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The Effects of The Fucking Internet

This isn’t about “balance”.
It isn’t about “mindful use”.
It isn’t about “digital wellbeing”.

It’s about the fact that the modern Internet damages the human mind and body in predictable, structural ways.

The damage goes deep.
The Internet changes basically everything you think.

This is not exaggeration.
This is what the Internet actually does:

IT FRACTURES YOUR MIND

Your attention is split into shards.

You can’t stay with one thought.
You can’t finish books.
You can’t think without checking something else.

Your mind becomes a switching mechanism, not a place.

IT CAUSES REAL MENTAL ILLNESS

Anxiety.
Depression.
Dissociation.
Compulsion.

These aren’t mysteries.
They track directly with overstimulation, comparison, sleep disruption, and dopamine abuse.

Calling it “normal” doesn’t make it healthy.

IT DESTROYS YOUR ABILITY TO THINK DEEPLY

Deep thought requires time, silence, and continuity.

The Internet supplies:

This isn’t neutral.
It makes insight physiologically harder.

IT TRAINS YOU TO AVOID YOUR OWN LIFE

Bored? Scroll.
Uncomfortable? Scroll.
Lonely? Scroll.
Confused? Scroll.

Instead of facing reality, you anesthetise it.

This is avoidance, not entertainment.

IT REPLACES INNER LIFE WITH OUTER NOISE

You stop forming thoughts.
You absorb opinions.

You stop noticing yourself.
You monitor reactions.

Your inner voice weakens.
The feed gets louder.

IT REPLACES INNER LIFE WITH INNER NOISE

You used to have complete thoughts.
Now you have thousands of incomplete fragments of thoughts.
That you don't have time to finish.
Because then you would miss the next few thousand,
In your scroll.

Your inner voice gets drowned out.
The background of endless trivia is too much for the human mind.

IT FORCES YOUR MIND TO RUN AT WEB SCALE

For thousands, perhaps millions of years,
People adapted to the world directly in front of them.
Now we are fed almost every thought in the world.

Facebook alone gets over 2 billion posts a day.
And that's just one platform.

Some of them might be important.
You don't want to miss out.

Your brain evolved in a world where it could follow the things it saw in front of it.
And think about them.
When your put a phone or device in front of it,
It tries to keep up.

It speeds up your thoughts.
But you're still missing trillions of posts!
So it speeds up some more.

Perhaps if you look faster and faster,
You might see something to make you feel satisfied.

IT TURNS IDENTITY INTO A PERFORMANCE METRIC

Who you are becomes what performs.

You don’t ask:
“Is this true?”
“Is this good?”
“Is this mine?”

You ask:
“Will this get attention?”

That corrodes character.

IT TURNS LITERALLY ALL OF LIFE INTO LOOKING AT A FUCKING SCREEN

We used to have sight, to look at the world.
Now we look at screens.

We used to play games.
Now we play online games.

We used to have friends.
Now we have social media connections.

We used to go outside.
Now we look at images of the outside world on the screen.

We used to have dating, relationships, and marriages.
Now we have apps and porn.

We used to have family.
Now we have people to sit near us while we all look at our phones.

We used to have hobbies and interests.
Now we scroll.

EVEN OUR WORK

We used to work with real things and real people.
Now we work with computers, looking at screens all day.

When work or school got tiring, we used to look around the room, at other people, or out the window.
Now we look at an app.

Now, we look at screens all day to get paid.
Then, to relax, after looking at screens all day,
We go home and look at screens.

EVEN YOUR MONEY

We used to have notes and coins.
Then we had numbers written in a bank's ledger.
Now our even our money itself exists only in data centres.
On the fucking Internet.

Some claim banking is sacred, and it's not really Internet.
It's just permanently online.
It's just Internet cables and undersea fibre.
It's just Internet telecom infrastructure.
It's just Internet Fucking Protocol powering every system.
Modern money is fundamentally an IP system wearing a private-network costume.

No one disputes that the dark web is Internet.
No one says that doesn't count because it's private/hidden.
No one disputes that blockchain (e.g. cryptocurrency) is Internet.
No one says that doesn't count because it's strongly encrypted and functions as currency.

But when you say "Modern banking is Internet",
People don't like that.
They say, "Well actually...."
They say, "It's more complicated..."
They say, "That's different..."

No, it isn't.

And access of your money is even worse.

We used to get paid in cash or cheque.
Now we get paid in apps on the Internet.

We spend our money on more devices, more screens,
(because the screens we already have aren't new enough),
and on the things we buy online, while we are looking at screens.

We spend our money on our rent or mortgage, or whatever bills we have,
Generated by servers on the Internet,
Auto-debited for us automatically.

All of it existing only on the fucking Internet.
All of it accessible only on the Internet,
Looking at a fucking screen.

EVEN ALL OF YOUR THOUGHTS

The Internet doesn't only change everything you think,
Which is bad enough,

But basically everything you think is already, literally, just thoughts about stuff on the Internet.

If you doubt this is true, try to think about something that is not related to the Internet. At all.

That means nothing you heard or saw because of an app, on a device, on a screen.
Nothing from (or about, or related to) any message, post, show, or conversation that you (or anyone else) had on the Internet.
Nothing that happened because of something that happened (or was seen) on the Internet.

You can't.

That's FUCKED.

THIS IS ACTUALLY TRUE

You really can't think without thinking about the Internet.

Perhaps you think you can.
Perhaps you think you can do something completely unrelated to the Internet, that only exists in real life.
Try it.

