There is no "us"

On being online.

“A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” Georges Seurat (1884)

Lately I have been reading a lot about The Internet and what it’s doing to us. I find it funny, if a little tedious. Because of course there’s no canonical experience of Being Online. Other than being followed around by mystifying ads because you clicked on something or, as they say, “fit a demographic,” there is no “us.” Everyone’s time here is different.

I’ve always thought of people’s accounts of their time online as akin to picking up someone’s iPhone, or their personal computer. The interface is recognizable, but the way they use it is totally alien. You don’t have the weather app on your lock screen? How do you ignore this many notifications? Why aren’t any of these apps organized? You use the default mail client? Even if the tools are the same, the way we use them differs wildly from person to person. Same goes for our experiences.

It’s the same again with posting habits. I’ve come to love the way some of my friends use their Instagram stories, for example, because I like the rhythm of their posts — it’s distinct. Though I’d never post that way, I could pick theirs out of a lineup. And then sometimes, when I’m with them in real life, I can see the shape of the narrative they’re constructing for other people as it happens. But the point is: nobody taught them how to post the way they do. Nobody taught me, either.

In my generation, the first that grew up alongside the internet, there was a sense that the internet was a wild, dangerous place — a new American frontier, almost, with almost all the baggage that phrase implies. We were implored to not put anything personal online, because you never knew who might be watching, or who might want to harm you. And a lot of us were harmed, I think. By the then ubiquitous shock sites, the groomers on unmoderated forums, or just by each other.

It wasn’t all bad. It couldn’t be. It was a home for our first writing, our first art; the setting for some of our first private relationships; the place where you could try on new identities and work out who you really were. In those days there wasn’t really a narrative for what the internet was or could be, outside of the tech boosterism of early Wired and the spin from the dotcom moguls.

For people in my generation, the youngest users, we had to work out what the internet meant for ourselves. We had to construct a meaning — what was this place? Why were we all spending time there? It always felt important and separate, a world away from the real one.

All this happened in the private space between our brains, our hands, and our machines; the place from where I’m writing to you right now.

Though I’m sure the particulars differ, I’d bet that a lot of people have had a similar experience — younger and older. Even as the membrane between the physical world and the digital one has become thinner than ever¹. I’m sure you’ve spent a quiet moment in the dark alone with the profusion of minds online, all of us who make up and give meaning to the network. But our experiences are necessarily different, even though the tools are the same.

I think the illusion that there’s one discrete internet that we can speak confidently about descends from the misapprehension that you can see everything from your perch online, wherever that is. Here I think of the opening anecdote of that famous DFW speech more than I’d like to admit: this, whatever it is, is water. Though I’d argue in this particular medium we’re less fish and more our primordial marine ancestors.

All of this said, I understand the impulse to make pronouncements — to pin the idea of the internet to the board and talk definitively about what it is and isn’t. To categorize it and then catalogue it with the other similar specimens in the taxonomy of human achievement.

I guess what I really mean is that you have to figure out what your experience of the internet has done to you². And, of course, what it’s meant. It is strange to have a continuous awareness of the world outside of your immediate perceptions; it is strange to know, at any given moment, an approximation of what thousands of people who aren’t you are thinking about. Speaking only for myself, I find it magical: when I was a kid, I never thought the internet would last this long, or be able to do this many things. I am still in love with the idea that I can carry the whole world in my pocket. I am a hopeful, happy cyborg.

Or at least that's what I try to remember when I hear about the latest ways people are using the network to scam and harm, to divide and instill fear, to connect hate movements together. We have a long way to go, obviously, in making the internet work better for everyone. But I do want to point out that these problems are quintessentially human ones: these are fundamentally the same problems you get when you put a bunch of people in a room or a country together.

We need lawmakers who can understand and articulate their experiences of the internet and we need them pass laws and regulations accordingly³; we need to eradicate bigots and the ways they spread their hate online; we need to guarantee access to fast, reliable internet connections because, increasingly that’s where society happens, and everyone should get to participate.

I am a hopeful, happy cyborg. I want other people to have the chance to feel that way too. Because I know my experience isn’t universal.

Love,

Bijan

1. You know what I mean.

2. Look, I wanted to get to the tech overlord billionaire part of this, but I already feel like I’m running out of space. Internet culture happens downstream of the platforms and structures that make up the infrastructure of The Internet; the people who refuse to give their kids smartphones do have an active role shaping our perceptions of the world and the people in it, via their product decisions. If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s this.

3. My kingdom for a good data privacy law.