how i use the internet now

the worst thing you can do is suggest that people still have some agency over how they live their lives

I think we all recognize on some intrinsic level that our phones are eroding our quality of life. And yet, the phone feels inevitable. Even if it isn’t actually inevitable, I don’t think we want to live a life entirely separated from our phones. I like the internet too much to throw my hands up and demand a divorce. The dilemma is that it feels like this is the only choice I can make these days: to accept the phone as a fixture in my life. Once I have accepted its presence in my life, it’s over: I am swept away by the currents of social media and my senses are inundated. In the span of a few minutes, I am entertained, exhilarated, disgusted, exasperated, envious, disdainful, bored, tired, furious, and then in spite of it all—laughing again. This was the last thing that made me laugh today, by the way. It feels as though I have no choice but to succumb to this experience entirely, and the end result is that I am not very happy at all.

This year, I tried to question this premise. In the book How To Nothing, Jenny Odell discusses the idea of a tactical retreat from the digital world; it is not a permanent escape, but a temporary act of standing apart from its noise in order to reclaim control over where our attention is directed. I find this idea very compelling because “life under capitalism” does mean that we are living under the illusion of choice, but this at least gives me a way to inject a little more intention, a little more agency into my life.

The rest of this essay is an expansion of these thoughts.

how the internet uses me

It’s impossible to talk about how I use the internet without first establishing how the internet uses me. Any application or platform I use will quickly figure out who and what I am (woman, “young”, unmarried, single, living in a metropolis, wants a cat, likes bird videos and old furniture blah blah) and begin to show me what it thinks I want to see. I’ve already misspoken: it’s not about what it thinks I want to see, it’s about what it thinks will keep me scrolling. There is a new commodity on the market, and that is our attention. This value system is baked into the design of pretty much everything we use. Off the top of my head consider these: streaming’s binge watching model, infinite scroll on social media feeds, push notifications or numbered badges, ephemeral “stories”, pull-to-refresh, “streaks” for app usage or posting, auto-play on videos. All of these features started out on one or two platforms, and then quickly spread throughout the internet, to the point where they now feel ubiquitous, inevitable, obvious, matter-of-fact. In this attention economy, the time that you and I have at our hands has incalculable value to those who are building, running, and ultimately and profiting off internet spaces. In other words, as much as I need to be terminally online (which is what most of this essay is about), the internet needs me right back in order to sustain itself.

by dadu shin

making scapegoats

A few days ago, I saw a clip of an interview of Sam Altman, in which he proposes that the “real value” of AI will not be better reasoning, but “total memory” which will be used to build software that can “remember every conversation, email, and document across a person’s lifetime, identifying patterns and preferences humans never consciously express”. This is extremely common Silicon Valley rhetoric because it redirects the dialogue: now, the value of AI is discussed in terms of its ability to personalize our lives, rather than of course, its larger self-sustaining aim, which is to package and sell this data for profit. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff discusses exactly this:

The commodification of behaviour under surveillance capitalism points towards a societal future in which market power is protected by moats of secret, indecipherability, and expertise. Even when knowledge derived from our behavior is fed back to us as a quid pro quo for participation, as in case of so-called “personalization”, parallel secret operations pursue the conversion of surplus into sales that point far beyond our interests. We have no formal control because we are not essential to this market action.

Philosophically, I reject any critique of internet companies that isn’t founded on the principle of policy. It is the unglamorous process of regulation, legislation, taxation, and anti-trust action that is fundamentally required to combat the surveillance capitalism of tech companies. This is because the logic of the existence of these companies itself is predicted on deregulation. In addition to the design choices I mentioned earlier (infinite scroll, auto-play etcetera), tech companies have since their inception used another strategy to them: legislation. In the early chapters of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff outlines extensively the lengths the efforts to which Google and Facebook went in the early aughts to kill any form of privacy regulation, data protection, or enforce any practice that would introduce the slightest friction in the usage of their services.

Many of the ideas in Zuboff’s book have become commonplace. One of the most popular responses to that Sam Altman video was a quote tweet, which says: “‘memory’ is a kinder word than ‘surveillance database’”. The hyper-positivity around Silicon Valley tech that defined my early twenties and undergraduate years has now decidedly faded. There no shortage of thinkpieces about “Big Tech” and the misalignment of its profit incentives with the everyday needs of people, tongue-in-check comments about how our phones are making us miserable and we’re doomed to die while scrolling, posting, tweeting, and retweeting.