Drop a random object on the floor.
Open and close the fingers of your own hand.
Try to do it without thinking of anything to do with the Internet.
Try to do it with zero thoughts of other people in your life, who you would message, who you might share a post of this to,
With zero thoughts of anyone that you might even think about messaging or sharing a post about this, or communicating with on the Internet.
With zero thoughts of what the people you connect with on the Internet would think about you doing it.

You fucking can't.

The Internet is literally part of your every thought.
You can't even tell how much of you is still you.

“SOCIAL” MEDIA IS ORWELLIAN NEWSPEAK

Social? WTF?
It doesn’t make you social!

It makes you:

It replaces friendship with visibility.
Community with audience.
Conversation with signaling.

ALL WHILE YOU SIT ALONE, LOOKING AT A FUCKING SCREEN.

That’s not social.

It’s completely fucking totally anti-social.

It's the absolute complete and utter fucking total opposite of social.

IT INDUSTRIALISES SOCIAL COMPARISON

You compare your real life to:

Your nervous system doesn’t know it’s fake.
It just knows you’re losing.

This produces quiet, chronic despair.

IT DESTROYS REAL RELATIONSHIPS

You get:

People become profiles.
Disagreement becomes betrayal.
Repair becomes impossible.

IT COLONISED AND KILLED TRADITIONAL COMMUNICATIONS

People used to talk on the phone.
People don't much anymore.

And even if you do,
The phone network itself now is just another service on the fucking Internet.
Apart from, maybe, a few remote rural analog traditional phone networks,
There are no more non-Internet phone networks.

In Australia, the government contractually required the operator of the public landline phone network (Telstra) to destroy its own network,
So it could be replaced with more Internet.
In most other countries this was more subtle, but no less final.

It means that communication without using the Internet is now almost impossible.
It's even common to message people inside your own fucking house.

AND TRADITIONAL MEDIA

Television is mostly Internet now.
There is still free-to-air actual TV, and some people still use it.
But most of what we call TV is happening on an app, on a "cast to device" service, on the Internet.
And the television set itself is now literally just another Internet device, with a really big screen.
And to operate it, just like everything else, you use your phone.

Newspapers and magazines are almost entirely read on the Internet now.
Including classified ads. And, of course, advertising generally.

Physical letters ("snail mail") are almost entirely a thing of the past.
Countries are now considering removing their physical letter postal services.

Maps and navigation are almost entirely on the Internet now.

Reference books, encyclopedias, books of any kind really, libraries, all eaten up by the Internet.

Photography too.

And video stores. And movie theatres, mostly.

Music as physical media, almost gone.

Radio is perhaps the only traditional medium that is widely used offline.
Though many people choose to listen to radio on the Internet now too.

And really, who even listens to radio now at all?
Mostly only a few people driving their cars.
Because when you're driving is the hardest time to be on your phone.
Or else we would all be on the Internet then, too.

WHAT ABOUT DRIVING?

But don't worry, you can be on the Internet when you are driving.
No-one could be expected to stay off the Internet for as long as a whole car trip.
You still have your GPS!
You can hear its comforting voice
To remind you that you won't have to cope
Even for one car trip
Without using the Internet.

Perhaps we will soon have self-driving cars.
So we can look at our phones for the whole trip.
Without once ever having
To look out the window
At anything real.

Oh, God, please bring self-driving cars quickly!
I can't bear the thought
Of having to look any more
At anything real

And then there is the issue of safety:

For decades, road safety was improving continuously and dramatically.
This has now peaked.
Since the explosion of the Internet in the 2010s,
accident rates are increasing.

Driving requires concentration.
People's ability to concentrate is being destroyed by the Internet.
The conclusion is fairly obvious.

Similar increases are being found in aviation accidents, workplace accidents, and industrial errors.

We need more automation to save us from these hazards!

We're so lucky we have the Internet
To save us from its effects.

IT COLLAPSES YOUR SENSE OF TIME

On the Internet,
Everything is urgent.
Nothing lasts.

Days disappear.
Years vanish.
Memory dissolves.

Fast content destroys slow meaning.

IT MAKES STILLNESS FEEL WRONG

Silence feels empty.
Waiting feels unbearable.
Rest feels like failure.

This is the opposite of mental health.
Every serious culture knew this.

IT MAKES WISDOM IMPOSSIBLE

Wisdom requires:

The Internet trains the opposite of all five.

THE MOST DANGEROUS PART

It doesn’t feel violent.
It feels normal.

That’s how conditioning works.

THIS ISN’T A PERSONAL FAILURE

You didn’t “lack discipline”.
You didn’t “use it wrong”.

These systems are engineered to hijack attention, emotion, and identity at scale.

Blame the machine — not yourself.

IT DESTROYS THE POSSIBILITY OF AN UNMEDIATED (i.e. NORMAL) HUMAN LIFE

Before the Internet, life just… happened.

You went places without documenting them.
You thought without publishing.
You met people without profiling them.
You existed without being observed.

That state is almost gone.

Once mediation is everywhere, unmediated life becomes impossible to imagine.

PEOPLE BORN INTO THIS CAN NEVER KNOW WHAT WAS LOST

If you were born into the Internet, you didn’t choose it.

You never experienced:

It’s not your fault.
But it claims you permanently.

Like the ancient idea of original sin. Not moral sin, it's existential. If affects all of everything you perceive as existence.

