twilight years

or, i'm sad that the internet is dying

I’ve spent the last few weeks reading Elif Batuman’s The Idiot; it’s a wandering, aimless sort of book, the sort of book you read in long, slow sips. It’s 1995, and our narrator Selin is in her first year at Harvard, figuring out academia, social conventions, and her place in the world - and also figuring out Ivan, a final-year student in her Russian class. (Its title is a reference to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel of the same name.) Selin and Ivan’s relationship unfolds, in large part, through long, philosophical emails, which seem to have little bearing on their day-to-day conversations. Instead, their email-selves establish a separate, intellectual yet tender relationship, existing in parallel to their interactions in the physical world. To Selin, email seems like another universe, a shimmering realm where you can be simultaneously more and less honest. She describes “a glowing list of messages… like they were being beamed straight from people’s brains. And each message contained the one that had come before, so your own words came back to you.”

Batuman wrote the first draft of what would become The Idiot soon after she herself graduated Harvard, in 1999 - eighteen years before the final version was published. In interviews, she has spoken of re-discovering that first abandoned manuscript and realising that it had since become a historical novel. It feels self-aggrandising to say, but I relate. My own novel is set in 2017-8, and I don’t mention the Internet too much, but when I do, it’s immediately dating: parties organised via Facebook event, Snapchat as relative novelty, even posting a single, un-beautiful photo on Instagram, just because you thought it was funny. I suppose in today’s warp-speed, history catches up with us quicker. Novels get thrown violently into history, and subsequent irrelevance, in the few years inbetween being written and being published. ‘Now’ is always falling through our grasp, like water.

my five year old self would have loved messing around on Microsoft Paint here

Back in 2017 there were, broadly speaking, two types of internet user; there were people who used it to catch up with their friends, and only really followed people they knew, people for whom social media was a mere extension of their real-world lives. And then there were people who used it as escape, as a kind of fun: those of us with Tumblr friends, and usernames that weren’t our real names at all, perhaps already well-versed in the now-ubiquitous intentionality of digital-self-creation. Now I wonder if there’s little distinction between the two. We all end up down rabbit holes of our own passive making; 90% of the faces we see are those of strangers. We’re all using it to entertain ourselves, now, except that probably isn’t the right word - Google’s Thesaurus cites ‘distract’ as one of the closest synonyms for ‘entertain’, and I don’t know if I think that’s quite true.

At the moment, I’m writing lots of my book on my phone’s Google Docs app. Actually I write on the Northern Line quite a lot; the bright, roaring heat of the train weirdly does focus the mind. Writing on a narrow screen for long stretches of time makes me feel queasy somehow, motionsick - I suppose humans see in landscape, not portrait. But I wring out all the time to write that I can, and I’m not about to get my decade-old Macbook out on the Tube. I’m writing some of this piece while sat on the 186 bus, and behind me, the same few sound bites play on repeat from the tinny speaker of a five-year-old’s iPhone: Please Please Please, that emergency, paging dr. beat one, the auditory online soup we’re all floating in this month. Each one lasts for three seconds before it is swiped away; it’s like he’s permanently flicking through television adverts, except the number of channels is infinite. I haven’t had the time to eat lunch in the office, so I cram down a protein bar, and it sticks in my throat like wet sand. Later, the man next to me on the Tube is watching a TikTok where half the screen is someone playing Minecraft, and the other half is a digital voice reading out an Am I The Asshole Reddit post, so that if he gets bored of one he can just flicker his eyeballs slightly to the left or right, and watch the other. (The OP can’t attend her sister’s husband’s funeral because she’s got tickets to the Eras Tour for the same day, and now her sister’s upset - riveting stuff.) My dad spends hours in the evening scrolling through AI-generated YouTube shorts about the US election. I’m borrowing phrasing from

griffin blue emerson

here, but if the Internet’s dead, we’re all hanging out in the graveyard. I’m not sure when, or if, we’re all going to leave.

Maybe I’m just trying to find some redeeming qualities to this place where I’ve spent so much time. But I miss when all I saw on Instagram was my friends’ posts, when no-one was trying to sell me anything. I miss meeting a friend of a friend, following them on social media, barely seeing them again but being reminded of them every few months or so, our lives gently brushing one another, like a light hug exchanged between two semi-acquaintances at someone else’s party. Seeing what they are up to and feeling glad that they are having a nice holiday in Venice, or at a concert they saved up to attend, or having an artfully swirled coffee somewhere the autumn leaves are softly glowing.

It’s one of the things I found compelling about social media in the first place - the ability to make myself thought-about at the touch of a button, to disperse small facts about myself and my life to maybe five hundred people. I think I like it most because it’s somewhere I can pretend to be a more serious writer and photographer than I really am. I shoot a lot of film when I can afford to, but I’m not sure I would do it if I knew no-one else would see the pictures - and maybe that’s shallow of me. For those of us who aspire to write, and haven’t yet broken through into more formal publishing, it’s a little anxiety-inducing seeing all the think-pieces about how the Internet is no longer a place where art can live and flourish. I know that it’s a busted flush, that eventually, the whole thing will just be AI bots, commenting on one another’s posts, blinking at each other for eternity in the lifeless dark. But with access to formal creative recognition and careers rapidly dwindling, I wonder how many of us are going to end up trapped here with them.

I’m thinking about my grandpa, my mother’s dad. He was a keen photographer and had a darkroom set up in the attic of the house where my mum grew up. None of his work exists digitally - I only have copies because I’ve laid them flat and taken pictures of them on my iPhone, which wasn’t something he could comprehend being possible when he glued them into meticulously curated albums. I only saw them over a decade after he died. He would spend hours bathed in that red light, rinsing and soaking the film, coaxing out the images for maybe six or seven people to see. All this labour just for the love of it. And perhaps that’s a more noble way of creating, but I still wish his pictures had been seen, because they deserve to be.

one of Papa’s photos. I don’t know where this was shot, and I wish I could have asked him.

It’s the most natural of impulses, to show people something you made. It’s coming home from school and showing your mum a drawing you did in Art class. It’s submitting a poem to the school magazine and praying it gets accepted, crossing your fingers on both hands so tight your knuckles hurt. It’s posting on here. I’m not trying to say I like the Internet - but for now, I don’t know where else my photos and writing can live. I don’t mind if it means resurrecting the earliest version of 1990s email, the invention Selin finds so magical, sitting in the spectral glow of a hulking grey plastic computer, and sending my writing and photos to everyone who cares; I just hope everyone keeps caring. I just hope there’s still life out there.

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Hello everyone <3 and happy Halloween! I’ve been less active on here because I’m really trying at the novel - it’s like the longest exercise in delayed gratification ever, but I just hit 8000 words, so that’s something. Also I really would recommend The Idiot.

and here’s the song rec for this post - Autumn is officially Elliott Smith season <3