The Internet Used to Be Fun. Now It’s Just Homework

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There was a period, maybe 2005 to 2012, when the internet felt like a playground. I remember spending entire evenings reading weird blogs written by people I’d never meet, following link trails from one strange corner to another. Someone would write something genuinely interesting about medieval farming techniques or the optimal strategy for a video game nobody played anymore, and you’d stumble across it and read the whole thing just because it was there. The motivation was curiosity, or maybe boredom, but it wasn’t ambition. Nobody was building their brand.

Now every online interaction carries this weight of strategic thinking. Should I comment on this post? Will it help my professional network or damage my carefully curated image? Is this tweet going to get engagement or should I delete it and try again with different wording? I’ve caught myself workshopping Instagram captions like they’re college admissions essays, and I don’t even have that many followers. The returns don’t justify the investment, but the investment has somehow become mandatory anyway.

Social media platforms used to show you posts in chronological order. You’d check in, see what your friends had been up to, maybe respond to something, and then you’d leave. The experience had a natural endpoint. Now the algorithmic feeds are designed to be infinite, but the infinity is exhausting rather than liberating. I scroll past dozens of posts that some machine-learning model has determined are optimal for engagement, which apparently translates to “vaguely anxiety-inducing but not quite upsetting enough to make you quit.” Every third post is an ad, every fifth post is from someone I don’t follow, and somewhere in there are the actual updates from people I know, which I usually miss because I’m so numbed by the onslaught that I can barely process what I’m seeing.

The worst part is how we’ve all internalized the homework mindset. I have friends who talk about “posting strategy” and “content calendars” for their personal accounts. Not because they’re influencers or running businesses, just because that’s how you’re supposed to use these platforms now. You need to post consistently at optimal times. You need to engage with others’ content to boost your own visibility. You need to stay on top of trending topics so you can contribute something relevant before the moment passes. When did sharing vacation photos become a job?

Professional networking has gotten particularly dystopian. LinkedIn has successfully convinced millions of people that they need to perform enthusiasm about work in public, constantly. Every job change gets announced with a paragraph about growth opportunities and excited to announce and grateful for the journey. People write posts about productivity hacks and leadership lessons with the unmistakable cadence of someone who’s trying very hard to sound inspirational. I watch colleagues who I know are miserable in their jobs write glowing testimonials about company culture, and I can’t tell if they’re lying to the platform or to themselves.

Even the fun parts of the internet have been gamified into obligations. I play video games with friends online, but now every game has daily quests and seasonal battle passes and login rewards, all carefully designed to make you feel like you’re falling behind if you don’t check in regularly. Missing a day of dailies in a game you paid for already feels like shirking responsibility. How did we let entertainment companies turn leisure into another set of tasks to manage?

The creator economy sold us a dream where everyone could make money doing what they love online, and maybe some people managed it, but mostly what happened is that hobbies became side hustles and side hustles became sources of guilt. I know someone who used to bake elaborate cakes just for the joy of it, and then she started an Instagram account, and now she doesn’t bake anymore unless she can photograph it properly and write an engaging caption and post it at the right time. The hobby collapsed under the weight of optimization. She was happier before, when she was worse at social media.

There’s something particularly cruel about how the internet promised connection but delivered isolation plus homework. I have 800 friends on Facebook and I couldn’t tell you what any of them actually care about right now, past what the algorithm has decided to show me. I have professional contacts on LinkedIn who I’ve never spoken to and probably never will. I follow hundreds of people on Twitter who I scroll past without reading. The connections are technically there, but they’re so thin and numerous that they barely qualify as relationships. Meanwhile, maintaining even these shallow connections feels like a part-time job.

Perhaps I’m just getting old and cranky, yelling at clouds that happen to be made of data. But I don’t think the problem is simply that I’ve aged out of understanding new platforms. The platforms have changed in ways that make them actively worse for human flourishing. They’ve been optimized for engagement and time-on-site and ad revenue, and somewhere in that optimization process they stopped being places where people could just exist and became places where people have to perform.

I miss the internet where you could be weird without worrying about your brand. Where you could disappear for weeks and nobody noticed or cared. Where the main thing you did online was waste time in ways that felt genuinely wasteful and therefore genuinely relaxing. Where nothing you posted had to be strategic or aspirational or optimized for maximum visibility. Where logging on felt like opening a door to somewhere interesting rather than checking your to-do list.

Maybe I should just log off, but that’s not really an option anymore. Too much of modern life happens online, from work to social coordination to basic commerce. We’re all stuck in this system that transformed gradually from playground to workplace without anyone quite noticing when the transition happened…

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Part of this is no doubt driven by the platforms themselves, which have made every interaction quantifiable and transactional, but economic factors are equally to blame. As conditions become increasingly precarious, becoming a brand is a survival strategy. That same role of personal brand manager then carries over into everything else you do.

Gen X could afford to care about “selling out” because, for most of them, it was optional in a time when low-wage work could still provide a reasonably comfortable lifestyle. For anyone who entered the workforce after 2008, the term is meaningless, leading to the embrace of hustle culture and constant self-promotion.

