Links

There are no external fucking links.

There are not going to be any external links, least of all tracking links, or (I can feel some vomit rising in my throat) marketing links.

Recommended reading (and perhaps viewing) will be suggested. In plain text.

The Links

The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt. Book. 2024. You can find it in several in-real-life bookstores. You can buy it online. It's excellent. Even if you've lived long enough to remember life before the Internet, this book will help shock you out of deeply repressed layers of complacency. A lot of issues are covered. It hits hard with how completely and utterly different our ordinary lives all became in the period between adopting our first smartphones, and only a handful of years later. And that's just one relatively small piece of the terminal jigsaw we locked ourselves inside of, and threw away the key. It's mostly about how fucked the Internet is. Its fucking freaky.

Try searching the Internet for this (you can copy and paste it): tiktok children cant watch a movie they say its like school because they have to pay attention for a whole hour reddit

Film students, people going to college to study film, can't even sit through whole movies anymore. You can search for that too.

The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, by Cory Doctorow. It's about what the title says.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr. Explores how frequent internet use, especially browsing and multitasking, rewires our brain functions, weakening deep thinking, focus and memory.

The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, by Astra Taylor. This book argues that the internet hasn’t delivered cultural democracy that it originally promised (believe it or not, it did) — but instead it has reproduced old inequalities and concentrated attention and power in big platforms. No shit.

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, by Jaron Lanier. This book makes a passionate case for quitting social media. It covers manipulation, addiction, privacy, and personal autonomy.

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, by James Bridle. It explores how digital complexity and misinformation make the world harder to understand.

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, by Cal Newport. A practical guide to cutting back on digital clutter, social media, and smartphone dependency to focus on meaningful activities. It’s one of the most popular modern “internet escape” books.

The Beginning of Hope

Once you begin to understand the true extent of the endless twisted labyrinth we are all trapped in, the gentle mustard-seed beginning of hope can arise once again.

This is not a joke.