There is a latent conservatism to all this fantasizing about a life lived without the corrupting influence of the internet—but the cat is out of the bag. The internet is here to stay. The cage has descended, and the forms in which we write have changed—our sentences are different from the long and twisted parentheticals of Henry James.
My business was boredom. For years, I was the person whose job it was to keep you clicking, to keep you scrolling. To keep you grimly entertained. Forgive me—the concepts of “amusement” and “information” have never been so porous, the line dividing “news” from “diversion” has never before worn so thin. What I needed from you was time, your time, now understood to be a commodity. Somehow, through the alchemy of AdSense, this was supposed to turn into money. In the so-called attention economy, even the most cloistered institutions were aghast to find themselves now begging for spare change.
Magazines and corporations and political campaigns and non-profits alike all needed someone to run the social media accounts they now relied on while simultaneously professing to disdain.
I noticed all the conversations that unfolded all around me, the threads that twined and splintered, until the original point had been lost entirely in the churn of retweets and reactions. It is a kind of fan dance, the ways in which people strategically choose what to and what not to reveal about themselves online.
Our lives today are lived on screens; we lose our hearts and even our minds to algorithms with increasing frequency.
Do I regret working as a social media manager? Of course not—it’s how I’ve paid my rent and bought my groceries. Without the internet, I suppose I would have lived a very different life. It has afforded me, too, glimpses of other worlds, other people’s points of view. There is something to be said about the pleasures of spying: silent on the other side of the screen, some of us are looking. Some of us are watching. Some of us are writing this all down.
The world has shrunk since the advent of the smartphone. The women of Tokyo dress the same as the women in Paris dress the same as the women in New York. We scroll and scroll through our individualized content streams, but we’ll never reach the end; in this atomization of experience, it is hard to see the collective point of it all.