The Poverty of Digital Life

My coworker asked me the other day how my "AI Blog" was going. So of course, the first thing I have to do is write about something other than AI. (But hey, I "know my wheelhouse," right?) The question feels natural: A few weeks ago? No blog. Today: Blog. "Blog!" It's not just a dumb sounding word, in this case they're my dumb words, practiced as a mostly dead version of the art form. Serving up flat file HTML with words written by human hands in the year of our lord, 2026, feels a lot like a preacher standing on the streets of San Francisco with a megaphone: loud, invisible, obnoxious, unnecessary.

Still, I've got a soft spot for the format.

This 20th century artifact appeals to my lived experience, leftover from a time when a PC, some HTML, and a web ring bought entry to a technology revolution. Back then the internet felt huge. In retrospect it was an incredibly intimate version of the web. By the start of the 21st century, we only had 6% of the world online, and yet "smol web" felt like it offered access to everything, everywhere. For the longest time, it was just... people. (Soylent Web?) Normal people, nervously chatting with mostly anonymous strangers for the first time about what they thought were niche interests.

Communities existed on open-source locales, reflections of their participants and little else — no one had figured out how to make money off of them yet. I'm brought back to the Noise BBS I was on, hosted on phpBB, which felt like this niche outpost of the internet. It was a genuinely fun place, filled with musicians, artists, and weirdos trading and selling tapes and burned CDs of their tunefully atonal sound compositions. You'd meet these people at shows, or sleep on their floor while you were "going on tour" to a record shop + someone's basement over a long weekend, and they were usually every bit as genuine and idiosyncratic as they came across on these forums. (Shoutout to my coworker James, who for whatever reason invented phpBB¹. These boards are how I got into all kinds of fun little subcultures and small communities of builders and weirdos, so thank you James.) And that's just one of my own overly specific experiential slices, one of many. It seems like everyone I know who grew up in this time shares a photocopy of this experience — the Friendster or LiveJournal communities, the IRC channels, etc.

The early-2000s were that shadow zone boundary between the total non-existence of the web and our hyper-connected, hyper-monetized now. For the longest time I actually had to touch grass, not just because I had no choice (which is true) but also because it was fun. Ours was a truly unique generational milieu. It's not that other generations didn't have a hand in forming this, but we had the neuroplasticity required to actively mold — and be molded by — the biggest sea change in modern history, on a level we haven't seen again until the emergence of LLMs.

Zooming out some 20-odd years later, it genuinely baffles and horrifies me that we have an emerging majority of digital natives, so thoroughly enmeshed in the substrate of digital life that they can't even fathom things looking or working any other way. To para-quote a line from Backrooms, "imagine describing a dog to someone that's never seen one and then asking them to draw it." In another generation, the "pre-internet dog" will be a mythical creature.

Maybe this is just the moral panic of the day, you can find similar sentiments about the emergence of the printing press, but the negative traces are hiding everywhere in plain sight. We've all seen the friendly gatherings or business meetings featuring people together, but apart, staring at their slabs of glass. An act so mundane it seems almost pointless for me to mention it, outside of the fact that this was once considered sad and anti-social. And this is how many — if not most — people spend their days. Knowledge workers work on their work screen, taking periodic breaks on their pocket screen to catch up on memes and loved ones, they relax with the pocket screen on the commute home, then unwind in the evening with the big screen, before falling asleep to one last scroll on the pocket screen again.

The idea of performative activity on social media isn't just the norm, it's the common thread that ties people together. Parasocial relationships give people a sort of social interaction junk food. Maybe it scratches an itch on some level, but it's fundamentally transactional. Influencers get their eyeballs, and the ad revenue flows. But none of this is nutritive in the substantial way that having an actual, persistent community of IRL humans is.

This is "the spectacle" as foretold by the Situationists in the 1960s, brought to life writ large. The words are eerily prescient, unpacking "a social relation between people that is mediated by images," a world where everything that was once directly lived has moved to representation. Guy Debord writes in his seminal work:

The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at. [...] The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.

This inversion of life has become a funhouse mirror image of what it's replaced. Humans are tribal, drawn to their close knit social groups, but communities of the physical world are exactly the spaces that shrank in the last two decades, replaced by their digital substitutes. Churches, the neighborhood, the town hall, local politics, the PTO meetings, those spaces that people find common ground with their neighbors and friends, those are all the areas the data shows participation has crashed. In its place, we have a digital world which feels rootless, but it's how people find their jobs, their partners, and their friends.

Digital life has become the water in the fishbowl, invisible, omnipresent, a non-negotiable requirement for being alive.

