colored hair recruits, sparking a sharp but eventually futile wave of protest from the ‘Pete Seeger people’ about the erosion of Twin Oaks’ exalted egalitarianism.

A year after that, OK Cupid was discovered at Twin Oaks, and everyone got an account. Shopping for people. Already living in a community where polyamory was rife and the entire population assumed groovy names, everybody assumed a reinvented set of intrepid aliases which encouraged even lower inhibitions. The problem with OK Cupid in utopia is that everybody’s superficial interests — saving the whales, voting for Ralph Nader, vegetarianism, no nukes, etc. — coupled with the same zip code simply gets OK Cupid to algorithm up everybody at Twin Oaks with each other and nobody else in the entire Virginia-D.C. area. Sourdough gets an 89% ‘compatibility score’ with Loofah who she’s detested for over 12 years; Pinecone gets a 93% ‘compatibility score’ with Tweed who she used to sleep with, since ending in a vengeful meltdown of recriminations; Chamomile gets a 95% ‘compatibility score’ with me, someone she doesn’t bother to acknowledge; and Lord Byron VIII receives a whopping, eye-popping 99% ‘compatibility score’ with Onion who he’s been studiously attempting to avoid for that last 6 months. So much for the wisdom of algorithms.

Even though I had chucked my personal device back in Menlo Park, thinking I would shed my bourgeois vices in utopia, I was able to maintain a slow drip of my habit through the use of one of Twin Oaks’ office computers. Since competition over the six community consoles was fierce (in the passive-aggressive manner of hippies), I adopted a nocturnal schedule in order to better serve my addiction, now updating my blog (about the ‘simple life’) while simultaneously writing copy for an online music magazine (‘maybe it will get anthologized into print someday’) plus getting sucked into the personal (and depressing) anthropology studies conducted on Facebook, ultimately unfriending the first girl I ever kissed (in 8th grade). However, the day the Edward Snowden story broke, I deleted my Facebook account, thinking that was what every conscionable leftie into saving the whales, voting for Ralph Nader, vegetarianism, no nukes, etc. would do. Nope. I remember the main visitor liaison, a ‘famous anarchist’ who merited his own (putatively self-penned) Wikipedia entry,³ telling me Facebook was “too important a resource for membership outreach” to abandon (as he compulsively hit ‘Like’ on a series of anarchist memes entering his feed). As I noticed over the ensuing years, the problem with recruiting members from Facebook, Twin Oaks kept recruiting Facebook addicts.

Soon enough, everyone in Walden Two was binging Game of Thrones.

6.

Nonetheless, the iPhone didn’t make its way into Eden. It was too expensive for socialist tofu farmers living way under the state poverty line. While Twitter soon enough made its reductionist presence known at Twin Oaks — cancel cultural added drama to a dull rural routine — for the most part, I remained a Web 1.0 junkie. Once I set my now-resumed poetry to cut and pasted musical backdrops, I became hooked on Soundcloud (which, advertising surveillance aside, primarily exists to sell its suckers fake followers). Like a million other rubes, I was always amplifying my ego-tripping on the internet where everybody’s famous and nobody cares.⁴ I remember my indignation when a former Twin Oaker refused to “check out” my recent masterpieces because I turned off the comments feature, informing me (over email) “I’ll listen when I can make a comment.” Since when did people need a corresponding activity to music listening? Was this an indication that pop music had grown exponentially worse since push-button drumming and Napster freeloading made music simultaneously more democratic and less skilled? Democracy was getting overrated.

Responding to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, I wrote a poem about the (short-lived) movement to ‘Delete Facebook’:

Surveillance

Or, Deleting Our Vanity?

