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How to end your extremely online era
“At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by by people who do not love us but want our money.”— David Foster Wallace
About a year ago, I wrote an essay predicting the end of our extremely online era. Much to my surprise and horror, it went viral1.
I still stand behind the piece, but I realized that it’s more of an abstract argument than a practical guide. It’s missing next steps on what being less extremely online looks like in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence. That’s what I want to talk about in this essay2.
The surprising thing about the essay going viral was the fact that it’s not very good writing. Nowhere close to my best work. I wrote it in half-hour intervals over the span of four days, sitting on the floor of a cabin on the coast of Newfoundland, my laptop on life support from a solar panel battery. The finished product was mostly a first draft.
Read it all here:
