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The internet is already over
Our God is a devourer, who makes things only for the swallowing.
[4]Sam Kriss
Sep 18, 2022
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A sort of preface
There’s a phrase that’s been living inside my head lately, a brain
parasite, some burrowing larva covered in thorns and barbs of words.
When it moves around in there it churns at the soft tissues like
someone’s stuck a very small hand blender in my skull. It repeats
itself inside the wormy cave system that used to be my thoughts. It
says you will not survive. You will not survive. You will not survive.
Earlier this year, an article in the Cut reported that the cool thing
now is to have messy hair and smoke cigarettes again. You might
remember it; the piece was widely mocked for a day or two, and then it
vanished without a trace, which is how these things tend to go. But the
headline was incredible, and it stuck with me. [5]A Vibe Shift Is
Coming. Will Any Of Us Survive It? Everyone else seemed to focus on the
‘vibe shift’ stuff, but the second part was much more interesting. To
talk about survival—what extraordinary stakes, for a piece that was, in
essence, about how young people are wearing different types of shoes
from the shoes that you, as a slightly older person who still wants to
think of themselves as young, wear. Everything is stripped back to the
rawest truth: that you are a fragile creature perishing in time. And
all you need to do is apply Betteridge’s Law for the real content to
shine through. No. None of you will survive.
There was an ancient thought: that Zeus feeds on the world. ‘The
universe is cyclically consumed by the fire that engendered it.’ Our
God is a devourer, who makes things only for the swallowing. As it
happens, this was the first thought, the first ever written down in a
book of philosophy, the first to survive: that nothing survives, and
the blankness that birthed you will be the same hole you crawl into
again. Anaximander: ‘Whence things have their origin, thence also their
destruction lies…’ In the Polynesian version, Maui tried to achieve
immortality by taking the form of a worm and slithering into the vagina
of Hine-nui-te-po, goddess of night and death.[6]1 He failed.
Hine-nui-te-po’s pussy is full of obsidian teeth; when she stirred in
the night those teeth sliced clean through his body. He dribbled out
again, a loose mulch of the hero who conquered the Sun.
You will not survive is not only a frightening idea. The things I hope
for are doomed, and everything I try to create will be a failure, but
so will everything I despise.[7]2 These days, it repeats itself
whenever I see something that’s trying its hardest to make me angry and
upset. There’s a whole class of these objects: they’re never
particularly interesting or important; they just exist to jab you into
thinking that the world is going in a particular direction, away from
wherever you are. One-Third Of Newborn Infants Now Describe Themselves
As Polyamorous—Here’s Why That’s A Good Thing. Should I get upset about
this? Should I be concerned? Why bother? It will not survive.[8]3 Meet
The Edgy Influencers Making Holocaust Denial Hip Again. Are we in
trouble? Maybe, but even trouble is ending. Everyone That Matters Has
Started Wearing Jeans Over Their Heads With Their Arms Down The Leg
Holes And Their Faces All Cramped Up In The Sweaty Groin Region, And
They Walk Down The Street Like This, Bumping Into Things, And When They
Sit Down To Eat They Just Pour Their Subscription-Service
Meal-Replacement Slurry Over The Crotch Of Their Jeans And Lick At The
Dribblings From The Inside, And They’re Covered In Flies And Smell Bad
And Also They’re Naked From The Waist Down Because Their Trousers Are
On Their Heads, That’s Part Of It Too—We Show You How To Get The Look!
How proud they are of their new thing. ‘The strong iron-hearted
man-slaying Achilles, who would not live long.’
In fact, one of the things that will not survive is novelty itself:
trends, fads, fashions, scenes, vibes. We are thrown back into cyclical
time; what’s growing old is the cruel demand to make things new. It’s
already trite to notice that all our films are franchises now, all our
bestselling novelists have the same mass-produced non-style, and all
our pop music sounds like a tribute act.[9]4 But consider that the
cultural shift that had all those thirtysomething Cut writers so
worried about their survival is simply the return of a vague Y2K
sensibility, which was itself just an echo of the early 1980s. Angular
guitar music again, flash photography, plaid. We’re on a twenty-year
loop: the time it takes for a new generation to be born, kick around
for a while, and then settle into the rhythm of the spheres.
