It’s difficult to talk about the internet without sounding cliche or stodgy. By now we know the talking points. The algorithms are addictive. The algorithms are bad. We are addicted and we are now bad. Our attention spans are shorter, tragedy does little to mobilize the collective, and almost everything about ourselves (our steps, our followers, our favorite movies) is quantified and collected and put on display and measured against each other.
We tell each other to touch grass, alluding to this idea that there is a “real life” outside of our screens — but more and more, whatever we consider real life to be and the Internet to be are collapsing into one. We are sad because of the internet — and we are also on the internet so much because we are sad. We act or dress a certain way in person, knowing that we can immortalize the moment by taking a photo and posting it online — and then we hope that this crafted online persona will give us cooler, better, richer in-person access.
The internet is the ultimate version of a world without boundaries — information, access, and even fame are “democratized” under tech’s utopian promise. So if this is our world now, and it is — flat and disembodied — we should try to understand it deeply and critically, as infrastructure that we lead our lives in and through. This month we will publish a series of interviews all seeking to understand how the internet shapes our lives and why we let it.