Three (reluctant) cheers for the Internet

A techno-pessimist admits the gaps in his worldview

If you were expecting a post about Aristotle today, don’t worry: I’ll be continuing the Aristotle read-along on Wednesday. I’m just a little bit behind.

I am a techno-pessimist. Or at least that is what I’ve been called by a few people lately. I compare smartphones to tempting demons. I write about silence and its role in modern life, the need for a slow culture, the terrible consequences of AI in the classroom, and the possibility of AI ‘replacing’ human work. I generally think that in order for human beings to flourish – or, as I like to call it, in order for us to do the work of being human – we have to rethink our relationship to technology.

While I don’t support being a full-on Luddite, whatever that is supposed to mean these days, I do think technology brings with it a variety of harms that we too often overlook. In that way, I am the most bland version of a counter-cultural writer. Yes, I’m challenging conventional beliefs (everybody has a smartphone, and most people would hate to give them up), but I’m doing it in a way that many others do, especially here on Substack.

So let’s try something different today. With some reluctance, I present here three reasons to love the king of modern technology: the Internet.

Solving the problem of access to media

When I started to get into punk music, around 2003 or so, I was still buying magazines to learn about bands. I have fond memories of flipping through the pages of publications like The Big Takeover, just learning about new bands.

But I was a kid in rural Ohio. I didn’t have a quality internet connection. I couldn’t actually go and find the albums I wanted to listen to. Limewire, my pirating option of choice as a teen, was unreliable. Because of where I lived, if I wanted to buy an album that wasn’t a chart-topper or a well-established indie band, I’d have to get my dad to drive me to a record store over an hour away. Sometimes he did, and I’d buy a few CDs, and I remember the gut-wrenching feeling when you realized you’d wasted $20 on an album you didn’t like.

Or when I was in high school and started to get into literature and philosophy. I knew big names from my English classes, at least when it came to poets and novelists, but I knew very little about them. At the time, Wikipedia still had a reputation for being unreliable, and it never occurred to me to look elsewhere for information. I was still living in the days when ignorance was just something you had to accept — information wasn’t just a Google search away. (Or if it was, I didn’t realize it, and so I didn’t do the search.) The best thing I could do was browse the shelves at Borders and hope to find something.

The same for film. If I wanted to watch something beyond what was playing at the theater, I either had to hope my rural library had a copy (it rarely did) or I could find a DVD at Walmart. Or I could watch the five or six movies Comedy Central used to play all the time.

Looking back, I do have a feeling of almost romantic nostalgia about this. I had to really hunt for things to love. When a family friend gave me a Guide By Voices CD, it rocked my world. I listened to it over and over again. They became my favorite band; they still are my favorite band. Finding GBV that way really shaped me in a way that just reading their Wikipedia page and listening to them on Spotify likely would not have.

But if I am being honest, I would not want to go back to those days. Teens interested in weird media have a chance to find nearly anything they want now, even if they are in some rural village or a media desert. Kids like me, living in houses between cornfields, can listen to every Beatles record, watch every Kurosawa film, and read every work by nearly every novelist who has ever lived. (If they are savvy and don’t have moral qualms about it, they can even do it for free.)

And this is good. It may be a good that comes with costs, as all goods do, but it is still good.

If you ever read intellectual histories or biographies of great thinkers one thing that sticks out is how limited they were in their access to information. Thus, books become coveted objects. They need a volume, and it is nearly impossible to obtain, and so they practically lust after it. It is strange to say, but that’s a solved problem. If you want to be a writer or a creative, especially outside the confines of a major institution, then now is the best time in history to give this a shot.

Thanks, Internet.

Bridging cultural gaps

Along with my YouTube channel, I run a Discord server. It is a place where fans of my work, mostly my YouTube videos, come together to talk. They run reading groups together, they debate philosophical issues, and they share art they’ve made.

We have Americans, Indians, Germans, Frenchmen. We have members from most South American countries. We have a few active members from various parts of Asia. We have a little bit of everything, really.

Many of the people who are active have things in common. They tend to be bookish, mild-mannered, and interested in prolonged discussions. What’s most interesting to me is that these commonalities are felt much more strongly than our cultural differences — yes, those differences are real (and I think they are good and healthy), but the general love of books and ideas is a much stronger bond.

Without the internet, a community like this could not exist.

Again, I think about my teen years. I was not the happiest teenager. I was struggling with many things, my parents were recently divorced, and I lived in a place where I never felt at home. There were many things I wanted to do, or even felt called to do, but where I was felt like the limiting factor. I was never going to be happy there. One major reason was that I always felt lonely.

Being on the internet is not a perfect solution to this. Some data suggest that the internet can exacerbate feelings of loneliness, depression, insecurity, etc. But it is also true that the internet allows communities to form which previously were impossible. A cross-cultural community built around common interests is one of them. And I have to think that as a teenager, I would have benefited from having something like that.

Unsettling the defaults

Recently, I’ve become fond of saying that the story of my adult life is a story of institutional decline. Previously, you had to rely on institutions – universities, large corporations, etc. – in order to succeed. Yet every bit of success I’ve had, however modest that might be, has been outside of institutions.

I like to think of those institutions, along with many other things, as the cultural defaults. Want to be a writer? Go get an MFA. Want to teach philosophy for a living? Become a professor. Want to make music? Get signed to a label. Want to make art? Schmooze with enough curators until you finally get a show. Want a steady living? Go do wage work for a major corporation.

But now, those defaults aren’t the defaults anymore. Instead, they are options. You can choose them, but you don’t have to. Success is found in many places now, sometimes with the old cultural defaults but sometimes not.

This is empowering. If you want to write a book, you can find a publisher — or you could choose not to. Personally, I want to publish my book with a publisher. I want to work with the publishing industry on this project, as I think it would work best for what I’m doing. But this is my choice. That is the part that is empowering. I chose this path.

Let’s think about another example: stand-up comedy. For a very long time, the dream of a stand-up comedian was to get a special on HBO or Comedy Central. That was your ticket to real success. If you got a special with either of those, you would sell tickets on your next tour and start to really make some money.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Louis C.K. decided to release a special on the internet. You just had to pay $5— not an awful deal. Louis C.K. essentially bypassed the old default and showed that there was another way. He continued that model for a time, and while he would eventually work with studios, he continued to direct and produce the specials on his own.

Now, it is totally normal for comedians to self-produce their own specials. While some might still want a studio special, now often with Netflix, many comedians are finding success by just putting their work on YouTube. Austin’s comedy scene is a testament to this. While much of its success is attributed to Joe Rogan’s investment, and we shouldn’t overlook this, it is also true that none of this would exist without platforms like YouTube. Studios just don’t factor into the equation.

The moral of the story

So there we have it: three (reluctant) cheers for the Internet. Even if I remain a techno-pessimist of sorts, I must acknowledge the good with the bad. I’ve tried to do that here.