The internet is watching you,

and who else cares what you’re up to?;

your so-called friends, your would-be wife

are first to say, dude, get a life;

the neighbors once knew our affairs

but nowadays, nobody cares;

our parents noticed what we did

but that was then, so good luck, kid;

we once thought God watched over us

but He turned out oblivious;

the bands of social life went splat

and narcissism’s where it’s at;

nobody gives a rat’s rear end

unless you are their Facebook friend;

now, worry not of privacy,

you need it like virginity;

we heed not caution which just proves

we want someone to watch our moves;

we must sign up, log on, enlist—

without Google, we won’t exist;

the thought that someone’s watching us

means life is not anonymous;

surveillance bothers us not, since

it proves we have significance.⁵

I mean, what better evidence does any self-respecting leftie need than to know Facebook helped Trump get elected, and still stayed logged on, sending memes and hitting ‘Like’ like some brainwashed pigeon in a Skinner box? As Tim Kendall, former FB exec, told a Congressional committee in 2020, “We took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset.” Nice guys.

7.

I left Twin Oaks in the summer of 2020. I was not entirely prepared to confront the changes (many of which accelerated due to the Covid pandemic) in American mainstream society which developed over my 13 year sabbatical. The first thing I noticed was, even in virtue-signaling neighborhoods, cars were now effectively the size of tanks. The second thing was, everyone on the planet was staring at a rectangular portable TV held in their hand while walking, talking — or driving (leading to an increase in auto accidents, 25% due to smartphone use). Amazon boxes and GoPuff groceries rolled up at every middle-class door. Further down the social Darwin food chain, I noticed that the proliferation of mobile devices had spread through the unwashed masses (even beggars accosting me for a dollar), polluting the internet with the hoi polloi. (While the internet was once an open mike at a used bookstore, it was now Black Friday at Walmart.) Behold an infinite army of the scrolling dead, babbling like bedlamites, low-bandwidth brains feeding on a low-information diet. Then I noticed (to my growing dismay), job interviews were either conducted on Zoom (making me lament my earlier decision to purchase a refurbished laptop without a camera function) or, simply enough, processed automatically by a series of online psychological quizzes. Interviewed (literally) by robots, which made sense since most everyone in America was now confabulating with their batteries.

As it turned out, the one job (out of dozens) I applied for that did not employ a psychological profiling test was the one that hired me. Except for the face masks, it was an old school real time interview. I was hired as a Special Ed Teacher’s Assistant at a nearby county public middle school. Of course, my pay would have to be electronically deposited into an online bank account with the proper verification requiring, in addition to the near-$100 a month internet connection, a cellphone with text function. Like all hippified boomers, I struggled juggling all the concomitant passwords expected to maintain this level of middle-class infrastructure (on a working-class wage). Meanwhile, my new wife — whom I met (and fell in love with) at Twin Oaks — took an online course in computer science and left me within the year, prompting me to google my nights away, microwaving my eyeballs, searching the varied topics of divorce recovery, dating sites (now predominantly populated by bots) and, as always, submitting or posting my latest project, or whatever it was, in an attempt to keep my narcissism from flat-lining. I was another sucker adhering to the “pre-Copernican belief” (as Andrew Keen called it), that the “new digital universe” revolved around me.

