https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over?showWelcome=true

The internet is already over
Our God is a devourer, who makes things only for the swallowing.
Sam Kriss
Sep 18

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.
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.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.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.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.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 1997, Ken Olson 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
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 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.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 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 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 liquefying out of its corpse every year. But the same
pattern is everywhere. Engagement fell 28% on Instagram and 15% on
Twitter. (It’s 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 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 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?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.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 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 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 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.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.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.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 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 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 no change whatsoever to
their bottom line. One study found that algorithmically targeted
advertising performed worse than ads selected at random. This is
what 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 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 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.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. 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 ‘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.

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.  

1

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

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.  

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. 

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.’

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.

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.  

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.  

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.

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.  

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. 

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.