You will not survive<\/em> is not only a frightening idea. The things I hope for are doomed, and everything I try to create will be a failure, but so will everything I despise.2 <\/p>\n\n\n\nThese days, it repeats itself whenever I see something that\u2019s trying its hardest to make me angry and upset. There\u2019s a whole class of these objects: they\u2019re never particularly interesting or important; they just exist to jab you into thinking that the world is going in a particular direction, away from wherever you are. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Should I get upset about this? Should I be concerned? Why bother? It will not survive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2018The strong iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles, who would not live long.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In fact, one of the things that will not survive is novelty itself: trends, fads, fashions, scenes, vibes. We are thrown back into cyclical time; what\u2019s growing old is the cruel demand to make things new. It\u2019s already trite to notice that all our films are franchises now, all our bestselling novelists have the same mass-produced non-style, and all our pop music sounds like a tribute act.4<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The things that will<\/em> survive are the things that are already in some sense endless. The sea; the night; the word. Things with deep fathoms of darkness in them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/span>The internet will not survive<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\nIt\u2019s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1977, Ken Olsen declared that \u2018there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.\u2019 In 1995, Robert Metcalfe predicted in InfoWorld<\/em> that the internet would go \u2018spectacularly supernova\u2019 and then collapse within a year. In 2000, the Daily Mail<\/em>reported that the \u2018Internet may be just a passing fad,\u2019 adding that \u2018predictions that the Internet would revolutionise the way society works have proved wildly inaccurate.\u2019 Any day now, the millions of internet users would simply stop, either bored or frustrated, and rejoin the real world.Funny, isn\u2019t it? You can laugh at these people now, from your high perch one quarter of the way into the twenty-first century. Look at these morons, stuck in their grubby little past, who couldn\u2019t even correctly identify the shape of the year 2022. You<\/em> can see it perfectly, because you\u2019re smart. You<\/em> know that the internet has changed everything, forever.If you like the internet, you\u2019ll point out that it\u2019s given us all of human knowledge and art and music, instantly accessible from anywhere in the world; that you can arrive in a foreign city and immediately guide yourself to a restaurant and translate the menu and also find out about the interesting historical massacres that took place nearby, all with a few lazy swipes of your finger. So many interesting little blogs! So many bizarre subcultures! It\u2019s opened up our experience of the world: now, nothing is out of reach.To be honest, it\u2019s difficult to reconstruct what the unbridled techno-optimists think; there\u2019s so few of them left. Still, those who don\u2019t<\/em> like the internet usually agree with them on all the basics\u2014they just argue that we\u2019re now in touch with the wrong sort<\/em> of thing: bad kids\u2019 cartoons, bad political opinions, bad ways of relating to your own body and others. Which is why it\u2019s so important to get all this unpleasant stuff off the system, and turn the algorithm towards what is good and true.They might be right, but you could go deeper. The internet has enabled us to live, for the first time, entirely apart from other people. It replaces everything good in life with a low-resolution simulation. A handful of sugar instead of a meal: addictive but empty, just enough to keep you alive. It even seems to be killing off sex, replacing it with more cheap, synthetic ersatz. Our most basic biological drives simply wither in its cold blue light. People will cheerfully admit that the internet has destroyed their attention spans, but what it\u2019s really done away with is your ability to think<\/em>. Usually, when I\u2019m doing something boring but necessary\u2014the washing up, or walking to the post office\u2014I\u2019ll constantly interrupt myself; there\u2019s a little Joycean warbling from the back of my brain. \u2018Boredom is the dream bird that broods the egg of experience.\u2019 But when I\u2019m listlessly killing time on the internet, there is nothing<\/em>. The mind does not wander. I am not there. I remain in its trance, the lifeless scroll, twitching against the screen until the sky goes dark and I\u2019m one day closer to the end. <\/p>\n\n\n\nYou lose hours to\u2014what? An endless slideshow of barely interesting images and actively unpleasant text. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
You know it\u2019s all very boring, brooding nothing, but the internet addicts you to your own boredom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m starting to think that the last thing the internet destroys might be itself. I think they might be vindicated, Ken Olson and Robert Metcalfe and even, God forgive me, the Daily Mail<\/em>.In the future\u2014not the distant future, but ten years, five\u2014people will remember the internet as a brief dumb enthusiasm, like phrenology or the dirigible. They might still use computer networks to send an email or manage their bank accounts, but those networks will not be where culture or politics happens. The idea of spending all day online<\/em> will seem as ridiculous as sitting down in front of a nice fire to read the phone book. Soon, people will find it incredible that for several decades all our art was obsessed with digital computers<\/em>: all those novels and films and exhibitions about tin cans that make beeping noises, handy if you need to multiply two big numbers together, but so lifeless, so sexless, so grey synthetic glassy bugeyed spreadsheet plastic drab. And all your smug chortling over the people who failed to predict our internetty present\u2014if anyone remembers it, it\u2019ll be with exactly the same laugh.52. That exhausted is a whole lot more than tiredYou know, secretly, even if you\u2019re pretending not to, that this thing is nearing exhaustion. There is simply nothing there<\/em> online. All language has become rote, a halfarsed performance: even the outraged mobs are screaming on autopilot. Even genuine crises can\u2019t interrupt the tedium of it all, the bad jokes and predictable thinkpieces, spat-out enzymes to digest the world. \u2018Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.