And yet, it feels as though we have become a little too comfortable with this argument. I now worry that we have turned our phones into scapegoats, submitting to a future in which we are hopelessly hooked on to them, powerless to do anything about it. It seems as though the worst thing you can do is suggest that people still have some agency over how they live their lives. It’s nice to realize that your phone is making you miserable but there are things you are allowed to do to stop it from doing that. In fact, identifying this causation itself should give us the power to do something about it.

here’s what I know about “reducing screen time”

I would go so far as to say that any malaise that people may feel about the internet, or their general state of living can be traced back to this: that too many of us are living with a painful, terrifying lack of intention. The way I see it, most of us have the desire to live a certain way. The trouble lies in converting this desire—which is fickle, which may wax and wane, which may abandon us when something else catches our eye, which our environment is designed to make us ignore—into intention. It is a mental process that separates those desires which are idle fancies or passing wants from those that are truly instrumental to our happiness. This is one of those mindfulness things that I deeply believe in, and I trace it back to a concept in Islam called niyyah, which literally means “intention”. To have niyyah is not just to declare your intent to do something, but to wholly reorient your heart towards the outcome you are seeking, come to terms with what it will take to achieve it, and get comfortable with dedicating real energy and time to it.

This is the part of the essay where a list of strategies to reduce screen-time would be appropriate. However, I don’t have a tidy list of steps to share, because my reduction in screen time is composed of a little of a lot of things. A set of rules (“no phone before bedtime” or “no social media on weekdays”) would simply not work for me, because I would promptly break them. I would not provide any advice that turns your phone lifeless (like making it black and white) or does away with it altogether (like getting a flip phone). There are some things that have worked for me to varying degrees: leaving my phone in a different room when I’m at home, deleting some social media apps (installing them only when I want to post something), and using one of those screen-time-reducing apps. But these strategies are really only as effective as your intention to stick with them: they are impediments, not immovable obstructions. You can easily just get your phone from the other room, re-install Instagram and never delete it, and dismiss the dialog that tells you that you’ve hit your screen time limit for Twitter for the fifth time that day.

If I had to point to what actually helped me reduce my screen time, it would be reconnecting with the desires that I want my phone to help me meet. Think of the myriad of emotions we feel: loneliness, alienation, boredom, curiosity, anger, dissatisfaction. On some level, we are all seeking to have those emotions handled—validated, tolerated, responded to, coped with—by the internet. We want to know what’s going on. We want to be entertained. And we want to feel profound things. And there is nothing wrong with that. Frankly, I am not interested in a life lived offline. Some of the dearest people to me in my life today are people I have met on the internet. The internet has taken me to places and shown me things and taught me ideas that nothing else could. Understanding this has helped me turn the time I do spend on the internet into a joyous, fulfilling time. But it has simultaneously helped me internalize that my phone is not necessarily where I will find the wonder, connection, hilarity, and amusement I am seeking. In fact, it is actively depriving me of the things in life that can help me find them. For instance, I realized earlier this year, that I was basically incapable of reading a book for more than 10 minutes at a time. I knew this already, but this realization felt different. This time it was accompanied by alarm and indignation. For all the “good” that scrolling on my phone was bringing into my life, it was also neutering me. For the first time in a long time, I forced myself to understand how I engaged with the world: I was flitting from Thing to Thing like I was a manic hummingbird. My brain was a sieve; a deluge of content and information was flowing through it and I wasn’t retaining much of any of it. I was dropping each thought I had in my mind like it was a hot potato, leaving a trail of steaming Yukon Golds in my wake as I set off in search of—what?

It was this reckoning, more than anything that helped me disconnect to a degree that I think makes me happy now. In one of my favourite books of all time, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Solnit discusses how much may be discovered “on the indeterminacy of a ramble”. She suggests that our minds may not move as quickly as we think they do, and that it is walking, that activity that takes place at about three miles an hour, that can match the pace of our minds. Reducing my time on the internet to me, is the same as creating more room to walk in my life. I don’t think I could sustain my life on walks alone. A car, a train, a plane, is eventually required. But equally, a life that allows no time for taking the long way, the slow way, the scenic route, that directionless amble feels equally bereft to me.

what I don’t (usually) consume anymore

I began writing this essay as a long rant about the things I hate about the internet. I hate how flattened discourse has become. I hate how much more I shop when I use Instagram. I hate the way it makes me compare myself to other people. I hate how inherently unromantic the internet is. Surely it cannot be good for me to know about what so many people are up to on a random Tuesday. I also hate how the nature of recommendation algorithms has made the average user of the internet turn into a hawker at the Sunday market selling their wares. Content today is created for virality and viscerality, and it leaves little room for neutrality. I like the internet more now, because I spend less time on it. But I also like it more because I’ve tried to stop existing in spaces that I don’t enjoy. Because of the fundamental logic of most internet spaces (they’re designed to activate anxiety), this is a Sisyphean effort, but worth it to me regardless.

to demonstrate my last point, need to share this exasperating text i sent some friends the other day

Here is a brief list of things I by-and-large don’t consume anymore.

