Saturday evening, after a lovely walk along Regent’s Canal, I found myself at a loose end in Camden. Wonderful, I thought, I’m in one of the liveliest parts of London. There’s all sorts of stuff going on – I can go to an impromptu gig or a comedy night. Let me google what there is to do tonight.
More than 45 minutes later, I was fed up and despondent, and my phone battery was low. An internet search for ‘live music in Camden tonight’ had yielded an overwhelming deluge of content: listings on dodgy-looking websites that screamed with pop-ups when clicked; card lists that insisted on downloading other apps before loading them; ticket sites for major music venues whose performances were sold out months in advance; reviews of events that sounded ideal until I realized they had already happened; and of course piles of sponsored posts that are almost indistinguishable from the real thing. I gave up and just walked into the first pub with a ‘live music here’ sign on the door.
Since then I have tried and failed to use the internet to: buy artificial flowers to use for a fancy dress party (Amazon shows me dozens of almost identical offers that are not what I want but have clearly hacked the key words); get clarity on the legal terms of a contract I have been asked to sign (I am redirected to law firm blogs that make my head spin with legal language and then try to sell me services); and researching Japanese knotweed (it’s apparently a culture war issue now). It was all too much – the pop-ups, the cookies, the sponsored messages, the tracking requests. It’s exhausting, discouraging and infuriating.
This was not the case in the past. I know that makes me sound about a hundred years old, but I remember when the internet was still usable. Not just useful – magic. Every answer to every question at your fingertips. Yes, I remember teachers warning us that Wikipedia wasn’t a reliable source of science, but for everyday things it worked. Recipes, travel guides, instructions for fixing things, recommendations for fun things to read, watch and do.
Now it’s a mess. I don’t know exactly what broke it, but I’ve read quite a few articles and tweets over the years about how SEO hacks and machine learning have destroyed search engines. The Google algorithm has essentially become self-eating: if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, it can’t help you, and even if you do, it will try to push all kinds of irrelevant nonsense through your browser before you find it.
And it’s not just about Google. Twitter may not have completely collapsed under the weight of Elon Musk’s aggressive innovation, but trolls and spambots are flourishing as the algorithm recommends increasingly bizarre posts to me (no, I’m not interested in reviews of reality TV shows that I haven’t read through the media I have never heard of it being unfollowed, or in the crypto scams sent to me daily). Facebook is a graveyard of cultured content and ghostly memories of a time when posting blurry photos of a night out was considered a core part of the college experience. Instagram is just LinkedIn for wannabe influencers. LinkedIn is… well, LinkedIn.
As for the rest of the internet – the fan communities, the random blogs, the weird little niche websites dedicated to board games or alternative fashion or snow ocelots – I’m sure some of them still exist somewhere. It’s just become increasingly difficult to find them unless you already know exactly where they are.
I’m not the only one who feels like something went wrong somewhere. “I have no idea what to do online anymore,” complains the journalist New statesman columnist) Marie Le Conte in her recent book Escape: How a Generation Shaped, Destroyed, and Survived the Internet. The boundless serendipity of the early online world has gradually been subsumed by the major social media platforms (you know, the ones that monetize our outrage and fear). Like me, Le Conte came of age at the same time as the world wide web, and has seen the anarchic, atomized Wild West of the 1990s overwhelmed by a few gigantic websites that have tamed it, sanitized it, and rendered it completely useless. -pleasure. Everyone who spends time online now hangs out on the same platforms, which has had a negative effect on how those platforms feel: “Our spaces make us feel tense because we never really feel safe in them anymore. Our internet is both open and flat, and it is not a pleasant place to be.”
My struggle with finding a gig in Camden is part of the same trend. Somewhere along the way, the idea that the Internet existed to be useful to us has morphed into the realization that we exist to be useful to it, mainly so that we can be sold to it or manipulated in some way. I never really minded the adage ‘if you don’t pay for the product, you are the product’ because I felt like I was at least getting something of value – you can have my details as long as you show me where I look for. Now it’s a different game. We are being datamined, provoked and deceived, and for what? So we can continue to collect, provoke and deceive data, in the vain hope that eventually there will be someone who can explain what ‘vacant property’ means, in language that does not sound like it comes from a legal source. textbook.
There’s been so much hype about ChatGPT (now six months old) and other chatbots destroying our jobs and making fact-checking impossible, and now experts are warning that artificial intelligence could lead to the extinction of humanity. But I don’t think we need to be so hyperbolic to see how technology is destroying something precious: itself. Or rather, the version of himself that felt like a magic spell in 2006, when you could ask “what should I do tonight?” and it would tell you. I don’t think this will come back – the incentives are all skewed, the tech giants are too powerful, the algorithms have a life of their own and there’s no stopping them. The Internet now keeps us occupied for as long as possible, not by being helpful or engaging, but by simply eliminating all alternatives. This is it: the pop-ups and the trolls and the sponsored posts have won.
Oh well. There’s always Wikipedia.
[See also: The Reeves doctrine: Labour’s plan for power]
