The Internet Has Never Felt Worse
I wrote about the urge to log off permanently
For the newest edition of my monthly Hazlitt column Mind In Bloom, I wrote about the current state of the internet. It feels as if our collective online experience is declining rapidly. The sour sentiment around the web seems to be omnipresent. Just a few days ago, the New Yorker was writing about how the internet isn’t fun anymore. As a result of social media’s tendency to regularly transform into a minefield of disinformation, anger and unqualified opinions, being online has arguably never felt worse than it does at this moment.
In my piece, I discuss the degraded experience of listening to music in the streaming era:
“Every New Music Friday makes me feel like I’m being force-fed in Dante’s third circle of hell. It’s laborious. I clock in every week, skipping through cynical collaborations by artists artlessly aiming to expand their market reach to include their respective audiences. It is like digging through garbage and I often come up empty-handed, reverting to my old playlists and comfort albums like so many listeners today. (In 2021, songs over eighteen months old accounted for 69.8% of music consumption in the United States.)”
This mirrors my feelings about social media, which was initially marketed as a place for staying in touch and making friends but has now become an outright hostile arena for our worst impulses. I tried to encapsulate how Twitter / X started as an enlightening space for conversation and discovery and has slowly transformed into a teeming cesspool of bad faith arguments:
“With many of the site’s most thoughtful users leaving X for greener pastures, what is left behind is most of the app’s worst aspects writ large. X is a markedly unpleasant place where you can find out who died today, who we all hate today (it might be you), how you can ride the crest of whatever temporary wave of outrage is happening so that you can profit from it, a hellsite where people tag me about how I was wrong about an album review I wrote twenty years ago (please stop doing this).”
I was surprised by how much Julio Vincent Gambuto’s Please Unsubscribe, Thanks! How to Take Back Our Time, Attention, and Purpose in a World Designed to Bury Us in Bullshit hit me at exactly the right moment of digital malaise. If you need a refresh of your relationship with technology, it’s definitely worth checking out.
Read my Hazlitt column “Breaking the Infinite Content Loop” here!
You can find me updating my playlists or hanging on Twitter and Instagram. You can listen to my music on Spotify, Apple Music and Bandcamp and you can get Cadence Weapon merchandise here. Read my monthly column in Hazlitt. Pick up your copy of Bedroom Rapper here and please rate it on Goodreads.
Having divested from any kind of algo in my day-to-day for a long time now, I can't recommend the alternatives enough. Get writing from writers (books, magazines, substack), music from music communities (online radio shows, labels I like, writers), film suggestions from people who think about film instead of what an app is pushing at me, etc. There's lots of great internet away from the platforms, and the digging continues...
Thank you. As someone with eclectic tastes, I've rarely, if ever, found algorithms helpful. (Yes, there have been exceptions.) Now that I no longer use social media as a news source at all, I don't feel any less informed — although that takes work, work that I fear most people don't want to do. And, obviously, if one doesn't put any work into informing oneself, then misinformation flourishes. But "clocking in" to the daily outrage cycle is a complete waste of time and I feel much better without it.