This, from Christopher Cantwell’s newsletter, has been on my mind pretty much daily since I first read it:
“In Halt and Catch Fire, at play was always the notion of people in need of connection trying to use technology to bridge the gap. We are living in the ironic end result of it not working. Of course, it also has in a multitude of ways. I’ve met some great friends through technology and established an entire second career. But it feels easier to maintain those connections the old fashioned way now, outside a swarm of wasps and detritus and deafening, meaningless noise.
“None of what the characters in our show did worked. Life has greatly improved in ways that can’t be discounted because of machines, but not socially. Technology has fueled cruelty and eradicated humility and assailed ideas of empirical truth and understanding. It has led many to believe that humans are data to be harvested or deleted, based on whether or not they please us on a whim. It has propped up the ephemeral and turned it into idolatry, it has aided in the denial of and / or the worship of real evil, all in the fearful hope of retaining or gaining even more power.
“It’s a failed experiment.”
Ignoring the fact that this makes me want to go back and rewatch Halt and Catch Fire — a show that I dearly love, and loved more and deeper the more it went on, and the more it became kinder to the very flawed characters at the heart of it — I return over and over to the idea that the internet is a failed experiment, and one that has made us crueler and worse people. The internet is responsible for all manner of good in my life, personally; it’s been where I’ve discovered love both romantic and platonic, and where I found my career, after all. But I can’t deny that, as a whole, this whole thing has been… probably not for the best?
And yet, we’re still here. There’s nowhere else to go, is there? Not really; we can’t all just unplug and step away. Such a thing is literally the stuff of dystopian sci-fi because our imaginations can’t really comprehend the idea that it might actually be for the best. How could it all work without the internet, again, knowing what we know? Would things really be better, or have we just had a shift it will take generations to recover from?
And now this question can live in your head for days after, too.