TikTok

At its best, it is genuinely entertaining, occasionally heartwarming, and can surface good recommendations. But none of this outweighs what I find so insufferable about the app, which is the overwhelming sensory experience of using it. Song snippets playing on loop, the vocal fry in the voiceovers that has become so common, the amount of sounds I am bombarded with, and the rapid fire audio that accompanies short videos, with information jam packed into short videos. Of course, when I use it, I spend hours on it, and I can’t even remember why. One day, I realized with some horror that I’d spent two hours on it and couldn’t remember a single video I’d watched except the very last one. I decided to get off it a few months ago and haven’t looked back since.

List-based articles

This is stuff like weekly or monthly favourites, recommendation lists for where to eat, or what to buy, or what to see in X city etc. This is probably self-explanatory but in case it isn’t, here goes: I find these to be the lowest form of online content. Putting together a list of things is very easy, and they perform exceptionally well. There are in fact entire Substacks (paywalled ones) dedicated to small pleasures, weekly delights, everything someone ate or wore that week. This content also performs exceptionally well online, so writing them is sort of a no-brainer. More often than not, these lists are not well researched. But even when they are, these lists more than anything are exceptionally good at promising consumption. Since they tend to be “favourites”, they are designed to evoke an emotional response in the reader: they brought the writer joy so they must then, bring the reader joy too. There are some exceptions to this, but I am extremely picky with what I read.

Skincare and makeup recommendations

I want to write about this in a different essay, but I am struck by how the internet makes think about ourselves too much, but in all the wrong ways. The skincare/makeup community is caught up in an endless hype cycle, and it is predicated on the promise of the “new”. By design, it will never sell you on the idea that having a tried and true favourites is not only kind of chic but also a huge time saver. With most recommendation content, there is a promise of “more”: your skin could look clearer, more shiny, more poreless, more glowy. and you know what, maybe it could! But I try to come back to this: it probably won’t, and even if it will, I don’t know that that’s necessarily what I want to dedicate my time to.

Any time I have had serious skincare issues, the only thing that has fixed it for me is a trip to the dermatologist. Other than that, what I do need, I already have, and it works for me. I really used to want to be “in the know”, and those who know, know that there’s a whole world out there of trying out, raving about, and reviewing product after product, and repeating that cycle only months or days later. I have stopped looking for recommendations online, have begun to cull people (influencers) from my feeds who surface regularly to tell me about the mascara I absolutely need or the new brand I Need to try, and simply begun to look for them in my real life: my friends, siblings, coworkers, the occasional article etc.

A plug here for an essay I read earlier this year, “You’re overspending because you lack values”: “Your appetite for novelty and your fear of missing out sucks the joy out of you—the more you eat, the hungrier you are. The more you spend, the more vapid you feel. You lack spirit, not another fashion identity. You don’t need another aesthetic, you need stronger values”.

Miscellaneous

Some other things off the top of my head that regularly circulate my feeds, that I try to give less real estate in my mind to: Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me (she’s not writing for me), pop-sociology style articles on Vogue, The Cut etc (they over-intellectualize behaviour niche online behaviour), Hollywood gossip (nothing wrong with it, used to enthusiastically consume, my tastes have just changed), domestic US politics (in favour of domestic Canadian politics) (but this one is so hard), New York media drama (don’t care about Olivia Nuzzi).

And as for the rest

Bizarrely enough, the regression in the user experience of Twitter has helped me arrive at a happy equilibrium with it: I use it regularly, but never “too much”. I still find it funny and occasionally insightful. What I like best about the app is that compared to other social media, it is very resistant to the proliferation of sponsored content. Goodreads similarly, is an app for the battle-worn and the freaks. It feels so bad to use that I use it absolutely only when necessary, as a mostly-private log of what I’m reading. The Substack recommendation algorithm has begun to feel frankly infantilizing to me, so as with Twitter, I try to limit my usage of the app to just the inbox tab (the people I subscribe to). A plug here for some of my most regularly read Substacks: Numb at the Lodge, Maybe Baby, Internet Princess, The Best Bit. Letterboxd genuinely brings me a lot of joy because it’s trying to do one thing very well. I am praying they don’t turn it into a social media app (i.e. introduce DMs and infinite scroll). Here’s mine, by the way. Last year, I got really into Reddit. The anonymity of Reddit feels like a blessing at a time when everyone is trying to cultivate a persona or become an influencer on other social media apps. I scroll by subreddit instead of using the main feed (a great feature that doesn’t really translate to other social media). I am a devoted user of Feedly for reading essays and longform content, and Raindrop as a bookmark manager (RIP Pocket). I’ve given up on not scrolling in bed in the morning, but I try to start my day with them. Instagram continues to be my personal weakness and greatest nemesis; I have a crazy and bizarre but ultimately satisfactory system for using it that I will explain to you if you reach the end of this post and ask me.