Every time this happens, it coincides with a synodic conjunction of
Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter, the triumphant present; Saturn,
senescence, decline. The son who castrates his father, the father who
devours his sons: once every twenty years, they are indistinguishable
in the sky. Astrologers call this the Great Chronocrator. The last one
was at the end of 2020, and it’ll occur twice more in my lifetime: when
these witless trendwatchers finally shuffle off, they’ll be tended on
their deathbeds by a nurse with messy black eyeshadow and low-rise
scrubs. Jupiter and Saturn will burn above you as a single point, and
with your last rattling breaths you’ll still be asking if she thinks
you’re cool. You don’t get it. ‘For oute of olde feldes, as men seith,
cometh al this newe corn fro yeer to yere.’ We are entering a blissful
new Middle Ages, where you simply soak in a static world until the
waters finally close in over your head.
The things that will survive are the things that are already in some
sense endless. The sea; the night; the word. Things with deep fathoms
of darkness in them.
The internet will not survive.
The argument
1. That it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the
internet
In 1977, Ken Olsen declared that ‘there is no reason for any individual
to have a computer in his home.’ In 1995, Robert Metcalfe predicted in
InfoWorld that the internet would go ‘spectacularly supernova’ and then
collapse within a year. In 2000, the Daily Mail reported that the
‘Internet may be just a passing fad,’ adding that ‘predictions that the
Internet would revolutionise the way society works have proved wildly
inaccurate.’ Any day now, the millions of internet users would simply
stop, either bored or frustrated, and rejoin the real world.
Funny, isn’t it? You can laugh at these people now, from your high
perch one quarter of the way into the twenty-first century. Look at
these morons, stuck in their grubby little past, who couldn’t even
correctly identify the shape of the year 2022. You can see it
perfectly, because you’re smart. You know that the internet has changed
everything, forever.
If you like the internet, you’ll point out that it’s given us all of
human knowledge and art and music, instantly accessible from anywhere
in the world; that you can arrive in a foreign city and immediately
guide yourself to a restaurant and translate the menu and also find out
about the interesting historical massacres that took place nearby, all
with a few lazy swipes of your finger. So many interesting little
blogs! So many bizarre subcultures! It’s opened up our experience of
the world: now, nothing is out of reach.
To be honest, it’s difficult to reconstruct what the unbridled
techno-optimists think; there’s so few of them left. Still, those who
don’t like the internet usually agree with them on all the basics—they
just argue that we’re now in touch with the wrong sort of thing: bad
kids’ cartoons, bad political opinions, bad ways of relating to your
own body and others. Which is why it’s so important to get all this
unpleasant stuff off the system, and turn the algorithm towards what is
good and true.
They might be right, but you could go deeper. The internet has enabled
us to live, for the first time, entirely apart from other people. It
replaces everything good in life with a low-resolution [10]simulation.
A handful of sugar instead of a meal: addictive but empty, just enough
to keep you alive. It even seems to be killing off sex, replacing it
with more cheap, synthetic [11]ersatz. Our most basic biological drives
simply wither in its cold blue light. People will cheerfully admit that
the internet has destroyed their attention spans, but what it’s really
done away with is your ability to think. Usually, when I’m doing
something boring but necessary—the washing up, or walking to the post
office—I’ll constantly interrupt myself; there’s a little Joycean
warbling from the back of my brain. ‘Boredom is the dream bird that
broods the egg of experience.’ But when I’m listlessly killing time on
the internet, there is nothing. The mind does not wander. I am not
there. That rectangular hole spews out war crimes and cutesy comedies
and affirmations and porn, all of it mixed together into one
general-purpose informational goo, and I remain in its trance, the
lifeless scroll, twitching against the screen until the sky goes dark
and I’m one day closer to the end. You lose hours to—what? An endless
slideshow of barely interesting images and actively unpleasant text.