Continuing my culture shock, over at school, I began to appreciate how entrenched the internet was established into the matrix of daily existence. You Tube videos — all of which began with Grammarly ads and were interrupted with pitches for Doritos — constituted at least 10% of the class curriculum. Autocorrect supplanted what I remembered (from my own childhood years in school) as basic spelling and grammar exercises. Essays were ‘written’ with the use of microphone apps on Google docs; in fact, Google provided (and owns) the entire educational platform (while Microsoft retained its hardware monopoly). And how did this affect the children (Special Ed as well as the ‘regular’ population down the halls)? Severe impatience and disrespect for any constraints, such as sitting at a desk for 15 minutes, were primary characteristics. Sentence fragments. Solipsistic disconnect. Twitter querulousness. Not surprisingly, autistic kids can’t go an hour without screen relief, whether it’s Crossy Road, Go Noodle or ‘relaxation’ videos. Kids are reading (more like skimming) horizontally. Eating Cheetos in class. Wearing pajamas, even toting security blankets. Teachers handing out candy. Students watching TikTok during lunch. ‘Educational’ Minecraft clubs. Girls taking selfies in the girls’ room; boys receiving them over Instagram in the boys’ room. (Even after the Francis Haugen congressional testimony and the Surgeon General’s warning about social media, my school retains both its FB and Instagram accounts.) Teachers sneaking out into the hallways to check their devices. Despite the APA recommending no more than 2 hours, students average 9 hours of social media a day. The more screen time, the lower the math scores. (The lower the income the higher the amount of screen time.) As Edward Tenner observed, “The technology that promised to equalize students’ opportunities appears to be increasing inequality.” It soon became evident that literacy had plummeted precariously since my time in school. Checking online (thanks, Google!), I discovered that, since the occurrence of the Reverse Flynn Effect (in which every generation’s average IQ has dropped an average of 7 points since 1975) that the average reading level of America is stuck between a 7th and 8th grade level. Literacy, which was nearly eradicated in America by 1979, now stands at 21% — more than it was at the end of the Civil War.

I was literally working in the very place where everything went wrong.

8.

My path to internet sobriety has been, admittedly, easier for me than it might be for most people. Back in the day, I popped a solitary quarter into an Asteroids console once, and walked away. I have lived years at a stretch without a phone. (Remember when there were phone booths?) While my various girlfriends (and wives) drove cars and watched TV, once I became single (as I always seem to do), I have eschewed both machines. I lived on a low-tech hippie commune over a decade in my mature years. “Everybody’s doing it” usually kills it for me. I’m less social than most people so I’m less inclined to be manipulated by social media. I walk to work. I read 100 books a year. Hell, I don’t eat candy and I boycott Christmas. And I particularly don’t like the idea that some rich kid in a designer hoodie is trying to neurologically screw with me.

Like cigarettes, quitting the internet has required some logistical planning and a level of psychological determination nevertheless. Like almost all Americans holding a job and having a bank account, some rudimentary connection online remains non-negotiable. All this rigmarole — the presumption of owning a middle-class infrastructure — definitely pisses me off. Nevertheless, I am able to maintain this basic level of online viability by the use of a computer at the local public library (and a paper backup of my multitude of passwords). Keeping my online business to such a minimum — nobody in their right mind ‘surfs the net’ in a library cubicle next to some coughing wino for very long — I estimate my current internet time at 20 minutes a week.

Like most people, I have frittered countless hours away on the internet, refreshing news stories, checking emails, updating my blogs, commenting on other people’s blogs, dicking around with free photo filters, pirating music files off YouTube, scanning product reviews and basically zoning out on the epistolomological equivalent of bubble gum. I am ashamed to admit that I have binged (and forgotten) every episode of Breaking Bad (and several other ‘legacy’ shows). Nevertheless, my core interest in life (which certainly qualifies as a weakness as well as an asset) has been the creation of my own self-generated culture (as opposed to the adoption and consumption of a mass-produced culture). This narcissistic impulse was my way in to the online slot machine. When I deleted my decade-long craigkurtz.blogspot.com site, I felt as if I was committing suicide. But remembering that I was the joker who wrote, laid-out, printed up and distributed (through used bookstores and ‘cool’ coffee shops throughout the Amherst area, circa 1995) 500 copies of a one-off anonymouszine absolutely free (printing cost was $800), I realized that, since then, I had been performing the same kind of aesthetic stunts — only in the (unintended) service of making Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Jeff Bezos (through the KDP version of my first novel⁶ ) untold riches. Frankly, I decided to go back to keeping it local and now I simply do my printing at the library (much cheaper than Staples).

This tract is the result. If you choose to keep it, it will last longer than an internet link (of which 25% no longer work). And Elon Musk won’t end up owning it (as he now does with every comment made on Twitter).

