Ten Years in the Swamp
Ten years. That’s the number I keep arriving at when I try to account for how long I’ve been standing in this flood. MySpace first. Then everything that followed, each platform slightly more insidious than the last, until the whole thing broke over me and buried me under an accumulation of likes and opinions and unsolicited commentary that hasn’t stopped since.
I used to think it would correct itself. That people would develop some basic editorial instinct about what was worth sharing with strangers. That was naive. What’s actually happened is the opposite: we’ve built a civilization where anyone who ever learned to read and write—even marginally, even incorrectly—now feels constitutionally obligated to broadcast their opinions on everything to everyone at all times. Especially when they don’t actually have opinions. The input field is always there. Silence has become the failure state.
The specific content is almost beside the point at this stage. The like-this-photo-to-save-a-dolphin posts. The share-if-you-want-a-supermarket-voucher posts. The live-tweeting of crime procedurals by people who genuinely believe their moment-to-moment reactions constitute a public service. The airport delay dispatches. The breakfast announcements. The grinding, grain-by-grain erosion of everyone’s collective ability to experience something without immediately telling the internet about it.
I’ll be direct: I don’t care. I don’t care whether you missed your train. I don’t care what you’re listening to on Spotify. I don’t care that someone won’t sleep with you, or that your car insurance went up, or that you found a funny photo of a cat. I don’t care about your job, your ambitions, your weekend, or your fears. None of it. I’m not trying to be cruel—I’m just describing the functional reality that every social media platform was specifically engineered to make you forget: the vast majority of what any individual produces online is of zero interest to anyone else. The whole architecture runs on the illusion that this isn’t true.
The live-tweeters are a special case. The people who sit down in front of a television and immediately open Twitter to narrate it in real time for their followers—I cannot explain this behavior to myself. The experience of watching a thing is apparently less real, less meaningful, than the experience of announcing to others that you are watching it while you are watching it. Three hours at an airport gate becomes, in these hands, a sustained piece of participatory journalism. Nobody asked. Nobody cares. They are going to tell you anyway.
Yes, I know: mute them. Block them. Curate my feeds until they contain only people worth reading. I do this, when I have the energy. But that’s not actually the point. The stupidity doesn’t stop existing because I stopped looking at it. The culture is broken, and insulating myself from its most visible symptoms doesn’t fix the culture.
What genuinely distresses me is watching people I used to respect disappear into it. People whose writing I sought out, whose observations were sharp and worth following. I can watch the before and after in real time: there’s a moment where a person’s posts shift from something to nothing—from genuine thought to reflexive content production. Memes. Engagement bait. Commentary on things that don’t require commentary. It happens gradually enough that I don’t think most of them notice it happening to them.
If this is the settled future of the internet—a handful of enormous platforms drowning in low-quality noise, where interesting work gets outcompeted for attention by whatever is loudest or most algorithmically convenient—then I want off. The proximity to this level of collective brain-melt degrades you. I can feel it working on me. The infection is real and it is spreading upward.
Maybe the solution is cheaper than I think. A well-weighted hammer and sufficient application, and then I too could live-tweet reality television without shame, send out game requests with genuine enthusiasm, and stop being the only person in the room who finds all of this quietly appalling. That does, honestly, sound like a kind of peace.