\u2019 Online is not where people meaningfully express themselves<\/em>; that still happens in the remaining scraps of the nonnetworked world. It\u2019s a parcel of time you give over to the machine. Make the motions, chant its dusty liturgy. The newest apps even literalise this: everyone has to post a selfie at exactly the same time, an inaudible call to prayer ringing out across the world. Recently, at a bar, I saw the room go bright as half the patrons suddenly started posing with their negronis. This is called being real<\/em>. Whoever you are, a role is already waiting for you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I say the internet is running dry, I am not just basing this off vibes. The exhaustion is measurable and real. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Facebook, the average engagement rate\u2014the number of likes, comments, and shares per follower\u2014fell by 34%, from 0.086 to 0.057. Well, everyone knows that the mushrooms are spreading over Facebook, hundreds of thousands of users liquefying out of its corpse every year. But the same pattern is everywhere. Engagement fell 28% on Instagram and 15% on Twitter. (It\u2019s kept falling since.) Even on TikTok, the terrifying brainhole of tomorrow, the walls are closing in. Until 2020, the average daily time spent on the app kept rising in line with its growing user base; since then the number of users has kept growing, but the thing is capturing less and less of their lives.And this was, remember, a year in which millions of people had nothing to do except engage with great content online\u2014and in which, for a few months, liking and sharing the right content became an urgent moral duty. Back <\/p>\n\n\n\n
round the same time, strange new conspiracy theories started doing the rounds: that the internet is empty, that all the human beings you used to talk to have been replaced by bots and drones. \u2018The internet of today is entirely sterile\u2026 the internet may seem gigantic, but it\u2019s like a hot air balloon with nothing inside.\u2019 They weren\u2019t wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What\u2019s happening?6 <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The same thing is happening everywhere, to everyone. The more you relentlessly optimise your network-facing self, the more you chase the last globs of loose attention, the more frazzled we all become, and the less anyone will be able to sustain any interest at all.7Everything that depends on the internet for its propagation will die. What survives will survive in conditions of low transparency, in the sensuous murk proper to human life.3. That you have been plugged into a graveFor a while, it was possible to live your entire life online. The world teemed with new services. Like everyone, I thought this was the inevitable shape of the future. \u2018You\u2019ll own nothing, and you\u2019ll be happy.\u2019 We\u2019d all be reduced to a life spent swapping small services for the last linty coins in our pockets. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But this was not a necessary result of new technologies. The internet was not subordinating every aspect of our lives by itself<\/em>, under its own power. The online economy is an energy sink; it\u2019s only survived this far as a parasite<\/em>, in the bowels of something else.That something else<\/em> is a vast underground cavern of the dead, billions of years old.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Vision Fund is an investment vehicle headquartered in London and founded by Japan\u2019s SoftBank to manage some $150 billion, mostly from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which it\u2019s poured into Uber and DoorDash and WeWork and Klarna and Slack. It provides the money that effectively subsidises your autistic digital life. These firms could take over the market because they were so much cheaper than the traditional competitors\u2014but most of them were never profitable; they survived on Saudi largesse. Investors were willing to sit on these losses; it\u2019s not as if there were many alternatives. Capital is no longer capable of effectively reproducing itself in the usual way, through the production of commodities. Twenty-five years ago manufacturing represented a fifth of global GDP<\/a>; in 2020 it was down to 16%. Interest rates have hovered near zero for well over a decade as economies struggle to grow. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The only reliable source of profits is in the extraction of raw materials: chiefly, pulling the black corpses of trillions of prehistoric organisms out of the ground so they can be set on fire. Which means that the feudal rulers of those corpselands\u2014men like King Salman, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques\u2014ended up sitting on a vast reservoir of capital without many productive industries through which it could be valorised. So, as a temporary solution, they stuck it in the tech sector. It didn\u2019t matter that these firms couldn\u2019t turn a profit. The real<\/em> function was not to make money in the short term; it was to suck up vast quantities of user data. Where you go, what you buy; a perfect snapshot of millions of ordinary lives. They were betting that this would be the currency of the future, as fundamental as oil: the stuff that rules the world.