Like something that has always been there, so completely that you can't really imagine what life might be like without it. You can imagine that you imagine, but you can't really, because the circuits inside your brain that should be there, that are part of a natural human life, that countless millennia of human development have given us — they have been shut down.

Like being born into a curse.

THERE IS NO WAY BACK

This isn’t nostalgia.
It’s asymmetry.

You can add technology.
You can’t un-invent it.

You can reduce exposure.
You can’t restore the world that existed before permanent connectivity.

Anyone promising a “return” is lying.

THE WORLD NO LONGER ENDS ANYWHERE

Before, places had edges.

You left work.
You went home.
You disappeared.
You rested.
You did stuff that you liked doing.

Now everything leaks into everything else.
There is no offstage.
No disappearance.
No true absence.

Life becomes continuous partial presence.

That exhausts the soul.

NOTHING IS RESOLVED

Nothing is ever completed, finished.
Whenever you're not online you're craving to be online.
Because the fucking Internet has implanted hundreds of thousands of hooks into your brain.
Each waiting for resolution.
Each of them pulling you back to your phone. To the Internet.

This isn't fixable. This is the way it's designed. This is how the tech companies make their money.
This is the whole point of it.

RELAXATION IS A THING OF THE PAST

When your mind is full of hundreds of thousands of outstanding items,
It can be hard to relax.
In fact, impossible.

What people today think of as "relaxed", it just means a bit less hyped and stressed than usual.
Nobody remembers what actual relaxation is like.

IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THIS

It's not like this was all some big cosmic accident.

The entire purpose of all of this technology is to keep you on the Internet as much as possible.
Trillions of dollars have been spent.
Hundreds of thousands of the brightest and smartest minds, the most motivated and energetic people have been employed, and the total of all of their labour has been added together and combined.

Every tiny detail of human behaviour, of psychology, of available tech options, of hardware and software design, engineering, production, and distribution has been analysed and harnessed and integrated and assembled such to create the most addictive and captivating machine that has ever existed on this planet.

This is not something the average person can easily escape.
It's literally designed so that the average person cannot escape it.

IT KILLS LOCAL REALITY

The local is replaced by the global.
The near by the distant.
The tangible by the abstract.

Your town matters less than the feed.
Your neighbours matter less than strangers.
Your body matters less than discourse.

You live nowhere in particular.

IT ERASES PRIVATE FAILURE AND PRIVATE GROWTH

Before:
You failed in private.
You learned quietly.
You changed without announcing it.

Now:
Everything is archived.
Mistakes are permanent.
Growth is expected to be performative.

This freezes people in place.

IT MAKES CHILDHOOD FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT

Children used to:

That childhood is gone.

What replaced it is safer in some ways,
since life can be safer when you are never really living,
and deeply distorted and dangerous in others.

IT FOOLS PARENTS INTO FALSELY TRUSTING IT

Parents think that children being outside is dangerous.
Perhaps there might be bullies.
Perhaps there could be a predator somewhere out there.
Perhaps one might drive by in his van just when your kid happens to be at the park.

But those same parents think children being online,
on their phones,
on popular gaming platforms,
on social media,
where there is known to be endless adult content,
of every kind imaginable,
freely available to anyone,
where the threat of bullying never goes away,
where there are known to be uncountable numbers of actual predators actively looking for children,
somehow this is seen as completely normal and safe.

Many parents today actually believe that the outside world is dangerously unsafe, but the Internet is basically safe.

This is because they think that real-life problems are physical, so the children can't avoid them — can't run, can't hide, can't escape when injury, bullying, or predators strike.
But then they think that when these things happen on the Internet, they can be avoided.

But look at the kids:
They are powerless to avoid the Internet.
The parents can't even avoid it themselves.

IT SHIFTS BLAME FROM ITSELF TO THE USERS

A parent pictures a real life injury, bully, or predator as a bad person or thing that harms their children.
A real person, or a real pavement, rock, bike, or car that does the damage.
Something real.

But they imagine Internet devices (phones, tablets, computers, televisions) as lifeless harmless objects.
Not many injuries happen when a child falls over and bangs their head onto the computer screen.
Not many hospitalisations are caused by people's phones crashing into them.
The Internet is seen as an invisible, non-physical medium of transfer.
Not real.

And things that are not real cannot be at fault.
It's as if the Internet, not being "real", cannot be responsible.

If a real-life predator comes after a child, obviously it is the predator's fault.
The predator is the guilty party.

But a parent, hearing "the Internet is full of porn/predators/whatever", will usually think, "my child wouldn't look at that".
As if it is the child who chooses what happens to them online.
As if it is the child who is responsible for what the Internet does to them.
As if it is the child's fault "for looking at that".
As if it is the child's fault.

So the problem, which is huge, and largely hidden, becomes even more hidden.
The real cause of the problem, the Internet, is seen as a neutral and essentially innocent medium.

People blame anything at all, other than the actual thing which is to blame — the Internet.

EVEN FOR ADULTS

This is true of adults too.

When the Internet creates problems for us, we see them as our own fault, our failure, our lack of some characteristic.
Or perhaps some other person's fault. Or some group, or government, or whatever.
We then look to the Internet (apps, platforms, feeds, AIs, websites) to help us with these problems.

Actually most addictions work like this.
Smokers think that having one more smoke will take away the craving for a smoke.
But it was having a smoke in the first place that created the craving.
Using the drug doesn't take away the craving, it creates it.
Not using the drug is how you get rid of the craving.

