the internet is dead. long live the internet
whatever happened to 'brb'???
At a wedding in cdmx teddy pulls out his phone, and shows me a bright screen of grayscale. In my hand is a matching black and white screen, outfitted with screentime time limits and social media blockers.
I’m reminded of when we all first met, as bright-eyed summer analysts, living in shared nyu housing and rotating between our desks and le bain. That summer, the bank handed each of us a blackberry for our 12 week internship. We were expected to have our work phones on us at all times — constantly reachable in case a client service deck needed urgent logo reordering. I remember every time my blackberry blinked its red light I’d immediately be put on edge until i checked my notifications to see what i was in cusp of missing.
I later learned that the summer we interned was the last that the bank handed out blackberries. Soon after, having a separate device in order to be always accessible became redundant.
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I’ve always been an internet apologizer, but there is something about this point in time online that feels particularly bleak. Lately i’ve been seeing an uptick in posts about how the internet is dead, lonely or generally not as fun anymore. It’s true that everything seems to be an ad, a funnel towards endless consumerism or constant mindless dopamine. There is so much content, an overwhelmingly enormous amount of content just thinking about how much of my life has been and will be spent staring at a screen makes me want to throw up.
I’m old enough to remember the days of dial-up, where being online felt like being an (internet) explorer in an unknown land. The internet used to be a place of solace and comfort but slowly has become a place of inescapable anxiety.
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One of my fondest memories on the internet was when instant messaging first became popular — I’d spend afternoons home from school changing my email avatar and writing in bubbly turquoise font. There was something about instant messaging that felt thrilling: if one of my dozen or so friends were available, we could message back and forth for minutes or hours until one of us had to go get dinner or do our homework or head off to swim practice. We’d sign off with a “gtg” or “ttyl” and then be on with the rest of our lives.
Increasingly, I see a lot of tiktoks of people my age becoming “bad at texting”. As someone who is somewhat known to be a bad texter, my take is that this is because we don’t have the luxury of saying “gtg” anymore. Rather than having a cleanly scoped digital life, the reward for responding to a text message is another text message.
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When I first started this substack, I decided to call it a cozy corner of the internet — partly because the internet has (throughout my life) provided a sense of comfort and minimal-judgement learning. I distinctly remember learning on the world wide web about body hair, how to wear eyeliner, which drugstore concealers to choose, frank ocean and what it means to be a style rookie. To me, that was the golden era of the internet: michelle phan, DIY heatless curls, tumblr, mini clips, king kylie. Everything was a little messy, more homegrown, sillier. Those early days on the internet in many ways shaped who I am and showed me that anyone can prop up a camcorder in their bedroom and start talking to the world.
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When I think about the “right” amount of the internet to consume, it’s probably somewhere in between my current screen time and none at all.
Last summer I endeavored on a one week dopamine detox. The biggest realization I had was that when I didn’t have instagram, tiktok or pinterest to distract myself, I found myself turning to slack, gmail and my photos app in order to fill the void. With less entertaining modes of distraction, I became more conscious that my phone was a way to avoid feeling something bad. Anxiety, boredom, uncertainty could all be tomorrow’s problem if I scrolled long enough.
My Opal app would suggest that I don’t have any of the answers on how to better spend time online. I’m constantly cycling between being chronically online and swearing off my phone without a way to say “brb”. But a mental shift I’ve started to be more conscious of is noticing when I’m using the internet as a crutch and when my digital consumption feels rushed, desperate and myopic.
Even though I’ve flirted with the idea of how chic owning a blackberry (or a motorola razer !!) in 2024 would be, I don’t think abstaining from the internet is the answer I’m looking for. At the end of the day, while the internet at large may be more algorithmic, economic, and dead, there are still pockets of the internet that I find inspiring, creative and fun. The challenge is to reorient our screen time away from passive brain rot and towards consuming things that delight or inspire us, or at the very least, are things we consciously want to consume. ✦✦
To send you off with some inspiration here are some places on the internet I actively love!
Internet Gems: For awhile before I started my blog, I tried to teach myself to build my own website (using no code tools) — while I switched to substack, I do still adore this treasure trove of stunning website layouts and designs. If you love design or even admire that world from afar, this website is genuinely delightful to scroll.
Substack: Writing is my first love, and it’s so fascinating to me that we’ve come full circle back to blogging after almost two decades moving towards more stimulating and fast-paced content. It’s like a long bike ride where you actually start to thread the content that you’ve watched into coherent thoughts, themes and commentary. A few gems:
Content: I think the hallmark of a good piece of content is something you can come back to over and over — more akin to art than commerce. Lately I’ve found myself re-discovering:
From the screenshots folder:
I am on a social detox currently (6 days in) and the mention of finding yourself scrolling your photos, gmail etc made me gasp, because yep, same. Ouch
oh i FEEL the omelette! was that neopets?!