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I’ve realized that writing for the internet has an insidious effect: over time, you spend less time writing and more time wondering, calculating, about the impact, the response, your writing will get; the word loses its snap — its vigor. The word starts to rot in the silo.
I worry: are we saving two million lives to starve two hundred million?
Experts and pseudo-experts and fake-experts and anti-experts: all act like experts; it’s strange. The whole Internet is hot-taking its way through Coronavirus; either that, or pathetic-fallacy-ing its way through Coronavirus (oh woe is me). All reactions seem to come out of the can, then get further microwaved on Twitter or Facebook. I’m not-not guilty of this, only increasingly aware of it — aware of myself and aware of the behavior of the millions of apparitional others I interact with, however indirectly, on the internet, via social networks. It’s extremely difficult to know how much useful information we get from the certain platforms, compared to how much re-fried bullshit. The platform I’m writing on now, for instance, is really, truly, embarrassingly filled with pathetic clickbait garbage; the thousands of so-called writers here are anything but. The same is true of Twitter aphorists.
As far as I can tell, social media contains only involuntary self-parodists. Newspapers are hardly better: writing in the style of either a) smug liberal meritocrat or b) conspiratorial backwoods survivalist individualist or c) technocratic fintech jock who can’t believe the rest of the world isn’t taking their suggestions.
If sugar gives you diabetes — what does all this Internet sugar do to your cognitive insulin? What kind of mental diseases are we in the process of developing during this concentrated period of quarantine intake?
