I Used to Live Here
I haven’t been on Instagram since before Christmas. I check Facebook for a few seconds once every five days or so to clear notifications—mostly automated pestilence, rarely generated by a human. I’ve gotten onto reddit a few times to research some DIY info…and Pokémon trades. Daily: I do the Wordle, I check the weather, I check some package tracking numbers…and Pokémon trades in the Home app. If I’m still not finished in the bathroom by then, I’ll look at TikTok for a few minutes. All told, my time online these past thirty+ days has been probably a total of five hours.
And I found, maybe not to my surprise…that I didn’t miss it.
And it wasn’t that long ago that I would have.
But today’s internet is not the world wide web it was just a few years ago. The internet used to be a place. We’d log off. We’d leave it behind. Maybe “touch grass,” or read a book or something. Now it’s always there, in our pocket, in every room with us, in our mind’s eye—interrupting our thoughts, our conversations, our time with each other. We no longer tell the people we’re talking to in messaging apps that we’ll BRB—we exist in a perpetual state of Online. We never have to spend a few seconds alone with our discomfort, or with the crushing dread of the dystopian horror unfolding around us. We’re joined by everyone else experiencing the same horror, through a smudged-up, dirty window that lives in tandem with us at all times.
I read No One Is Talking About This last year (or maybe the year before? I don’t know, time no longer has meaning, everything exists all at once, and maybe that’s a symptom too) and understood virtually all the references rife throughout—a whole lexicon built through hours whiled away online. Ephemera that lasts a day, half a day, is already tired out by the time your parents’ evening news or Reels gets ahold of it, days later. And what the hell for?
Those two times I checked reddit, I was instantly pissed off by the headlines that caught my eye—the first I don’t remember, but the second was about that grim AI-generated George Carlin standup special (to which you KNOW he’d have a furious tirade to respond with). I have Instagram barely showing anyone my posts, but also pushing ads and Threads into my feed, encouraging me to join another Zuccubus social web I’ll never subject myself to being tangled in. More of the same on Facebook. TikTok started shoving Shops down everyone’s throats just a few months ago—and at least on my FYP, no one is happy about it. Even Spotify’s algorithm and interface has turned to garbage—I have to google (except not actually google anymore, because of sponsored content burying relevant results) what albums are coming out any given month because it’s stopped putting my favorite artists’ releases in my new music feed. Streaming platforms you already pay for (or your friends and family do) are further paywalling the things we want to watch—or removing them altogether, never physically released.
I noticed with increasing frequency that my time online was emptying me out FAR more than it was filling me up—so why would I keep subjecting myself to it? And I just…logged off.
I’m not trying to be Old Man Yells At Cloud here, but the internet of not even a decade ago had more to contribute to our culture and enrichment than…what it has become. Because it used to be made up of and controlled by regular-ass people who HAD something to contribute—and now it’s been hijacked and strangled by corporate and capitalist interests: right-wing billionaires building AI empires of propaganda and pay-to-play algorithms that force people to churn out “content” instead of substance, lest that algorithm leave them behind, lest it hide them from customers, or fans, or even friends and family. Speaking of friends and family, you don’t see their posts much anymore, do you? Maybe a shared post from an unfunny meme page once in a while from Uncle Elgort about how Trump is the second coming of Christ, unless you’ve muted or unfriended him by now. Otherwise, just one big advertisement, spread over every platform, everybody influencing and selling and spewing. No more wonders of the online world served up by StumbleUpon (RIP)—just the latest terrible take from some billionaire-owned outlet, ragebaiting towards Bethlehem.
More and more attention is demanded of us for less and less reward. Late-stage capitalism has come for the internet, and the enshittification of everything continues unabated. We pay more and more, we get less and less. Online. At the grocery store. To those criminals at Adobe so we poor, beleaguered artists can keep using Creative Suite.
I realize it’s a massive luxury afforded to me that I can just step away from most of it. Virtually every career requires you to be online these days. Hell, who knows what it’ll do to my career not being present in people’s feeds (when the algorithm deigns to let me through)—though to be perfectly honest, as someone who refuses to “play the game,” it wasn’t doing much for me to begin with. But I wouldn’t even have a Facebook or Instagram account at this point if I didn’t have comics to promote, contributing my own posts to that Great Big Advertisement that is the internet now. Disgusting. Sorry. I obviously want people to discover and read and enjoy my work, but not like this. Not inviting pestering comments to “DM it on ArtStupid!” or emails with broken syntax telling me they “love my brand” and would love to “collaborate” by selling their supplements or tacky watches or whatever the garbage of the day is from my account. If they had any idea how antithetical to their goals the messaging of my work is, they wouldn’t come anywhere near me.
All that said, I’m not like, encouraging everyone to leave the internet and exist in the Real World. Everything sucks. The internet was once a semi-safe Third Space from that suckage. Now, you wanna “touch grass”? Okay, it costs $100 just to step out the front door. There’s still a pandemic happening, a mass disabling event (second-worst COVID numbers we’ve ever had this past holiday season, last I checked), and our leaders don’t give a shit as long as we’re alive enough to keep making them money. We exist solely so parasites can make a profit off of us, and we’re being microtransactioned to death both online and offline. Our Third Spaces are disappearing and being increasingly gatekept and monetized and made unsafe. Shit, they’re even working on outlawing homelessness like in the The Unforgiven, 14 years after I wrote it. So where the hell do we GO?
I mean, obviously I’m going to say “This is OUR world, not theirs, and we take it back.” Which, yeah. But that’s going to take some real doing, and in the short-term, we’re ships without a shore. The internet is also now a place to view the horror happening everywhere, all the time, in real time, and fill us with the despair that there is little we can do about it alone—like try to stop a Palestinian genocide funded by our tax dollars. And it’s so important to know things like that are going on, but sifting through all the barriers to that information is becoming increasingly difficult—especially while living under a government with such a massive interest in making sure people eat up the propaganda it’s spoon-feeding them to keep them from demanding the genocide stops.
And it’s true—we can’t do much against all this alone, which is why we need to build community and strength in numbers and visibility offline. But again—pandemic, disappearing Third Spaces, gatekeeping, etc. Difficult to amass, deliberately. Deliberate atomization and isolation, because together, we CAN usurp the handful of jackasses literally destroying the planet. So in the meantime…what? Scream into the void, get buried by the algorithm for daring to go against the grain?
Sorry to tell you after reading all this way that I’m not here presenting answers. I don’t know what I’m here for. Maybe I’m just…letting y’all know I’m saying goodbye to the perpetually Online person I’ve been for the last decade, now that the returns are precipitously diminishing? Letting y’all know that I’m still out here, IRL, with a pulse, with an angry desire to end all this deliberate misery? Idk. But I am, and I am, and I am, and…maybe you are too. And since we build community with connection, with shared experience, and we’re all sharing this awful experience together, maybe it’s just important to start by saying you’re not alone. We’re not alone.
Now what?
I don’t know what the future holds for my relationship to the internet. I know what it was, when I liked what it was, and I know what it’s become—me vs a thing that manipulates and dysregulates, “a terror that extends to everywhere” that I feel a pressing need to escape from. Maybe I’ll return with some regularity one day. Probably that’s inevitable, with the world we live in, my emotional and mental health be damned alongside everyone else’s. But I’d like to think my internet will return to staying in one spot, and I’ll just check in on it from time to time—like when you drive by the house you once lived in, just to see what’s become of it. See how it’s holding up, get a sense of who lives there now, see if they put the couch under the same window you did.
I might drive by. But I don’t live here anymore.