When did the internet get so boring? (When did I?) Whenever I catch myself feeling too happy, my cure is to look at my browsing history and its ever-diminishing circles: word game, weather, SMH, surf check. Maybe a northern hemisphere news site to see if anything happened overnight. Maybe not. Another word game. Surf check again if the first left room for doubt. Another weather site because I don’t believe any of them. Back to the news. What now? I know, a word game. These are meant to stave off dementia, but seem to be doing the exact opposite. Brain to Malcolm: Stop! Malcolm to brain: Only after I’ve shrunk you to the size of a cashew.
Will the internet die of boredom before we do? On October 9, in one of several recent obituaries for the world wide web – “Why the Internet isn’t fun anymore” – the New Yorker gave compelling reasons for its demise: the nastiness of social media, the march of advertising, the tyranny of The Algorithm, and more generally what science-fiction writer Cory Doctorow has called, in a much-shared Wired article, the “enshittification” of the online world.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, never knew that his baby would become so boring.Credit: AP
The Algorithm is the most chilling. Example. I have an eccentric thing I do in my backyard when I need to take a five, 10 or 60-minute break. I’m not going to reveal it because The Algorithm would then know for sure. There’s nothing I can buy for it, and I’m too embarrassed, so my online activity has been totally dark on the subject.
And yet, what should pop up one morning but a video of some kid doing my thing in his backyard in Africa. A small part of me is pleased – hey, I’m not that weird – but a bigger part is nonplussed. How did The Algorithm know? What else does it know?
If this intrusion into our secrets, plus the nastiness and the rest, is turning people off the internet, hallelujah. The internet is over. Liberation. The Insider Intelligence research site reports that the rate of growth of online users is falling. Yay, freedom!
Except, not only is it not over, it’s growing – just a little slower. Insider Intelligence also says a record 3.76 billion people use social networks. Boo, servitude!
Illustration: Dionne Gain. Credit:
The worse the internet is, the more time we spend on it. Like Donald Trump’s popularity, the effect is the jubilant opposite of what should follow from the cause. And the narrower the rabbit hole, the more it self-digs. The fewer sites I visit, the greater my weekly screen time. The Algorithm, which knows a desperate soul when it sees one, is helping turn me into the dog in Devo’s 1980 song Freedom of Choice: “In Ancient Rome/ There was a poem/ About a dog/ Who found two bones/ He picked at one/ He licked the other/ He went in circles/ He dropped dead.”
Devo didn’t invent that dog, but they did invent the poem from Ancient Rome for the rhyme. The story came from Greece, where the philosopher Aristotle had written about “a man, being just as hungry as thirsty, and placed in between food and drink, must necessarily remain where he is and starve to death”. It was later adapted by the 14th century French philosopher Jean Buridan into the “paradox of the ass”, who starves when unable to decide between hay and water.
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