Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

This quitting/cutting back on the internet is hard. The algorithm loves me and wants me to be happy. Just one more video related to one of my previously documented obsessions. Look, it is slightly different than the others. Oooh! An update! New recycled content about Alien!! Updates on the news cycle that never ends and does me no good.

You will miss something if you don’t watch. Keep watching. Don’t move that cursor up there! Are you sure? Just one more. Something to make you feel good about yourself, or bad about yourself but offering a solution to the problem you didn’t know you had.

And I don’t use my phone to doomscroll. So by ‘average’ standards, I may be an under-consumer of ‘content’.

I am not a content producer. I’m a writer. But how can anyone have time to write, let alone read, when the algo induced FOMO keeps you glued to your screen? It’s only 2 minutes, I can watch that at 2x speed. See? I’m saving time. 20 cat videos later I’m questioning my life choices. I like the shoulder cam footage that follows one intrepid tabby through the mean cat-laden streets of suburbia. How come they always find their way to a dry spillway/concrete canyon? So much drama!

I don’t really watch cat videos. Apart from that one I just mentioned, that did have a cool documentary vibe. The secret life of what the hell am I doing staring at this? FFS!

Damn. Or dang. Internet is rapacious and demands your attention. Somewhere in a server farm an altar of eyeballs is being built, still twitching madly, looking for the screen that isn’t there.

When I was a boy (yes – this astonishing segue was always coming, and you knew it – congratulations!) I always wanted a computer. A Commodore 64 would have been beyond my wildest dreams. (Not really – I dreamt of it a lot. But was that what I meant? You decide.) The computer that never came was, I have come to realize, another symbol of my desire to escape the humdrum of my childhood, the same urge that sent me off to Narnia or Middle-earth. It is so strange to discover now, as a man of mature (haha!) years, that the imagined escape and limitless frontiers that I believed lay within the Commodore’s 64 bit/byte/sue me interior was as much a fantasy as Mr. Tumnus, and with a poorer choice in tea.

I’m not saying the internet is all bad. But it isn’t an escape. It feels more like a trap. I’m saying this because I have failed to control myself as I would like. I failed my self-imposed test. I was a little bit better than before this past week, but saw myself failing to disengage early and often, as I should have. Often, because all too often I click back in, to check on the nothing that has changed since I last opened that window. FFS. Next week I’ll do better.

If you have self-control and can keep your distance from the algorithmic monsters that lurk waiting to snare your attention you can still find much of use. It feels less free than it did though, and not just because of subscriptions here, there, and everywhere, or requests to join things (for a monthly fee) or tip people (just a coffee!). It also feels a little censored, a little curated, a lot less trustworthy. And that’s a damn/dang shame. But I hope that will make it easier for me to turn my head away, remove my eyeballs from the altar, and live a little. Today I cleaned a freezer. Later I plan to pull weeds. That, my friends, is the life.