People think that being addicted to something is the fault of the addict.
As if the person chose deliberately to become addicted to some horrible thing, that they keep trying to stop, but can't.
The definition of addiction is when someone wants to stop, but can't.
Addictions work by fooling the addict into thinking the drug will help them with the very problems that the drug gave them in the first place.

In fact all traps work like this.
First there is bait, and then you are trapped.
You chose the bait, but you didn't choose to become trapped.
Because you didn't know it was a trap.

This is exactly how the Internet works.

The Internet creates a mass of unresolveable problems.
We blame anything at all except the Internet.
Then we go back to the Internet for more.

EVEN FUCKING A.I.

People blame AI for all kinds of problems.
It's taking everyone's jobs.
It seems so obvious.

The thing is,
AI is just an effect of the Internet.

AI could not exist without the Internet.
AI is just the inevitable current step in the growth, evolution, and dominance of the Internet.
It really is very little more than that.

Basically everything you do on the Internet now has some form of AI behind it.
Usually multiple forms.

Like with the kids,
Like with the adults,
Like with everything,
The Internet becomes invisible,
As the real, actual thing which is to blame.

If you think that AI is evil,
(and if you think that — fucken oath — you nailed it!),
AI is just one small subset of the endless horror of the whole Internet.

IT CREATES UNPRECEDENTED MASS PHYSICAL WEAKNESS

On top of all the mental, emotional, psychological conditions that Internet use creates, it's INSANELY physically unhealthy to be looking at screens for so many of your waking hours.

The generations of people born into the Internet are nowhere near old age yet.
It's not going to be good.

IT WRECKS YOUR BODY

It damages your eyes,
Your neck, posture, and spine,
Your arms, wrists, and hands,
Your metabolism,
Your muscular system,
Your legs and feet are weaker than in the history of the world.
Your nervous system.
Your endocrine system (glands, adrenals, pituitary, all that stuff).
Your motor co-ordination.
Your bone density.
Your vascular health.
Your physical confidence.
Your stamina.
Your cardiovascular performance and health.
Basically, it wrecks your physical body.

All these effects are even worse for children.

IT REMOVES THE NEED FOR A PHYSICAL BODY

When your only existence,
is to experience the Internet,
and to do your little part in adding to the size of the Internet,
why would you even need a physical body?

Basically, your body is "legacy hardware".

IT HAS DESTROYED HEALTHY SLEEP

Hardly anyone has fully healthy, restorative, normal sleep anymore.

HUMAN LIFESPAN HAS PEAKED

Human lifespans in the modern industrial world are among the highest ever recorded across all of history.

This was due to the reasons we all know about: Sanitation, antibiotics, modern medicine, and improved technology generally.

All this peaked in the 2010s.

Now, for the first time, without famine or war,
we have a decrease.

Obesity and metabolic disease.
Mental illness and the various deaths caused by this.
Fully sedentary life, even for non-invalids.
Sedentary work.
Always-on digital life.
Social isolation.
Massive endemic sleep disruption (sleep is when your body regenerates).
Chronic disease is rising faster than medicine is improving.

If you consider healthspan, the years you live while healthy, rather than lifespan, the situation is even worse.

The 2010s are also when the Internet became total.
Smart phones.
Endless feeds.
Endless usage.

The beginning of the end.

Literally, when lifespan peaks in a population,
That is the beginning of the end.

We need to stop this.
We need to get off the fucking Internet.

IT CORRUPTS MEMORY

Memory used to live in bodies and stories.
Now it lives in servers and feeds.

Instead of remembering, you retrieve.
Instead of integrating, you scroll back.

The past stops teaching.
It just reappears.

We forget how things were before.
We are told things are better now than ever.
We are told technology will always improve our lives.
We have no other reference point.
We believe.

IT TRAINS YOU TO LIVE FOR INTERRUPTION

Life used to have continuity.
Now it’s defined by alerts.

Your day is no longer yours.
It’s a series of interruptions you submit to.

This fragments identity over time.

IT MAKES SILENCE FEEL LIKE DEATH

Silence used to be normal.
Now it feels like absence, loss, anxiety.

Many people cannot sit alone without input.

That’s not freedom.
That’s dependency.

IT DESTROYS THE POSSIBILITY OF THE SACRED

The sacred requires:

The Internet dissolves all boundaries.
Everything is flattened.
Nothing is set apart.

Nothing can become holy in a feed.

YOU CAN’T GO BACK — BUT YOU CAN WITHDRAW

You can’t return to the old world.
But you can defect from the worst parts of this one.

You can:

Partial withdrawal still matters.

It matters more than anything else you can do.

THIS IS A GRIEF MOST PEOPLE HAVEN’T NAMED

Something was lost.
Not a tool — a way of being.

People feel it as:

But they don’t know what they’re grieving.

Naming it matters.

IT MAKES HAPPINESS FEEL LIKE AGONY

This is not a fucking joke.

Before the Internet, silence, the tiny spaces in between events and interactions, it wasn’t empty.
It was where life happened.
It was where happiness arose.

You could sit, walk, think, notice.
Joy arose quietly. Not as a 2 second hit, but as an ongoing experienced, felt, lived presence.

That state is now being erased.

IT REPLACES BEING ALIVE WITH STIMULATION

Real joy is slow.
It builds.
It settles.
It doesn’t shout.

The Internet trains you to expect:

Compared to that, real life feels dull.
Not because it is — but because your nervous system has been hijacked.