Oh, cool—more memes! You know it’s all very boring, brooding nothing,
but the internet addicts you to your own boredom. I’ve tried heroin:
this is worse. More numb, more blank, more nowhere. A portable suicide
booth; a device for turning off your entire existence. Death is no
longer waiting for you at the far end of life. It eats away at your
short span from the inside out.
But lately I’m starting to think that the last thing the internet
destroys might be itself. I think they might be vindicated, Ken Olson
and Robert Metcalfe and even, God forgive me, the Daily Mail.
In the future—not the distant future, but ten years, five—people will
remember the internet as a brief dumb enthusiasm, like phrenology or
the dirigible. They might still use computer networks to send an email
or manage their bank accounts, but those networks will not be where
culture or politics happens. The idea of spending all day online will
seem as ridiculous as sitting down in front of a nice fire to read the
phone book. Soon, people will find it incredible that for several
decades all our art was obsessed with digital computers: all those
novels and films and exhibitions about tin cans that make beeping
noises, handy if you need to multiply two big numbers together, but so
lifeless, so sexless, so grey synthetic glassy bugeyed spreadsheet
plastic drab. And all your smug chortling over the people who failed to
predict our internetty present—if anyone remembers it, it’ll be with
exactly the same laugh.[12]5
2. That exhausted is a whole lot more than tired
You know, secretly, even if you’re pretending not to, that this thing
is nearing exhaustion. There is simply nothing there online. All
language has become rote, a halfarsed performance: even the outraged
mobs are screaming on autopilot. Even genuine crises can’t interrupt
the tedium of it all, the bad jokes and predictable thinkpieces,
spat-out enzymes to digest the world. ‘Leopards break into the temple
and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the
end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the
ritual.’ Online is not where people meaningfully express themselves;
that still happens in the remaining scraps of the nonnetworked world.
It’s a parcel of time you give over to the machine. Make the motions,
chant its dusty liturgy. The newest apps even [13]literalise this:
everyone has to post a selfie at exactly the same time, an inaudible
call to prayer ringing out across the world. Recently, at a bar, I saw
the room go bright as half the patrons suddenly started posing with
their negronis. This is called being real.
Whoever you are, a role is already waiting for you. All those pouty
nineteen-year-old lowercase nymphets, so fluent in their borrowed
boredom, flatly reciting don’t just choke me i want someone to cut off
my entire head. All those wide-eyed video creeps, their inhuman
enthusiasm, hi guys! hi guys!! so today we’re going to talk about—don’t
forget to like and subscribe!! hi guys!!! Even on the deranged fringes,
a dead grammar has set in. The people who fake Tourette’s for TikTok
and the people who fake schizophrenia for no reason at all. VOICES HAVE
REVEALED TO ME THAT YOUR MAILMAN IS A DEMONIC ARCHON SPAT FROM
BABYLON’S SPINNING PIGMOUTH, GOD WANTS YOU TO KILL HIM WITH A ROCKET
LAUNCHER. Without even passing out of date, every mode of
internet-speak already sounds antiquated. Aren’t you embarrassed? Can’t
you hear, under the chatter of these empty forms, a long low ancient
whine, the last mewl of that cat who wants to haz cheezburger?
When I say the internet is running dry, I am not just basing this off
vibes. The exhaustion is measurable and real. 2020 saw a grand, mostly
unnoticed shift in online behaviour: the [14]clickhogs all went
catatonic, thick tongues lolling in the muck. On Facebook, the average
engagement rate—the number of likes, comments, and shares per
follower—fell by 34%, from 0.086 to 0.057. Well, everyone knows that
the mushrooms are spreading over Facebook, hundreds of thousands of
users [15]liquefying out of its corpse every year. But the same pattern
is everywhere. Engagement fell 28% on Instagram and 15% on Twitter.
