Keep the Internet Out of My Brain

Who gets to define the future? I have some notes.

Hi friends!

It’s February. We are here and we are living all 29 days of it. I don’t dare ask how you’re all doing because we saw where that led Elmo — straight into an aggravated assault from Larry David that left Al Roker speechless.

This week, I’ve been forced to break my self-imposed Elon Musk blackout because when the world’s most annoying and richest man (with the saddest little kitchen) announces that his dream of surgically implanting a computer interface into a human’s brain has come true, the Unhingement outweighs the rules.

For my readers who haven’t been tech-pilled (lucky you), Musk shared the brain implant news via a post on his broken platform and included the phrase “promising neuron spike detection” to make himself sound smart.

I was then obliged to pay a visit to the Elon Musk brain chip company’s wikipedia page and, of course, it’s as messy as the rest of his enterprises. Highlights include: most of its founding scientists quitting because the timeline was too rushed, an ultimate goal of using the implants to stop AI from destroying humanity (pardon me?), and the gruesome demise of 20+ monkey test subjects who never consented to be part of this circus and should have been left alone to just vibe that monkey vibe.

There is incredible medical potential for this technology but they’re marketing it as a pit stop on the road to everyone becoming a cyborg, so truly, what the fuck.

It’s undeniable that our collective relationship to technology is on the verge of … something. The internet is weird now, and not in the good way so many of us adored. AI is excellent at creating new ethical disasters, the latest of which required an army of porn-busting Taylor Swift fans to engage in combat. Even alleged human being Mark Zuckerberg, when faced with addressing the realities of child exploitation and abuse across his company’s apps, was forced to break character and emote this week.

Don’t get me started on the stupid Apple ski goggles and how many ads I’ve been bombarded with on every social platform and Roku city billboard in the mere day they’ve been available for purchase. My take has not changed one bit since they were announced — the “mixed reality” concept sounds like a salad no one ordered and if I’m spending thousands of dollars on an accessory then I better be able to wear it in public without looking like a huge dork.

better luck next time!

I know there’s a solid crew of early adopters and tech enthusiasts who are still here for it all. Love that for them, the ones who yearn to see spreadsheets augmented into their living room decor. But I feel pretty confident in declaring that the rest of us are actually looking to distance ourselves from being online, not bring the screen inches from our eyeballs or embed access into our most vital organ. I want to get the internet out of my brain, not deepen its chokehold.

As technology continues to skew reality we’re seeing a wave of nostalgia towards Y2K tech, relics from a time when the internet was still fun, a place we willingly gathered as opposed to what it feels like now, somewhere along the lines of algorithmic captivity with the occasional Stockholm syndrome moment of mass catharsis.

Just like my generation brought back vinyl and still insists on taking film pics even though getting them developed is the worst, Gen Z is finding joy in megapixel scarcity and thrifting chunky digital cameras.

I’m so happy to see a second life for the cameras that brought the chaotic bliss of waking up hungover on a Sunday morning to see you had been tagged in 78 greasy, unedited photos posted by that one friend who always did the Facebook album. The trend cycle is beyond analog nostalgia now and has planted itself in simpler, digital times. Bless.

I say we follow the trend and limit the internet to one desktop computer per member of household. We’ve injured our brains enough, sans implant, let’s all get flip phones again and be free.

me taking a pic for a group of 22-year-olds.

I don’t really see how physiologically merging with the machines wins the AI-pocalypse for humanity but I am also not some wannabe supervillain with billions of dollars and an obsession with technofuturism bordering on the insane. That guy’s version of the future never ends well, I’ve browsed the speculative literature, and I think there are other directions for us to go in.

My vision for the future is aesthetically less sci-fi and more ‘90s shampoo commercial, one where we somehow stop this planet from boiling, get to go back to nature, and hang out in waterfalls with nary an email in sight because AI is doing our stupid jobs while we chill with great hair.

Are we hunter gatherers in this fantasy? Living in a network of interconnected communes? Hard to say. But what I’m certain of is that in my vision of the future we’re not irreparably tethered to the internet like a little digital bitch.

It feels like we’re getting close to the fork in the road where we’ll have to actually deal with what the internet is doing to us. The great paradox of social media is that it both brings us closer together and drives us further apart and that has been wildly evident these past four months as we’ve witnessed war play out in proxy across our feeds. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools derange us.

They do have some merit, the tools. The internet has given us access to unprecedented amounts of collective power and creativity, but it’s the same internet that is now programmed to keep us engaged, entertained, and enraged, which doesn’t leave a lot of space for sowing the seeds of change. We’ll cackle en masse about lead in the viral water cups but it’s been almost a decade and Little Miss Flint is still out there doing the work and getting attacked by Barbz for it.

A proper vision for the future addresses safety and community, includes affordable housing, gets corporations to stop destroying the planet and fleecing us with inflation, provides decent health care, and allows us all to retire someday (soon, fingers crossed). It has nothing to do with unchecked technological progress and everything to do with addressing the broken structures we’re currently living in.

This unhinged age is marked by endless crisis and change. Everything is crazy but the glitching paradigms and chaotic swirl bring so much potential for transformation. Since the crazy-ass billionaires are too distracted by other apocalyptic plotlines and rocketing themselves into space, we need to take matters into our own hands.

We have the tools to collaborate, so let’s decide what we want the future to be. If we can get enough good people together and focus for like twenty minutes I’m sure we can at least workshop something better than implanting the internet into everyone’s brain. Then, after we figure it out, we can put the internet back where it has always belonged — 10 hours free on a CD-ROM — and once again know peace.

Hope you enjoyed my (wo)manifesto this week!

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™️

Liz