If you disagree, or don't believe me, I invite you to experience what I mean firsthand. Believe it or not, you have to opt-in to participate in the internet and social media.

Try abstaining from your digital devices for a few weeks and see both how different your brain feels, and how hard it is to do some basic things now, like buying stuff, keeping in touch with people, or simply paying for parking or a subway ride. I've done many a "digital detox," trying out thoughtful and visionary devices like the Light Phone. It's always a wonderful experience — I read books, I write — and it always falls apart because you can only go for so long without (for example) a god damn GPS on your phone.

Coming back to social media now feels like adventuring with hard drugs while hoping one doesn't become addicted. Harsh words for the chronically online, I know. If you haven't tried taking a few weeks off from social media, or better yet a break from your smartphone as I outlined above, you should really try it and just see what it feels like.

Consider it my challenge to you.

I'm sure I sound like some 90s internet elitist. To clarify: I'm not a 90s internet elitist, just an overall 90s elitist. Not because the 90s were actually better, but because I got to appreciate something a vanishingly small number of people did: life before everything was inescapably addled by the internet and technology. I feel fortunate to have a reference frame in my brain that can tell me "this doesn't seem quite right..."

What's not right seems easy enough to name these days, or at least the stream can be traced to its source. I don't want to rehash the phenomenon of enshittification, much better writers have covered the topic.

X née Twitter is the most accessible example. Twitter was initially inspired by something called TXTMob, created by people at the intersection of activist tech and the anti-globalization movement. Before Signal, before WhatsApp, before group messaging, TXTMob allowed protestors to coordinate at events like the 2004 RNC and other anti-globalization flashpoints in the early aughts.

"The creation of twitter was something which was intentional, but nobody knew what would be built," to quote Rabble, one of its creators. Truer words...

The truth in that statement could be applied to much of what the internet has wrought. It's easy to blame people for these kinds of phenomena, much in the same way that corporations have tried to reframe climate change as a problem of personal responsibility and green living.

This is why I love the Twitter example. It demonstrates, in bold type, a consciously designed series of tactics and strategies we've seen employed by Big Tech for years, a playbook so boringly obvious at this point, it's almost a joke. Elon Musk just made it grossly obvious, and it's getting harder not to see the same patterns playing out from his billionaire brethren.

As someone was telling me the other day: "The internet has gotten a lot bigger since 2014." They're not wrong. Circa 2014 was the year I'd made a conscious decision to stop using all social media and any of the places on the internet I deemed "dumb." Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, etc. The wildest part about this experience was missing entire sea changes as a genuine outsider, like the proliferation of short form vertical video. Whole apps like TikTok came and almost went without my having even created an account on them.

And yet, despite the risk of having my dopamine reward system hijacked, I feel compelled to return to The Internet. Abstention from the open web, at a time when the version I remember seems destined for the trash compactor, now feels at best amoral. At worst it's unethical and irresponsible, in the worst way, because my children will inherit the collective result of all of our action or inaction, mine included.

The stakes are also higher. There's a billionaire class in the form of Dario, Sam, and Elon, all with their own designs for how this will play out, and they have a trio of competing IPOs coming to ratchet up what looks like an AI enshittification speed-run. Between the rise of authoritarianism, climate change, and AI, the world may be sitting on the precipice of one of the most consequential sets of transitions in society, ecology, and technology.

Our "era of eras."

The good news: there's still signs of life all over the place, green shoots sprouting in places one wouldn't think to look. While I was withdrawing from enshittification, a growing coalition of folks have been investing in building practical visions of alternatives to extractive Big Tech, and they're doing it today. This takes the extractive edge off of coming back to the social web, because now we have emerging alternatives in the form of Bluesky, but other networks still maintain a sort of hegemony of necessity if you want to reach certain audiences. But we no longer have a zero-sum game where Facebook and Twitter are the only game in town. DWeb, AtProto, and the Fediverse have all emerged in the last few years as a rejoinder to this lost digital decade.

Even better: My friend showed me a flyer for "The Summer of Ludd," a whole series of events coming to NYC this Summer. It's hard to find a lot of information about them online, which thrills me since it seems to be a reflection of their stance on technology. In the best possible turn of events, these are the youth of today, college students are arriving at many of these same conclusions themselves, and the kids are sounding both pissed and hopeful.

There's something so genuine to the hopefulness of young people rejecting the wrongs of the day. Maybe it's because I identify with it, but it reminds me a lot of what it felt like to look at the early web, and seeing something that seemed to stretch out to forever, a blank canvas waiting for a mark. Hopefully this generation learns from the first draft.