chat

Eh, I guess I'll defend him a bit because I do read him pretty often.

He's definitely got a Marxist kernel in his writings. If you go back and look at his older stuff it's pretty on-brand ML internet blogging. That being said, he's by no means a "good communist" in any sense, but i don't think he's trying to be. I think a few years ago he made a shift towards a literary approach, where the arguments he explicitly makes in an essay may not necessarily be what the actual intention of the piece is, and he will often turn what you think is a cut-and-dry op-ed about some recent event into a totally hallucinatory retelling from some events from the middle ages. The point he's making is often entirely unclear, and honestly i kinda vibe with that sometimes.

Here, though, i think he's making some pretty clear arguments (though the whole "the internet is literally going to end" may not actually be one of them). A big part of what he's saying about the internet is that what you find on it just doesn't fucking mean anything. His bit about the Holocaust isn't about an actual existing increase of Holocaust denial, which may be occurring, but rather about bullshit articles that claim that there is without any actual basis in reality. It's just people making shit up for clicks. This isn't new, it's always been a part of the internet, but it's reaching a point where the signal-to-noise ratio is converging on zero, where everything is all meaningless slop which is making our lives worse.

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.

Say he's wrong.