(It’s [16]kept falling since.) Even on TikTok, the terrifying brainhole
of tomorrow, the walls are closing in. Until 2020, the average daily
time spent on the app kept rising in line with its growing user base;
since then the number of users has kept growing, but the thing is
capturing [17]less and less of their lives.
And this was, remember, a year in which millions of people had nothing
to do except engage with great content online—and in which, for a few
months, liking and sharing the right content became an urgent moral
duty. Back then, I thought the pandemic and the protests had
permanently hauled our collective human semi-consciousness over to the
machine. Like most of us, I couldn’t see what was really happening, but
there were some people who could. Around the same time, strange new
conspiracy theories started doing the rounds: that [18]the internet is
empty, that all the human beings you used to talk to have been replaced
by bots and drones. ‘The internet of today is entirely sterile… the
internet may seem gigantic, but it’s like a hot air balloon with
nothing inside.’ They weren’t wrong.
What’s happening?[19]6 Here’s a story from the very early days of the
internet. In the 90s, someone I know started a collaborative online
zine, a mishmash text file of barely lucid thoughts and theories. It
was deeply weird and, in some strange corners, very popular. Years
passed and technology improved: soon, they could break the text file
into different posts, and see exactly how many people were reading each
one. They started optimising their output: the most popular posts
became the model for everything else; they found a style and voice that
worked. The result, of course, was that the entire thing became rote
and lifeless and rapidly collapsed. Much of the media is currently
going down the same path, refining itself out of existence. Aside from
the New Yorker’s fussy umlauts, there’s simply nothing to distinguish
any one publication from any other. (And platforms like this one are
not an alternative to the crisis-stricken media, just a further
acceleration in the process.) The same thing is happening everywhere,
to everyone. The more you relentlessly optimise your network-facing
self, the more you chase the last globs of loose attention, the more
frazzled we all become, and the less anyone will be able to sustain any
interest at all.[20]7
Everything that depends on the internet for its propagation will die.
What survives will survive in conditions of low transparency, in the
sensuous murk proper to human life.
3. That you have been plugged into a grave
For a while, it was possible to live your entire life online. The world
teemed with new services: simply dab at an app, and the machine would
summon some other slumping creature with a skin condition to deliver
your groceries, or drive you in pointless circles around town, or meet
you for overpriced drinks and awkward sex and vanish. Like everyone, I
thought this was the inevitable shape of the future. ‘You’ll own
nothing, and you’ll be happy.’ We’d all be reduced to a life spent
swapping small services for the last linty coins in our pockets. It’s
Uber for dogs! It’s Uber for dogshit! It’s picking up a fresh, creamy
pile of dogshit with your bare hands—on your phone! But this was not a
necessary result of new technologies. The internet was not
subordinating every aspect of our lives by itself, under its own power.
The online economy is an energy sink; it’s only survived this far as a
parasite, in the bowels of something else.
That something else is a vast underground cavern of the dead, billions
of years old.
The Vision Fund is an investment vehicle headquartered in London and
founded by Japan’s SoftBank to manage some $150 billion, mostly from
the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which it’s
poured into Uber and DoorDash and WeWork and Klarna and Slack. It
provides the money that [21]effectively subsidises your autistic
digital life. These firms could take over the market because they were
so much cheaper than the traditional competitors—but most of them were
never profitable; they survived on Saudi largesse.