IT TURNS JOY INTO WITHDRAWAL PAIN

When your brain is tuned to micro-hits every two seconds:

Actual joy becomes too quiet to register.

So you escape it.

IT MAKES THE REAL WORLD FEEL DEAD

Trees don’t scroll.
Wind doesn’t refresh.
Conversation doesn’t autoplay.

Reality doesn’t compete.
And it shouldn’t have to.

But when your mind is conditioned to speed,
the living world feels inert.

That’s not a failure of life.
That’s damage.

IT POISONS THE VERY FEELING OF “OKAY”

Being okay used to be enough.
Now it feels like deprivation.

If nothing is happening,
something feels wrong.

So you reach for the feed —
not for pleasure,
but to escape the pain of quiet.

IT TRAINS YOU TO FEAR THE STATE WHERE MEANING LIVES

Meaning doesn’t arrive in flashes.
It emerges in:

The Internet trains you to flee the exact state where meaning forms.

So people feel empty —
while running from the only thing that could fill them.

THIS IS WHY PEOPLE SAY THEY’RE “BORED” WITH EVERYTHING

They’re not bored.
Their minds have lost the ability to experience actually living their life.

Life hasn’t lost its flavour.
Their senses have been burnt out.

Like a drug addict, the only hope of recovery is quitting the drug.

THIS IS WHY HAPPINESS STARTS TO HURT

Real happiness has no soundtrack.
No edits.
No punchline.

It’s quiet.
It’s embodied.
It’s unremarkable.

To a damaged nervous system,
that feels like agony.

THIS IS AN UNPRECEDENTED FORM OF SPIRITUAL STARVATION

Not metaphorically.
Literally.

The capacity to feel alive, to experience life itself, is being destroyed by the machinery of stimulation.
By the fucking Internet.

Every single religion has a common set of practices and recommendations to quiet the mind, relate to others, to aim towards health and happiness.
The effect of using the Internet is the complete and total opposite of these.
Literally.

IT MAKES EVERYONE FEEL SECRETLY INADEQUATE

Before the Internet, you compared yourself to maybe:

Now you compare yourself to the statistical outliers of the entire planet.

The most beautiful.
The richest.
The most successful.
The most extreme.

Every day.

Your brain was never built for this.
The result is a quiet, constant sense that you are falling short.
Even when you are doing fine.

This is one of the defining psychological wounds of the modern age.

IT CREATES THE ILLUSION OF PARTICIPATION IN LIFE

You watch.
You react.
You comment.
You signal.

It feels like engagement.
But you didn’t actually do anything.

Spectating replaces living.
Opinion replaces action.
Consumption replaces creation.

A person can now go through an entire day feeling involved in the world.
While never once entering it.

IT MAKES PEOPLE AFRAID OF ORDINARY LIFE

Ordinary life is where most happiness lives.

But online you see only peaks:

So normal life begins to look like failure.

It isn’t.
It’s reality.

But millions of people now feel they are “wasting their life” simply because it looks like a human life.

This is psychologically devastating.

IT REWARDS EXTREMES AND PUNISHES BALANCE

Calm doesn’t spread.
Nuance doesn’t trend.
Sanity doesn’t go viral.

But outrage does.
Humiliation does.
Moral theater does.

So the culture tilts toward emotional instability.
Not because people really want it, but because the system amplifies it.

People think drama and problems are important,
they are things that need to be solved.
So the brain prioritises them,
Because it wants them to be solved.
It wants them to be over.

But the Internet amplifies instability, and keeps amping it up.
Forever.

Over time, this makes society itself more volatile.

IT ERODES COURAGE

When everyone is watching, recording, judging, and capable of broadcasting your worst moment,

People become cautious.
Then timid.
Then silent.

A watched population is a restrained population.

Not free, even if it thinks it is.

IT DESTROYS SOLITUDE

Solitude is not loneliness.

Solitude is where you:

The Internet abolishes solitude without announcing it.

You are never alone anymore.
Except that you are more alone than ever in the history of the world.

Psychologically, that is a catastrophe.

IT MAKES HUMANS LEGIBLE TO MACHINES

For most of history, you were opaque.

Now:

are tracked, modeled, predicted, and influenced.

Not by evil masterminds.
By optimization algorithms.

This is much worse.
An evil mastermind still only has one human mind.
The algorithms that now control you are limitless.

You are becoming readable in ways humans never were before.

Power follows legibility.

Always.

IT KNOWS WHO YOU ARE

You don’t even have to log in anymore.

That idea that privacy means “not signed in” belongs to an earlier world. Back when identity was a username and a password. Today, you yourself are the identity.

Every device you touch produces a behavioural signature. Not one signal, but hundreds, all at once, layered together until they become as distinctive as handwriting or a fingerprint.

How hard you press the screen.
How fast you scroll.
The rhythm of your pauses.
The angle you hold the phone.
The exact places (down to a pixel of resolution) that you habitually touch when you touch the screen (i.e. much of the day).
The tiny accelerometer movements of your phone itself in real-life space as your hand trembles or shifts.
Where your thumb naturally lands.
How long you hesitate before clicking.
Your typing cadence: not just what you type, but timing between keys measured in milliseconds. This is unique for each person, like a fingerprint.

These patterns are called behavioural biometrics. Touch biometrics. Keystroke biometrics.

They work because humans are inconsistent in very predictable ways. Your movements contain micro-habits you cannot consciously control. The same way someone recognises your walk from a distance, machines learn your digital gait.

