Switching off

The internet used to be an escape. Now we log out to escape the internet.

There was a time when going online felt like stepping through a door. The internet was a place you visited, and you could leave it behind when you were done. It was called surfing the web, and you went home from it the same way you went home from anywhere else.

That relationship inverted somewhere along the way, gradually enough that most of us did not notice it happening. The internet stopped being a place you visited and became the medium through which everything else arrived. Work. News. Social connection. Entertainment. Errands. Argument. Outrage. Recommendation. The feed that never ends, refreshing itself before you reach the bottom, always offering one more thing to look at before you put the phone down.

The internet did not get worse. It got optimised. Optimised for engagement, which turns out to be a different thing from optimised for people.

Since I left social media (mainstream social media) around 2021 this thought has been perpetually occupying my thoughts, because the platforms that dominate our time were not designed to be pleasant. They were designed to be sticky. Pleasantness is a nice-to-have, whereas stickiness is the metric that drives the revenue model.

The result is an environment that has learned, at scale, exactly how to keep you looking at it. It knows which emotional register keeps your thumb scrolling. It knows that anger travels further than joy, that outrage spreads faster than nuance, that the content most likely to make you feel bad about yourself is also the content most likely to make you keep watching. It has been trained on billions of data points to understand what you cannot look away from, and it serves you that, relentlessly, in the name of keeping you engaged. Collectively, we spent close to fifteen years training Facebook by giving it all of our data, and now it knows exactly how we think and can predict our behaviour before we even know what we are going to do.

Switching off is harder than it sounds when the thing you are trying to switch off from has spent years learning your particular weaknesses. The internet is now a designed experience, deliberately constructed to make leaving feel like loss.

Logging out is an act of reclamation. It is choosing your own attention over someone else’s algorithm.

What I have been trying to do, imperfectly and inconsistently, is find the version of online life that feels like a choice again. That means being more deliberate about which corners of the internet I inhabit, and more honest about which ones I drift into out of habit rather than intention. It means building more of my own infrastructure, hosting more of my own things, participating in communities that exist because people chose to build them rather than because an engagement loop herded everyone there. It means writing things down on my own website rather than performing them on someone else’s platform.

It also means, sometimes, just closing the laptop. Going for a walk without a podcast. Sitting in a room without reaching for the phone when the silence gets uncomfortable. Letting boredom arrive and staying with it long enough to remember that boredom is not actually a problem to be solved.

The internet I miss, and still sometimes find, is the one made of people with something genuine to say, sharing it in spaces they tended themselves. It is still there. It is just harder to find when the louder, stickier version is always in the way.

The best parts of the internet were always the parts that felt like someone made something because they wanted to, not because an algorithm told them it would perform well.