Investors were willing to sit on these losses; it’s not as if there
were many alternatives. Capital is no longer capable of effectively
reproducing itself in the usual way, through the production of
commodities. Twenty-five years ago manufacturing represented a
[22]fifth of global GDP; in 2020 it was down to 16%. Interest rates
have hovered near zero for well over a decade as economies struggle to
grow. Until this year, governments were still issuing negative-yield
bonds, and [23]people were buying them—a predictable loss looked like
the least bad option. The only reliable source of profits is in the
extraction of raw materials: chiefly, pulling the black corpses of
trillions of prehistoric organisms out of the ground so they can be set
on fire. Which means that the feudal rulers of those corpselands—men
like King Salman, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques—ended up sitting on
a vast reservoir of capital without many productive industries through
which it could be valorised. So, as a temporary solution, they stuck it
in the tech sector.
It didn’t matter that these firms couldn’t turn a profit. The real
function was not to make money in the short term; it was to suck up
vast quantities of user data. Where you go, what you buy; a perfect
snapshot of millions of ordinary lives. They were betting that this
would be the currency of the future, as fundamental as oil: the stuff
that rules the world.[24]8
They were wrong, but in the process of being wrong, they created a
monster. Your frictionless digital future, your very important culture
wars, your entire sense of self—it’s just a waste byproduct of the
perfectly ordinary, centuries-old global circulation of fuel, capital,
and Islam. It turns out that if these three elements are arranged in
one particular way, people will start behaving strangely. They’ll
pretend that by spending all day on the computer they’re actually
fighting fascism, or standing up for women’s sex-based rights, as if
the entire terrain of combat wasn’t provided by a nightmare
head-chopping theocratic state.[25]9 They’ll pretend that it’s normal
to dance alone in silence for a front-facing camera, or that the
intersection of art and technology is somehow an interesting place to
be. For a brief minute, you’ll get the sociocultural Boltzmann entity
we call the internet. ‘But nevertheless, it was only a minute. After
nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the
clever beasts had to die.’
The tables are already being cleared at the great tech-sector
chow-down.[26]10 Online services are reverting to market prices. The
Vision Fund is the worst performing fund in SoftBank’s history; in the
last quarter alone it’s [27]lost over $20 billion. Most of all, it’s
now impossible to ignore that the promise propping up the entire
networked economy—that user data could power a system of terrifyingly
precise targeted advertising—was a lie. It simply does not work. ‘It
sees that you bought a [28]ticket to Budapest, so you get more tickets
to Budapest…All they really know about you is your shopping.’ Now,
large companies are cutting out their online advertising budgets
entirely, and seeing [29]no change whatsoever to their bottom line. One
study found that algorithmically targeted advertising performed worse
than ads [30]selected at random. This is what [31]sustains the entire
media, provides 80% of Google’s income and 99% of Facebook’s, and it’s
made of magic beans.
A dying animal still makes its last few spastic kicks: hence the recent
flurry of strange and stillborn ideas. Remember the Internet of Things?
Your own lightbulbs blinking out ads in seizure-inducing Morse code,
your own coffee machine calling the police if you try to feed it some
unlicensed beans. Remember the Metaverse? The grisly pink avatar of
Mark Zuckerberg, bobbing around like the ghost of someone’s foreskin
through the scene of the recent genocides. Wow! It’s so cool to
immersively experience these bloodmires in VR! More recent attempts to
squeeze some kind of profit out of this carcass are, somehow, worse.
Here’s how web3 is about to disrupt the meat industry. Every time you
buy a pound of tripe, your physical offal will be bundled with a
dedicated TripeToken, which maintains its value and rarity even after
the tripe has been eaten, thanks to a unique blockchain signature
indexed to the intestinal microbiome of the slaughtered cattle! By
eating large amounts of undercooked offal while trading TripeTokens on
secondary markets, you can incentivise the spread of your favourite
cattle diseases—and if one of the pathogens you own jumps the species
barrier to start infecting humans, you’ve successfully monetised the
next pandemic! Once you get sick, you can rent out portions of your own
intestinal tract to an industrial meat DAO in exchange for
SlaughterCoins. Because SlaughterCoins are linked via blockchain to the
progressive disintegration of your body, they’re guaranteed to increase
in value! And when your suffering becomes unbearable, local abattoirs
will bid to buy up your SlaughterCoin wallet in exchange for putting
you out of your misery with a bolt gun to the head! Yes, the future is
always capable of getting worse. But this future is simply never going
to happen. Not the next generation of anything, just a short-term
grift: the ship’s rats stripping the galley of all its silverware on
their way out.
