Instead I was thinking about a topic at once less utopian, the internet, and also more utopian, i.e. how nice it'd be if it were less shitty.
I guess it's easy to complain about the ways the internet has distorted the culture worldwide - exhibit A is the Trump "presidency", which owes its existence heavily to the worst aspects of the internet, and which has given us the situation we currently face.
And it's not just here that the internet has fucked things up - misinformation on the internet generally and Facebook specifically contributed heavily to the Brexit vote in 2016 and other far-right politicians' victories in the years since. To say nothing of its success in radicalizing disaffected Muslim-background youth in Europe and leading to atrocities like the Paris attacks of 2015.
But every morning, when I fire up my laptop to do my Duolingo lessons, or when I follow along with a workout routine on YouTube, I have to remind myself of how much benefit it's brought me.
Or to put it another way, I keep trying to think how I'd be coping with boredom and so forth during this sheltering in place, if I didn't have the internet to keep me in touch with my friends and family, to keep me informed about what's happening, and to keep me entertained.
While I've gone on something of a buying spree on Kindle since the first shelter-in-place order came down, it's probably fair to say that I wouldn't be short on physical books to read. I've got my own collection here, and also my dad's, so if I don't mind re-reading certain things, I'd be fine there. Same with music, because even though I'm currently listening to John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Unfinished Music Vol. 2 on YouTube (review: don't listen to it), I have my own CD collection and iTunes library to fall back on.
TV is a slightly trickier prospect, because as a cord-cutter I really only have access to Netflix and other streamers. And there I'd find my first set of problems, because there wouldn't even be YouTube to pass the time (for instance by watching this one British nerd solve ridiculously complex sudoku puzzles).
I wouldn't be able to learn my languages on Duolingo or any of the other apps I use, including YouTube. And it'd be so much harder to keep on top of my health or finances or generally any of the other things that keep my life humming along - I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it's fair to say that a whole ton of things are so much easier now because of it, pandemic or not.
The other important thing that I wouldn't have if not for the internet is my girlfriend, because we met online, and now that we're sequestered apart we use iMessage and FaceTime to keep in touch every day.
This whole screed isn't so much a Pollyanna-ish attempt to ignore all the disruption and chaos that the internet causes, as a reminder of all the good things that we use it for. Sure, Twitter and Facebook in particular are not just causes of our current polarization, but also actively making things more chaotic by providing a platform for all the worst kooks and grifters to either peddle falsehood or use misinformation to sow division.
But even there it's pleasing to see how my friends and family are coping on my Facebook timeline, or seeing what interesting or silly things the writers and reporters and comedians I follow on Twitter. There are bad things to all of these apps and platforms, but we can outweigh them if we make a more concerted attempt to focus on the good aspects.
This is why I get so annoyed when I see writers I like (as one example) quote-tweeting whatever idiocy the president or his enablers has vomited out into the world. If we stopped signal-boosting all these idiots, I really think they'd go away. There's no upside to retweeting those things, beyond the endorphin rush of feeling superior because you got to say something snappy to a tweet by someone who doesn't even know you exist. But they're happy because you're sharing their message with other people.
Ramit Sethi, author of I Will Teach You to be Rich (another thing I know about because of the internet) talks about improving your life by focusing on increasing the good, rather than decreasing the bad. It's not always the easiest thing to implement, but it's pretty powerful - instead of cutting out junk food, for instance, you focus on increasing the amount of healthy food you eat.
It's a good model for how we approach the internet, I'd say. Instead of rage-tweeting because some right-wing dingbat thinks Mexicans cause the coronavirus or some such nonsense, seek out the things on Facebook and Twitter that make you happy, or make you think, or even just make you laugh. Such as this:
See also male opera singers and ship's horns 🚢 pic.twitter.com/HpQu17tYtc— Olaf Falafel (@OFalafel) September 4, 2017
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