Generationally speaking, the internet is a millennial: born in the late 1980s and now entering its uncertain 30s. On the world-historical scale, though, the internet remains the enfant terrible of communications technologies.
By comparison, the printed codex has been with us for six centuries; TV is tuning up for its first centenary (in 2027); commercial radio is doddering towards its 121st birthday this year. All of these established technologies are now boringly regulated, declared largely safe for daily use (barring the occasional panic about, say, the crassness of reality television). But the internet hasn’t yet been tamed, or even, perhaps, properly understood.
Now millennials themselves – the people who have grown up alongside (or maybe just on) the internet – are beginning to ask what the new technologies mean, and to write searching books about their online lives.
“I was born in Dublin,” writes the journalist and essayist Roisin Kiberd, “the same month and year as the internet as we know it” – that is, in March 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee submitted his proposal for a “World Wide Web” to his employers at Cern. From this fateful conjuncture, Kiberd has spun a dark, funny, unsettling and in some ways problematically limited “personal history” of our extremely online world.
“I am an emotional cyborg,” she writes her preface. “I outsource my opinions, my memories and my identity to the internet, and I have spent more time with my laptop than with any living being on earth.”
For Kiberd and other members of her generation, “the internet and mental health” are “closely intertwined”. Promised a technological utopia, internet users have instead been “led into fixed identities, each person given a biography, a Timeline, and a filter bubble of their own”.
The result, for Kiberd at least, has been “a slow depersonalisation” in which she has found herself “cut off from reality, from sincerity and sensation”. In 2016, she attempted suicide. “It took a while to realise that the internet had eaten my life. It took even longer to realise that I was experiencing a breakdown, because so much of the internet feels like a breakdown already.”
Process of recovery
The essays collected in The Disconnect – which range beyond the codes and cultures of the web to tackle other hypercapitalist grotesqueries (energy drinks, 24-hour gyms, sleep hotels) – were written, Kiberd says, “during and about a process of recovery, but not withdrawal, from the internet. They are an attempt to make sense of what we’ve lost, and to consider the lonely dystopia in front of us.”
As a sequence of subjective reports from the heart of the lonely dystopia, The Disconnect is superbly choreographed. The prose is sometimes witty and aphoristic (“The history of the internet is a history of girls in their bedrooms, waiting for someone’s message or call”); sometimes lyrical (drinking Monster Energy: “Starry-eyed, shaky, my mind becomes a hive of bees, my heartbeat an ill-mannered rattle”); sometimes scathing (the Dublin docklands, transformed by big tech, are now “an enclave of a new and stratified Ireland”, a place “designed to be seen from a boardroom: tall buildings, surrounded by other tall buildings, air-conditioned and clinical and gleaming”).
The two best pieces in the book are The Night Gym, in which Kiberd ruminates on the phenomenon of the 24-hour gym and its chief executive-worshipping culture of “luxurious abstention”; and Bland God: Notes on Mark Zuckerberg, a reflection on the Facebook founder as “a model of millennial blamelessness”, a “cybernetic black hole”. In these essays, ideas crowd the pages. There is a coldness to Kiberd’s perceptions that serves her and her readers extremely well as she maps with an unblinking gaze the smooth and sinister territories where money, tech and culture intersect, the world of “unicorns, blitzscaling and vaporwave”.
Slightly less satisfying are the essays about energy drinks, online dating and the capitalist colonisation of sleep. These pieces offer a volatile synthesis of raw confessional essay, quasi-Marxist cultural criticism and opinionated reportage that is reminiscent of, and suffers from some of the same flaws, as quite a lot of recent writing by millennials about “late capitalism” and the internet.
Hall of mirrors
Take Monstrous Energy, a witty reflection on Kiberd’s addiction to caffeinated energy drinks. Products such as Monster Energy, Hype Energy and Red Bull, she argues, tell us important things about the culture of work in the 21st century: “Where once energy drinks were geared towards recovery and wellness, now they are about performance enhancement in the capitalist hellscape.”
The glibness of that last phrase is indicative of a larger problem with The Disconnect (and, I would suggest, with a great deal of contemporary cultural criticism). In these essays, the experience of personal crisis (depression, anxiety) is used to guarantee the authenticity of the cultural analysis, and cultural analysis appears not as rigorous critique but as the aphoristic outgrowth of personal crisis.
What this means is that The Disconnect tends to portray “the capitalist hellscape” as the sole cause of personal crisis, and personal crisis as illustrative of all that is wrong with the capitalist hellscape. It’s a hall of mirrors: capitalism, in this view of things, ends up looking a lot like depression, and depression ends up looking a lot like capitalism.
“The internet today is boring,” Kiberd says in her preface. It’s a startling insight, and one that feels true: with most of human knowledge in your pocket, it’s amazing how quickly, these days, you can run out of interesting things to do online. (Shop. Scroll. Text. Post. Like. Repeat.) But Kiberd doesn’t chase down the implication: that a boring technology is one that has already lost some of its power to shape our minds, and that there might be more to the future than an endlessly unfurling “capitalist hellscape”.
Until then, of course, we are in urgent need of lucid reports from the hellscape’s digital heart. We should count ourselves lucky, therefore, to have Kiberd, sending us these glittering, provocative notes from the frontiers of the lonely dystopia.
Kevin Power’s new novel, White City, will be published by Scribner UK in April.