4. That the revolution can not be digitised
If you really want to see how impotent the internet is, though, you
only have to look at politics.
Everyone agrees that the internet has [32]swallowed our entire
political discourse whole. When politicians debate, they trade crap
one-liners to be turned into gifs. Their strategists seem to think
elections are won or lost [33]on memes. Entire movements emerge out of
flatulent little echo chambers; elected representatives giddy over the
evils of seed oils or babbling about how it’s not their job to educate
you. And it’s true that the internet has changed some things: mostly,
it’s helped break apart the cohesive working-class communities that
produce a strong left, and turned them into vague swarms of monads. But
as a political instrument, all it can do is destroy anyone who tries to
pick it up—because everything that reproduces itself through the
internet is doomed.
Occasionally, online social movements do make something happen. A hand
emerges from out of the cloud to squish some minor individual. Let’s
get her friends to denounce her! Let’s find out where she lives! You
can have your sadistic fun and your righteous justice at the same time:
doesn’t it feel good to be good? But these movements build no
institutions, create no collective subjects, and produce no meaningful
change. Their only power is punishment—and this game only works within
the internet, and only when everyone involved agrees to play by the
internet’s rules.[34]11 As soon as they run up against anything with a
separate set of values—say, a Republican Party that wants to put its
guy on the Supreme Court, #MeToo or no #MeToo—they instantly crumble.
And if, like much of the contemporary left, you're left with nothing on
which to build your political movement except a hodgepodge of online
frenzies, you will crumble too.
The post-George Floyd demonstrations might be our era’s greatest
tragedy: tens of millions of people mobilised in (possibly) the largest
protest movement in human history, all for an urgent and necessary
cause—and achieving precisely nothing. [35]At the time, I worried that
the mass street movement risked being consumed by the sterile politics
of online; this is exactly what happened. Now, even that vague cultural
halo is spent. Whatever wokeness was, as of 2022 it’s so utterly burned
out as a cultural force that anyone still grousing about it 24/7 is a
guaranteed hack. More recently, there’s been worry about the rise of
the ‘[36]new right’—a oozingly digitised political current whose
effective proposition is that people should welcome a total
dictatorship to prevent corporations posting rainbow flags on the
internet. You can guess what I think of its prospects.
5. That this is the word
Things will survive in proportion to how well they’ve managed to
insulate themselves from the internet and its demands. The Financial
Times will outlive the Guardian. Paintings will outlive NFTs. Print
magazines will outlive Substack. You will, if you play your cards
right, outlive me. If anything interesting ever happens again, it will
not be online. You will not get it delivered to your inbox. It will not
have a podcast. This machine has never produced anything of note, and
it never will.
A sword is against the internet, against those who live online, and
against its officials and wise men. A sword is against its false
prophets, and they will become fools. A sword is against its
commentators, and they will be filled with exhaustion. A sword is
against its trends and fashions and against all the posturers in its
midst, and they will become out of touch. A sword is against its
cryptocoins, and they will be worthless. A drought is upon its waters,
and they will be dried up. For it is a place of graven images, and the
people go mad over idols. So the desert creatures and hyenas will live
there and ostriches will dwell there. The bots will chatter at its
threshold, and dead links will litter the river bed. It will never
again be inhabited or lived in from generation to generation.
A conclusion, or, where I’m going with all this
I am aware that I’m writing this on the internet.