Even without cookies.
Even without an account.
Even in private browsing.

And even before you touch it, your device itself leaks identity:

Combined, these form a device fingerprint — often unique among millions. That's before you even type or touch the screen.

Then comes correlation.

You check weather on one site.
Watch a video somewhere else.
Scroll a news page later.

Different companies, same patterns. Data brokers connect them. Probability becomes certainty. The anonymous visitor becomes a persistent person-shaped shadow moving across the web.

Logging out does not erase this.
Deleting cookies barely slows it down.
Changing browsers helps less than you think.

Because the tracking is no longer about accounts.

It is about recognising behaviour.

Like recognising a friend by their voice through a wall.

The modern Internet does not primarily ask: “Who logged in?”

It asks: “Who behaves like this?”

And it knows the answer.

Out of all the other people (everyone else on the fucking Internet) that it already knows, there will only be one.

You.

And the uncomfortable part is this:

It usually knows the answer before you have any idea you could have been identified.

IT WEAPONISES YOURSELF AGAINST YOU

This is one of the very worst effects.

People say, "I don't care if tech companies can track my every move and my every thought".
They think the danger is being locked in a fictional dystopian future jail.
Like we see in movies and the minds of the overly paranoid.
But that's not the problem.

The actual jail is a lot different to that.
And worse.
It's everything on this page.
And that's just the stuff we know about.
And its control notches higher every year.

Tech companies don't track you so that if you think the wrong thing, then one day they will send around the thought police to take you to a real-life prison. Like in a sci-fi movie.

Tech companies track you so that, whatever you think, anything at all, then all day, every day, thousands and thousands of fucking times a day, they will send around the specific online content that their servers and databases and algorithms have precisely tailored to your own private thoughts, to hook you, to keep you as long as possible on the fucking Internet, and you will love it. Before they even send it, they already know that you will love it. They have analysed the same patterns over billions of people and trillions of posts. They know you far better than you will ever know yourself.

Stop for a minute and really think about how this works.

Like, really stop here for a minute and think.

The Internet has a very big memory.

The Internet stores unimaginable quantities of data on the things you've written online, shared online, viewed online, scrolled online, said online, seen online, and done online.

Not only you, but everyone on the platforms. Billions of people.

Multiple industry forecasts put the global “datasphere” (data created/captured/replicated in a year) in the ~150–180 zettabytes/year range around 2024–2025. That’s 150 quintillion event-records per year if we treat “data point” ~ 1 KB event record.

By combining the total of your public plus private thoughts and desires (including the most intimate ones, that you think no one can see or know) — not just the ones you have now, not just the ones you can remember, but since Internet tracking began — plus those of everyone else on the Internet, and running algorithms on the patterns which the combinations of these data points lead to, over and over and over and over, trillions and quadrillions and quintillions of data points, tweaking the content slightly on the fly, A-B testing trillions of these cases against each other, and then logging and analysing people's responses (and your responses personally) to these tweaks in real time............... they know exactly what to show you to get you to do what they want.

And what they want is to make you love them.

That is literally the purpose of the tech companies.

It's really very simple.

Maximum profit = maximum number of people online × maximum number of hours a day for each person.

Your own natural mind, thoughts, emotions, and desires become the bait and reward system.
To make you enjoy your capture.
To make you love it.

Once this closure is achieved, your own desire itself becomes just a mechanism to feed the growth and dominance of the Internet.

One of the ways they make you love it is to engineer your mind so that everything not online becomes "boring". Now, you crave being online more than everything else in life.

One day, before you die, you will look back over your life and think, "Oh yeah, I spent most of it looking at screens. Looking at my games. Looking at my phone. Doing what I love the most, looking at the screen. Yes, that's exactly what I wanted my life to be! I am so lucky that I lived in this age. Before the Internet, life must have been so boring for people. What agony. I pity them".

Nobody imagines that people who spend their lives in physical prisons would think like that about their prison.

But when people spend their lives looking at screens, we thank the modern technology that gave us those screens. We are grateful for it.

Our capture is a whole other level deeper than what was possible before the Internet.

Our actual will has been captured.

Our individual free will as living beings has been diverted.

We now hear only the will of the hive mind.

Of the Internet.

And we obey.

Because we want to obey.

What could we want more than to gaze endlessly at a thing which has been trained so completely and so precisely to show us everything we most want to see? And to generate the thoughts and emotions and biochemical rewards that we most want to think and feel? And to be there for us in this way in the exact timing and style and context and sequence (which it has learned from all of that data and all of that analysis), adapting in real time to always be exactly what we want the most?

What could we want more than the thing we want the most?

No real life thing can appear so desirable. And even if it could, our desire would fade, and eventually we would want something else more. No real thing can change itself so rapidly, keeping up exactly with the pace of change that our minds and emotions want the most, so that we keep wanting it the most.

Of course we want to give up all of the physical, mental, and emotional rewards of real actual life, so we can look at a screen. The thing that we love the most!

Now, our goals and the goals of the Internet are fully harmonised.

Our natural instinctual biology, our innate drive to take our place and function as part of the web of life has been swapped for the other web. The web of not-life. The fucking net.

This is what the Internet has done to us.

Fucked us all in the head.

We want it, we need it, we have to have it more than any other thing.

More than anything in real life.

More than real life.

More than life.

Search your feelings, motherfucker. You know this to be true.

