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The internet is already over

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The internet is already over

Our God is a devourer, who makes things only for the swallowing.

[12][https]
[13]Sam Kriss
Sep 18, 2022
[14]
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A sort of preface

[15]
[https]

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. [16]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.[17]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.[18]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.
[19]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.[20]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

[21]
[https]

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 [22]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 [23]
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.[24]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 [25]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 [26]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 [27]liquefying out of its corpse every year. But the same
pattern is everywhere. Engagement fell 28% on Instagram and 15% on Twitter.
(It’s [28]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 [29]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 [30]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?[31]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.[32]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 [33]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 [34]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 [35]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.[36]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.[37]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.[38]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 [39]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 [40]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 [41]no
change whatsoever to their bottom line. One study found that algorithmically
targeted advertising performed worse than ads [42]selected at random. This is
what [43]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 [44]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 
[45]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.[46]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. [47]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 ‘[48]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

[49]
[https]

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.

[58][                    ]
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.

[60]1

I am very disappointed that this scene never appears in Disney’s Moana.

[61]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.

[62]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.

[63]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.’

[64]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.

[65]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.

[66]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.

[67]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.

[68]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.

[69]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.

[70]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.

[71]
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