Whatever it is I’m doing here, you should not be part of it. Do not
click the button below this paragraph, do not type in your email
address to receive new posts straight to your inbox, and for the love
of God, if you have any self-respect, do not even think about giving me
any money. There is still time for you to do something else. You can
still unchain yourself from this world that will soon, very soon, mean
absolutely nothing.
____________________
(BUTTON) Subscribe
As far as I can tell, Substack mostly functions as a kind of
meta-discourse for Twitter. (At least, this is the part I’ve seen—there
are also, apparently, recipes.) Graham Linehan posts fifty times a day
on this platform, and all of it is just replying to tweets. This does
not strike me as particularly sustainable. I have no idea what kind of
demented pervert is actually reading this stuff, when you could be
lying in a meadow by a glassy stream, rien faire comme une bête, eyes
melting into the sky. According to the very helpful Substack employees
I’ve spoken to, there are a set of handy best practices for this
particular region of the machine: have regular open threads, chitchat
with your subscribers, post humanising updates about your life. Form a
community. I’m told that the most successful writing on here is
friendly, frequent, and fast. Apparently, readers should know exactly
what you’re getting at within the first three sentences. I do not plan
on doing any of these things.
This is what I would like to do. I would like to see if, in the belly
of the dying internet, it’s possible to create something that is not
like the internet. I want to see if I can poke at the outlines of
whatever is coming next. In a previous life, I was a sort of mildly
infamous online opinion gremlin, best known for being extravagantly
mean about other opinion writers whose writing or whose opinions I
didn’t like. These days, I find most of that stuff very, very dull. I
wonder if it’s possible to talk about things differently. Not
rationally or calmly, away from the cheap point-scoring of online
discourse—that would also be boring—but with a better, less sterile
kind of derangement. I’m interested in the forms of writing that were
here long before the internet, and which will be here long after it’s
gone. Not thinkpieces or blogs, but the essay, the manifesto, the
satyr, and the screed. Ludibria, pseudepigrapha, quodlibets. Or
folktales. Prophecy. Dreams.
[37]1
I am very disappointed that this scene never appears in Disney’s Moana.
[38]2
It’s the same thought that, in Marx’s 1873 postface to Capital, Volume
I, ‘includes in its positive understanding of what exists a
simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction.’
Or Hegel’s famous line on the flight habits of nocturnal birds. Or
Baudrillard after the orgy, sticky and spent, announcing that the
revolution has already happened and the Messiah has already been and
gone.
[39]3
As a general rule: by the time you hear about any of this stuff, by the
time it’s in general discursive circulation, whatever was motive and
real in the phenomenon has already died. Every culture warrior spends
their life raging at the light of a very distant, long-exploded star.
[40]4
Every few weeks, there are ads for some new band plastered over the
Tube. The acid, whipsmart voice of twenty-first century youth! Then you
listen, and they’re just ripping off the Fall again. ‘You think your
haircut is distinguished, when it’s a blot on the English landscape.’
[41]5
Chances are, though, that it won’t be remembered at all. Gregory of
Tours was a Roman aristocrat, the son of a Senator, raised on Virgil
and Sallust, but in his dense ten-volume History he never bothers to
even mention the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. The old imperial
world had ended so decisively that its passing wasn’t even considered
particularly important; the new world of barbarian kings (governing
through a system of ecclesiastical administration inherited from the
empire, and that still functioned, if haphazardly, with only the most
nominal connections to central authority in Italy or the Bosporus) had
become the only possible world order, even as the cities shrank and
Mediterranean trade vanished. Syagrius, magister militum in the Roman
rump state around Noviodunum, becomes the King of the Romans; his
imperial holdout becomes the Kingdom of Soissons. It took several
centuries for people to decide that anything particularly significant
had happened when Odoacer overthrew the teenaged Romulus Augustulus in
476 AD. This is why the internet has not been a true revolution:
everyone online is still obsessing over how much has changed, and
fondly remembering the time before we all spent all our waking hours
staring at phones.