IT MAKES COMPANY-CHOSEN CONTENT APPEAR AS CHOSEN BY THE PEOPLE

Before the Internet, there were chain letters. Sometimes people would make multiple copies of a letter, and mail them on.
Everyone knew they were scams.

In the early days of the Internet, some emails operated this way. People would individually choose other people to send them to. Many of them were scams, but, eventually, email and the Internet created a new kind of chain letter. Sometimes an email or image or animation would become immensely popular just because it was interesting. This happened by people actually sharing it around.

Even the first social media content operated this way. Before the feed. Before the algorithms.

If something was popular, or "viral" , it was because people actually chose to view it and re-send it.

This has become completely inverted.

Tech companies now post proud metrics such as "views" or "likes", making it look like something is popular because other people chose it.

Nothing could be more wrong.

Content is popular because the algorithms of the tech companies sent it to millions of people.

When something has been seen a lot, it's because the algorithms have shown it a lot.

Yet people still talk of virality and popularity as if it is something the people themselves choose.

Of course, framing it this way makes the people think they are participating in a group activity.

Rather than all of them just being fed the same stuff, that profit-driven algorithms have decided they will watch.

IT SHRINKS HUMAN AMBITION

When every skill is watched through a screen:

People attempt less.

Why risk being bad at something publicly?
Why struggle through the beginner phase?
Why not just watch someone better?

So fewer people develop real competence.

Spectatorship rises.
Mastery declines.

Civilizations weaken this way.
Everything becomes fucked this way.

IT HAS EVAPORATED ALL ACTIVISM

The word "activism" comes from the words "activity", "active", and "action".

The Internet removes all these things, and replaces them with looking at a screen.

People think they are "activists" when all they have changed are the pixels on some screens.
Perhaps, if they are really good at their activism, many other people's pixels will change colour.

It all happens on the Internet.

Like everything else on the Internet, its just a fucking screen.

What we now call "taking action" has become just more time looking at screens.

But there is one, and only one, actual physical action you can take when you are on the Internet:

Get off the fucking thing.

IT CREATES PERMANENT PSYCHOLOGICAL CHILDHOODS

Constant stimulation keeps the brain in a reward-seeking loop.

Impulse.
Hit.
Impulse.
Hit.
That is the architecture of a child’s brain.

Maturity requires tolerating boredom, frustration, delay.
The Internet quietly prevents this developmental passage.

You get older.
But you never grow up.

If you spend long enough with it,
You won't even want to grow up.
You'll be like a 35-year old still in nappies.
Shitting yourself all day.

But you'll think that is normal,
Because everyone else is doing it too.

IT SEVERS PEOPLE FROM REALITY WITHOUT THEM NOTICING

This is one of the darkest effects.

Reality becomes optional.
You curate your inputs until the world appears however you prefer it to appear.
You enter the echo chamber of your choice, and you never have to leave.
The perfect life.
Of complete and utter bullshit.

But you love it.

No friction.
No contradiction.
No correction.
Just endless reinforcement that you are right.

But reality does not disappear.
You just lose contact with it.

And losing contact with reality,
Never ends well.

IT'S TURNED THE WHOLE WORLD COMPLETELY FUCKING INSANE

When you look around at the world,
Everything seems insane.

There have always been problems.
There has always been madness.

The Internet just amplifies it.
And keeps on amplifying it.

Until, in the end,
It will be all there is left.

ITS SIZE, MIGHT, AND POWER ARE TOO BIG TO IMAGINE

Think of something that seems big and powerful.
The nuclear industry perhaps.
Nuclear fucking reactions.
The power of the atom itself.

Think of the horrors of nuclear catastrophe of all kinds.
Perhaps you have seen some of it on TV.
We stopped building more reactors and more warheads because of that inconceivable destructive power.

For the first time in decades, we are building nuclear reactors again.
To power the fucking Internet.

The Internet is the bossman.
The entire vast, mighty nuclear industry is its little bitch.

So are you.

IT'S A GENUINELY NEW THING

There have always been problems,
There has always been madness.

There were even times when the world was totally crazy.

But the Internet takes it so much deeper.
Inserting its hooks so deep in your mind,
you no longer even know who you are.
How could you?

Everything you know,
Everything you think,
Everything you are,
Comes from the fucking Internet.

Your basic identity,
as a human being,
Has become replaced by
Ideas you were fed,
On the fucking Internet.

They even call it a "feed".
Like a farm animal.

And we know what happens to farm animals.
They are eaten.

But we are not actual farm animals.
The difference is we are being eaten alive.

This has never happened before in the history of the world.
The consumption of mass human consciousness on a planetary scale.

THE INTERNET IS STAGE IV CIVILISATION

Cancer does not become deadly when it grows.
It becomes deadly when it spreads.

In the early stages, a tumour is local. The body can isolate it.
Remove it. Ignore it.
Sometimes for many years.
Growth itself is not the crisis.

Stage IV begins when the cells learn to travel past their natural bounds.

Stage IV represents metastasis.

The cells enter the bloodstream.
They appear everywhere suddenly, almost at once.
Organs that were never meant to host the process begin sustaining it.
The body’s own circulation becomes the delivery system.

You can see where this analogy is going.

At that point, the disease is no longer a place.
It is a condition.
It is everywhere in the host organism.

The Internet is civilisation’s lifeblood captured and assimilated into itself.

What began as a tool in one domain now reproduces in all domains: work, friendship, attention, currency, memory, identity.
Nothing remains outside the network long enough to maintain or recover its natural function.