In the past, the average person didn’t have a chance to sell out in any meaningful way because there were so few platforms where anything they did might be seen by a wide audience. Selling out now isn’t signing with a major record label for millions; it’s starting a slop youtube channel or an onlyfans account to pay off student debt, or taking anything you enjoy and trying to force it to fit the demands of the market and the algorithm.

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I feel like the “selling out” critique was always somewhat incoherent because it treated artistic integrity as if it existed in a vacuum separate from material conditions. When Kurt Cobain agonized about signing to a major label, he was already a professional musician - he’d already made the decision that music would be his job. The anxiety wasn’t really about whether to monetize his art (that ship had sailed), it was more which monetization strategy would preserve the most authenticity while providing enough resources to keep making art. The major label offered more money and distribution in exchange for less creative control; the indie label offered the reverse. But both were fundamentally commercial relationships. Is that bad? Do we call that selling out?

I always point to Fugazi and Ian McKaye as the antidote to that.

Either way, what’s changed now is that the floor has fallen out from under “regular” jobs, so the calculus has shifted. In the 90s, if your band didn’t work out, you could fall back on retail or food service and still make rent. That option was always Plan B insurance that made artistic risk-taking viable. Now that same backup plan gets you $20k/year and no health insurance, so the instrumental question becomes: is monetizing my hobby on Twitch worse than my realistic alternative employment?

The really dark version of this is that platforms have figured out how to extract value from the aspiration to make it. YouTube doesn’t need most creators to succeed, it has millions of people grinding out content in hopes of algorithmic lightning striking. The platform captures value from both the rare successes and the massive long tail of people who never quite make it but keep trying. It’s like how casinos make money not from the jackpot winners but from everyone else feeding coins into slots.

But I don’t think “selling out” has become meaningless so much as it’s been democratized in a way that shows up that maybe it was always somewhat arbitrary. The Gen X musician who signed to an indie label and worked at a record store wasn’t less compromised than the one who signed to Sony - they just had different constraints shaping their art. Both were operating within capitalism. Just at a different scale?

What we’re seeing now is that same process stripped of its plausible deniability. When everyone has to be their own brand manager, we can’t maintain the fiction that some forms of commodification are inherently more authentic than others

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Planning on publishing this week!

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:+1:
It’s a mindset. And the technologies repeat certain mindsets. Using TikTok and Insta shapes our thinking just like using the web did. We do have a choice but these habits can be hard to change.

My tip to anyone who wants to free him/herself is to start charging the phone far away from the bed. And once that’s a habit, continue with these => Control Your Tech Use Make social/commercial media boring.

Maybe that’s an entrance point to a more enjoyable internet. It feels like social/commercial media makes life meaningless.

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A huge mindset shift: how you use your phone. I know, I know. Everyone says this. But I can’t tell you what a huge difference it’s been just deleting every social app, blocking every social website, blocking every news website, and using it purely for music, podcasts, talking to people and the occasional RSS feed.

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That’s what to reach for. Getting the apps off the phone and creating some friction. :+1:t3:

And focusing on the more tool-like ones.

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I’ve tried Freedom and various blocking solutions like it over the years and while they do help, I think they don’t address the fundamental problem. In the same way that a recovering alcoholic can “white knuckle” their way through early sobriety simply by avoiding bars and liquor stores, the results are unlikely to last. Every prolonged period of complete restriction is usually followed by a worse relapse if you can’t face what you’re using the behavior to avoid. In most cases, that is simply being alone with your own thoughts.

Sam Kriss wrote an excellent piece about this last year. He describes it as “the horror of simply existing, sitting alone with nothing to look at, nothing to do with my hands, no bright lights to briefly flood my brain.” He provides what I think is the best summary of the problem:

A phone is a device for muting the anxieties proper to being alive. This is what all its functions and features ultimately achieve: cameras deliver you from time, GPS abstracts you out of space, and an all-consuming screen that keeps you a constant safe distance from yourself. If there’s something you’re worried or upset about, you can simply hide behind your phone and it will all go away. One third of adults say they’re on their phones almost constantly. Their entire waking lives are spent filling time, plastering over the gaps, burning up one day after another, waiting for something to happen, and it never does.

I’m not trying to dismiss the anxieties proper to being alive. These are serious anxieties, and I’m not sure they have any easy solution. Maybe the phone is a perfectly workable answer: to keep deferring the problem, one day to the next, until eventually it goes away for other reasons. Spending forty days without my phone did not make me magically happier. I wasn’t awed by the sunrise every morning. I didn’t suddenly find that all my relationships were so much deeper and richer. I did find myself ambiently uncomfortable in situations that had previously been helpfully smoothed over by a glowing screen. I got bored. I got lost. But I did also get more reading done, and my days did feel like they had more things in them.

…

Reality is not intuitive or instantly responsive to all my fleeting whims. It does not immediately yield whatever I want. Most of the time it seems to barely recognise my existence. This might be better for you in the long run; on an immediate level it’s very frustrating. But for better or worse we have been condemned to live. All we have is what’s right here; the only thing that ever is or ever will be here.

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