how to survive being chronically online

Mid is a perfect bit of new slang for a culture in which quantity is crushing quality, in which you can stream endlessly and feel nothing.

It’s been endlessly argued that algorithms influence too much of what we watch, listen to, read, and even think. Personal taste erodes while decision-making is outsourced to the platform.

The collection of so much personalized data—around what time of day we turn to Sade or how many seconds of a NewJeans song we play—suggests a future without risk, one in which we will never be exposed to anything we may not want to hear.

To feel creatively and intellectually alive, you have to stop mindlessly consuming the Internet and start mindfully curating it.

If the spaces we imagine to facilitate reconnection with the self also banish the factors that determine who we are — the wider cultural dimensions of the worlds we belong to — then we are condemned to either living falsely, or being alone. Both concepts collapse when one acknowledges that, no matter how far off-grid one travels, there is no place,... See more

The hyperlink, in this sense, is the building block of the modern internet.

In that way, some consumers have yielded to a type of techno-fatalism. People know that algorithms exist and often dictate how culture is disseminated to them—and that there’s not much they can do about it, save for abandoning the platforms altogether and embracing a retro-Luddism about their consumption choices.

I have thousands of photos of my children but few that I’ve set aside to revisit. I have records of virtually every text I’ve sent since I was in college but no idea how to find the ones that meant something. I spent years blasting my thoughts to millions of people on X and Facebook even as I fell behind on correspondence with dear friends. I have... See more