One thing I hear a lot is something to the effect of, “Technology is neutral; it’s all about how one uses it” or, “Oh, that’s what people said about the [whatever].” I beg to differ. Some inventions, such as the bomb, suck big time. The camera demolished realistic painting. The phonograph obviated classical music. The radio and TV dumbed down literature. These chronologies are clear. Furthermore, every new invention, other than intending to reduce human skill,⁷ has its inherent ideology. With the ship came slavery. Timepieces accompanied manufacturing employment. Firearms expanded the devastations of warfare. The assembly-line deskilled and cheapened labor. Automobiles have practically paved the planet⁸ as they alienated communities. And so on. When Tristan Harris, former Google designer, insists that social media platforms are not neutral, we might concede someone who gets paid to run the ant farm knows what he’s talking about. Imagine every worker in the U.S. — including your primary physician — distracted by their smartphone (resulting in an average 25% loss in U.S. workplace productivity). Things are designed to do stuff. And they do stuff to us. Plus, warming the planet to cool the servers, ecologically speaking, the internet is a bummer.⁹

According Roger McNamer, formerly of FB, said, “There is evidence that internet platforms produce happiness for the first 10 minutes or so of use, but beyond that, continued use leads to progressively greater dissatisfaction.” How like smoking. Or is it just another ‘cool thing’ too much capitalism has ruined?

Concluding, I will advocate to anyone who wishes to gain control over their (now cyber-manipulated) attention to first find other activities in the real world to replace the space left open by discarding internet habits. I got a cat, for example. Try to find other people who wish to reduce and minimize their cyber consumption. Parents, please stop using your phones (“to take pictures of Junior to send to his grandparents”) as an excuse to stay buffered from your offspring all the time. Take walks. Get a library card. Learn guitar instead of Guitar Hero. Play chess instead of WoW. Sleep more. Resist and refuse the algorithmic variable ratio schedules of operant conditioning. Live a life instead of outsourcing it in low-bandwidth bytes. Hopefully we can inspire the next generation accomplish something other than collect happy faces on their phones. Remember, all the ‘geniuses’ who invented the internet came out of a culture of reading books. Famously, Steve Jobs wouldn’t let his kids near an iPad; certainly my Google engineer ex-wife didn’t expose her kids to any screens. From what I can tell, it erodes the imagination while stressing the nervous system out. And what for? Our digital selves aren’t real people; they’re deteriorated copies of who we aspire to be.

The problem isn’t technology addiction; it’s addiction technology. Digital addiction is a pandemic. Internet sobriety is the solution. Recover your life.

NOTES

1. Page 71, 1966 Beacon paperback edition. I mention this to demonstrate the quotation above was not cribbed off the ‘net in a 2-minute search as many ‘classic’ quotations are nowadays done, reducing hundreds of years’ worth of wit and wisdom to an ever-centralizing clutch of googled commonplaces.

2. Here’s thinking of you, Rosa and Clara.

3. One-third of all Wikipedia entries are written by one man, Steve Pruitt. Of the rest, only 10% are written by women.

4. Almost 50% of all blog traffic goes to only 50 blogs, and 25 million blogs are never seen by anyone except their authors. Indeed, a mere 10 web sites receive 75% of all U.S. page views. 95% of all KDP books sell less than 100 copies. Similarly, 94% of tracks in the iTunes store sell less than 100 units.

5. Originally published (online, appropriately enough) by Rattle, 2018.

6. My vanity’s final dalliance with the internet was the KDP ‘publication’ of my novel about Twin Oaks. After sales tapped out after 50 units, Amazon’s product search ceased to mention its existence (even under my name or the name of the book), thus insuring its obscurity.

7. It has been estimated that 47% of U.S. jobs will be automated within 20 years.

8. Every vehicle mandates at least four concomitant parking spaces.

9. The ‘cloud’ has a larger carbon footprint than the airline industry. Half the electricity for data centers are air-conditioning. The global estimate for electricity consumption for computers alone is 25% by the year 2025 and the estimate for internet’s electricity consumption is expected to be 20% by 2025.

 

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