I Hate the Internet

A meditation

Photo by Sabri Tuzcu on Unsplash

I’ve come to hate the internet. I mean, not in the sense that I want to destroy it. I recognize our collective life depends on it, and that it has made our lives better in many ways. So when I say I hate it, I hate it in the same way that I hate a lot of things in life that I understand are necessary and so I’ll just go along with it.

I spend a lot of time on the internet. It is how I do what I’m doing right now, which is writing this meditation into the internet. And there’s something about it that I hate. I guess I’m saying I’d prefer in some sense that I wasn’t doing this at all. Because in my own little utopia of my own dreams, I would not be doing what I’m doing now. A lot of what I’m doing in my daily life, and including writing these words down, is out of a sense of moral obligation. I feel like I have some obligation to try to make the world a better place than it is, because I recognize danger, and I recognize that if people don’t awaken themselves to these dangers, a future for our children could be lost. And when I’m at my most honest, the people who are close to me, who see me in my more vulnerable moments, know and understand that I’m focused on what I am for one reason: I love this country and I care about my children’s future. That’s my motivation.

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I left my career in technology. The truth is, I love technology. I really do. But I feel like the things I like about technology — and have always loved about technology — are different now than what these large corporate behemoths that own most of our online life like about technology. What they like about technology is that it can be used to control, to capture your attention, and to extract as much money from you as they can.

I’ve written about Steve Jobs before here on Notes from the Circus, and I’ve also spoken about him in some of my video content. I’ve studied the man as much as anyone can from the public source material because he always fascinated me. He fascinated me because he had a philosophy about life and about technology. When you would watch Steve Jobs talk about the products he built and designed, he was always talking in terms of the creativity and human expression that these products could unlock. It’s why artists, musicians, and creative types fell in love with Apple, even as the rest of the business world saw Apple as overpriced and underpowered compared to the PC.

Steve wasn’t a geek. That was Steve Wozniak. People say he was the sales guy. But that’s not right. He was the guy who understood that technology is a tool for humans. That it’s not an ends. That we don’t live for technology or in technology. And he saw the world that way. To a fault. It got him fired from the company he co-founded.

I am writing this on a Mac. Which is running the latest version of macOS, which was considered a brand new operating system in 2000 when Mac OS X was announced to replace the technologically outdated MacOS of the time — which really was inferior to Windows at that point. But the interesting thing is that it wasn’t a new operating system at all. It was eleven years old. It was NeXTSTEP, which Apple had acquired. It was the company that Steve founded after being fired from Apple in the early 1980s. NeXTSTEP was the OS on which Tim Berners-Lee developed the world’s first web browser.

Modern macOS’s lineage dates back to the late 1980s, and much of the basic architecture of the operating system remains unchanged to this day, over thirty years.

The reason I went down this cul-de-sac was for a purpose. Because the fact that the legacy of Steve Jobs’ obsessive focus on creating human-focused technology, and the decisions he made with a small team of engineers in the 1980s, still constitute the foundations of the technology that powers Apple products today, is pretty impressive. It says something about Jobs’ instincts. He’s perhaps under-appreciated for his brilliance by many who think he was just a gifted marketer. No, Jobs understood technology. In some ways more deeply than the programmers he employed.

Enabling human creativity. Creating something new. Giving people tools to let them create things they wouldn’t otherwise be able to create.

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The thing is, I don’t think technology has to be alienating. I don’t think it has to make us mad and afraid. I don’t think we have to live like this.

It is not an accident that no one like Jobs occupies a position of comparable influence today. The business model that dominates the industry cannot tolerate such a person. A designer who genuinely believes technology is a tool for humans would build products that release users rather than capture them. Products that release users do not maximize attention. Products that do not maximize attention do not maximize revenue. Products that do not maximize revenue do not get built at scale. The model selects against the sensibility. Which is to say: the absence of Jobs’s philosophy from the commanding heights of technology is not a vacancy waiting to be filled. It is a feature of the system as currently constituted.

As long as the most profitable businesses in the world make money by making us mad and afraid, so that we give them more of our attention, so they can convince us to buy more things, our world is going to keep getting more and more miserable. Because we have an extractive set of businesses in Silicon Valley — not all of them, but the big ones — whose entire model is getting your attention. Keeping your attention. And then trying to own your whole life.

This is actually Elon Musk’s explicit strategy with X. He wants it to be the “everything app” — where you conduct your entire life, including your finances.

This is, upon reflection, the most fraudulent kind of economic capture that one could imagine constructing. Because it is not a business, if it owns your attention, your finances, your communications, and your sense of reality. It is a system that owns you.

And I think such business models should, when you really think about it, be illegal. That is, if we value our own collective mental health.

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