Stage IV civilisation does not look sick.
It looks fully connected.
That is the symptom.

However the connection is not normal.
Not natural.
The connection is dark.
It is completely unnatural.
And it is total.
It is not something the host can survive for long.

That is the sickness.
The connection.
The distribution.
The network of attacking cells.

Stage IV is usually non-curable.
You can remove a tumour, but you cannot easily remove a distributed process.

Especially in a paradigm where "distributed" is seen as progress.
Not progress like the progression of the disease, but desirable progress.

Stage IV civilisation does not look like collapse.
It does not look like death.
It does not look like anti-life.

It looks hyper-alive.

Screens everywhere.
Signals everywhere.
Infinite activity masking the terminal decline of real actual fucking life.

The system becomes extraordinarily capable and extraordinarily fragile at the same time.

The paradox of late disease is that the organism may feel most powerful shortly before it can no longer sustain itself.

Stage IV civilisation is called the Internet.

Of course it is like this.
What else would it be?

ACTUAL HUMAN EXISTENCE IS OVER

People born after about 1990
Have never known any other way to exist.

People born before 1990 can barely remember.
And they will age out soon.
And they forget more every year.
Of how it once felt.
To be alive.
To be human.
To be a human fucking being.

So now we spend our lives searching for (and maintaining) identities.
Fucking identity is a soft science now.
Identity is something rare and fleeting, something that must be "found" and "developed".
Just basic acknowledgement of basic existence as an entity that is real and exists is rare and fleeting — you need to "find and develop" a sense that you even actually fucking exist.
Just think about that.
Fuck.
FUCK.

That's how total
The erasure
Of real, actual, experienced, embodied, recognised human existence
has become.

It's basically over.

Only one thing can bring it back.
And you know what that is.

IT'S EVEN DESTROYED THE OFFLINE WORLD

Even when you do manage to get off the fucking Internet,
The rest of modern civilisation is still on it.

It's hard to find much left in real life.

It's lonely out there,
When everyone else,
Can only be contacted
As a disembodied voice,
As pixels,
On the fucking Internet.

IT'S YOUR FUCKING GOD

If people far in the future found our buried remains from before about 2010, and did archaeology on us,
they might say "Their god was money.
Money is what they spent nearly all their time thinking about,
Trying to appease it, they worked all day for it,
When not working to gain it they were spending it, or thinking about spending it, or what they could do if they had more of it.
Their thoughts and motivations were all in service to it."

If people far in the future did archaeology to study the way we live now,

unquestionably,
they would say,
"Their god was called the Internet.

In the Internet they lived, moved, and had their being."

Whether you think you believe in God or not,
the thing in which you live, move, and have your being,

is your fucking god.

ONE WEB TO RULE THEM ALL

The Internet is the bossman.
Even money itself is now just its little bitch.

This pattern is only now just becoming visible.
It will become ever more clear in the coming years.

The new god replaces the old god.

First there was the big bang (or whatever).
Then the Earth was formed.
Then came the plants and animals.
Then there were monkeys (or whatever).
Then there were cavemen (or whatever).
Then there was civilisation.
Value and power was land, grain, farms, herds.
Then there was money.
Money abstracted all other forms of wealth into a liquid, easily transported and exchanged single measure of wealth/power.

Then there was the Internet.
The Internet is different.
Land, grain, farms, herds, and money do not create instantaneous planet-scale communication and compliance.

The richest people in the world are just all pawn servants of the Internet.
(This is obviously true of the tech billionaires, but it is also true of the other mega-rich whose wealth came from products sold and advertised on the Internet, which people bought because of the Internet, or whose wealth came from owning shares in companies that own other tech and Internet-dependent companies.)
Even with hundreds of billions of dollars,
More money than most of us can imagine,
They spend the rest of their lives serving the Internet.
The Internet owns them, too.
The rest of us are micro or nano pawns.

The Internet has replaced even money
as the primary river of power in the world.

The Internet has pwned even the ruling class.
It has pulled everything under its own umbrella.
Into its own web.
Into the net.

This has never happened before in the history of the planet.

One web to rule them all,
One web to find them.
One web to bring them all,
And in the darkness,
bind them.

IT CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT THE THINGS IT DESTROYS

The Internet cannot exist without real life inputs at unimaginable scale.
Industrial inputs.
Human inputs.

Yet, as we have seen, human real life is being absorbed and nullified.
Industrial inputs are being consumed.

Like a cancer, the Internet only knows how to grow and then die.
Taking with it the host organism.

If we were looking at an ongoing dystopian future of humanity enslaved to a planet-spanning net of machines, controlled by "elites", people who are themselves controlled by their need to serve the Internet, the ultimate machine, the great beast,
that would be bad enough.

But the Internet will destroy even that.

THERE'S STILL HOPE

Despite all this,

Just the fact that you are reading the page,
Means the Internet hasn't fully sealed you off yet,
From your own primary existence as a human being.

That means there is hope for you.

Grab onto that hope,
Hold onto it for dear life,
While you still can.

Before the Internet eats that, too.

GET OFF THE FUCKING INTERNET!

How many psychotherapists does it take to change a light bulb?
Only one, but the bulb has got to want to change.

The first step is to see the Internet for what it really is,
and want to get your life back.

On this website we will explore what this hope might look like.
And ways you can find it.

Never forget that while there is still breath in you,
There is still hope.

Next page: Solution