[42]6
Actually, I have two slightly overlapping theories on what might be
happening. The main one is above; the second, which is weirder and
makes less sense, has been shoved down here. Samuel Beckett describes a
version of the internet and its exhaustion, one made of small pebbles.
Here is Molloy on the beach, this limping old bird in his shabby
overcoat, rolling in the sand. ‘Much of my life has ebbed away before
this shivering expanse, to the sound of waves in storm and calm, and
the claws of the surf.’ He has sixteen stones in his pocket, and every
so often he puts one in his mouth to suck on it for a while. ‘A little
pebble in your mouth, round and smooth, appeases, soothes, makes you
forget your hunger, forget your thirst.’ The problem: how to make sure
that when he next reaches into his pocket, he doesn’t take out the
stone he’s just sucked? How to make sure he’s getting the full
enjoyment out of each of his sixteen stones? Novelty is mysteriously
important, even though ‘deep down it was all the same to me whether I
sucked a different stone each time or always the same stone, until the
end of time. For they all tasted exactly the same.’ For a while, his
coat and his trousers and his mouth are turned into a series of
machines for creating sequences of stones. Supply pockets and store
pockets, modes of circulation: curated algorithms, organising the world
and its information. Beckett spends half a dozen pages (in my edition)
describing these systems, as each of them arrives in a flash of divine
inspiration and fails in turn. Eventually, Molloy has exhausted every
possible arrangement of atoms and voids. ‘The solution to which I
rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I
kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon
lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed. It was a wild part of
the coast.’ In The Exhausted, his grand study of Beckett, Deleuze
comments on the distinction between the exhausted and the merely tired.
‘The tired has only exhausted realisation, while the exhausted exhausts
all of the possible.’ To exhaust the world as it is you only need to
experience it: wander through reality, and get bored. But for true
exhaustion, you need to know that everything that could be is as empty
as everything that is. To reach exhaustion, you need some kind of
device, made of ‘tables and programmes,’ a technics. Something like
Molloy’s overcoat. ‘The combinatorial is the art or science of
exhausting the possible, through inclusive disjunctions.’ The ars
combinatoria is also the system of formal logic, revealed in holy
visions to Ramon Llull in his cave on Puig de Ronda in 1274, eventually
refined by Gottfried Leibniz, that powers the device you’re using to
read this now. Exhaustion is the mode of life integral to a
computerised society; the internet comes to us already long worn out,
combining and recombining stale elements, shambling through the dead
zones of itself.
[43]7
You could compare this process to Marx’s law of the tendency of the
rate of profit to fall: as each individual actor, follows its
incentives and inflates the organic composition, the entire system ends
up stumbling into crisis.
[44]8
People claim to be deeply worried by this stuff, but I think you
secretly like it. You like the idea that your attention is what creates
the world. You like the idea that the entire global economy is
predicated on getting to know you, finding out what you like and
dislike, your taste in music and your frankly insane political opinions
and the gooey little treats you buy. Global capitalism as one vast
Buzzfeed personality quiz. The faceless empire of yourself.
[45]9
One of the largest shareholders in Twitter is the Kingdom Holding
Company, chaired by Prince al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al-Saud.
For some reason, people seemed to think that replacing him with Elon
Musk would shift the tenor of the site to the right.
[46]10
When I was younger, my brother and I had a running joke about a lemon
that could connect to the internet. Not for any particular reason: a
light would blink just below the lemon’s skin, and it would do nothing,
just slowly rot in your fruitbowl. A few years ago, that lemon would
have immediately secured half a billion dollars in first-round funding.
Now, not so much.
[47]11
The ‘cancelled’ always participate in the theatre of their own
cancellation. In Greco-Roman sacrifices, the animal was expected to nod
before being led to the altar; the victim had to consent to its
slaughter. And that nod always happened, even if a priest had to induce
it by pouring a vase of water over the animal’s head.
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