Is the internet getting boring?

Buridan’s (or Aristotle’s, or Devo’s) paradox illustrates the internet’s awesome destructive potential. More important, quoting it also shows off my erudition. But here’s the internet’s terrible beauty. I picked up those fun facts by following a link from Devo lyrics to Aristotle to Buridan’s paradox. It took five minutes, whereas before the internet it would’ve taken several library trips plus letters requesting information to be posted to Devo’s people in Akron, Ohio. In other words, forget about it.

Instead, with access to all the useless information that’s ever been digitised, I can glory in the wonders of human thought and collect a scrap of trivia that, while impressive, will be forgotten in less time than it took to find it.

But I digress. And that’s the other way the web has enshittified its trousers and also our brains. You can’t stop digressing. You interrupt dinners to fact-check what someone’s just said. (Did I mention that the internet makes us boring?)

It’s often the catastrophic accident that makes the internet fun again. Example. My son told me the name of a girl he’d asked on a date. My daughter and I looked this girl up on Instagram. While scrolling through her inappropriate photos, I took the even more inappropriate act of allowing my big fat old thumb to inadvertently “like” her. Then the most inappropriate screw-up of all: not realising what I’d done, I failed to quickly “unlike” her.

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So the girl had an inappropriate old man liking her inappropriate picture. I told my son to blame it all on his sister. To lie was the only appropriate act in the whole sorry spiral, although telling the truth may have set me free of the internet. I might have been banned.

The author of the New Yorker article, Kyle Chayka, concluded that the “internet today feels emptier, like an echoing hallway, even as it is filled with more content than ever”. Doctorow anatomised the life cycle of the social media platform: “First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.” (But how can I quote this? I didn’t go to the newsagent and buy a copy of Wired.) But they don’t die, do they? They do all those crappy things, and then they keep growing. Call it Zuckerberg’s Paradox (yes, I know Mark Zuckerberg didn’t invent the internet; Trump did.)

For solutions, the big thinkers focus on technological self-determination: giving people freedom to escape before real-world bogeys like cyberterrorists, hackers, AI and the Chinese government cause real-world chaos. But what if we don’t want to escape? What if the more boring the internet is, the more it fails its promise, the less likely we are to climb out? What if (as it was for my son and that girl) it’s already too late?

Self-regulation, in the internettish spirit of freedom, is failing. Sayeth Devo: “Freedom of choice is what you got/ Freedom from choice is what you want.” Possibly the world needs some authoritarian uber-parent to confiscate our devices, and maybe that deep-seated desire for an uber-parent is why the world’s biggest countries support uber-parents, including those millions in the USA who express their authoritarian desires by voting for the world’s biggest uber-child, who also has the Biggest Ever phone addiction.

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I finally settled on a New Year’s resolution this week, which was to stop my screen time from rising … but only after I’ve finished that word game, rechecked the weather and the surf, kept up with the news, and located that morsel of information that I’ve forgotten why I wanted or that persuasive point I’ve forgotten I was hoping to make.

Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and columnist.