Twitter Thread

I was talking to my mom the other night about how weird it is to dimly remember the late 80s/early 90s and have grown up specifically through that period when people didn’t know what the internet was to now.

The world FELT different back then, and I don’t think it’s childhood nostalgia or just how the world felt “when you’re a kid” because it shifted slowly from childhood > adulthood in observable ways.

Ubiquitous cell phones have had an even bigger impact than the internet has had in accelerating this feeling. At least with the internet you had to sit down at a computer and “log in”–it wasn’t just ALWAYS at hand.

It feels like you’re always connected to all of these other people and images and ideas, whether you want to be or not, just to engage in the day-to-day activities you kind of have to do (like check your email or your calendar).

You can’t look at your phone without being pestered by ads, ideas, images, and people that you didn’t ask for, didn’t seek, didn’t intend to see–it worms its way in somehow (even as memes from other people), no matter how aggressively you guard, unless you go FULL luddite.

You can take a break, you can prune your garden, but you can’t completely disengage from a constant assault on your attention and beliefs about the world that’s aggressively injected by self-propagating ideas and people who want to take your money.

It’s bizarre.

Humans feel simultaneously more available and less connected to each other and it’s harder to create moments of shared bonding IRL, like reading out loud to one another.

Again, I don’t think this is JUST nostalgia. It feels like we’re losing something important.

Especially when you consider how much it changes our behavior and how we relate to each other and the speed of information acquisition compared to millennia of prior practice.

I don’t really know how to feel about this, but it’s vaguely “not good.”

The fragmentation of online communities into self-sorted enclaves is great to help you find people more aligned with you (think about the late-90s Yahoo ads) but it heightens the distance we feel for our immediate community too, if we don’t guard against that feeling.

Look at how we even talk about “normies” around here. Normies are just people who don’t fit in with smart weirdo Twitter. Making connections with people who appeal to you– finding your tribe is great– but you still want to understand and appreciate people who aren’t like you.

And what’s even weirder is that you can’t really “opt out.” Can’t use your phone to call a friend or check email without being exposed on some level. In the 90s if you didn’t want ads you could just turn the TV off, not pick up the magazine, and go to the library.

You can still theoretically do that, but not completely and not in ways that will make you seem unusual or difficult to reach or isolated from others in ways that will be difficult for people to understand and not sustainable.

The attention net is palpable.

And the weirdest part is that the totality of it seems completely outside of anyone’s control. No one can turn it off, slow it down, or stop it.

It’s bizarre. You’d have to almost create a parallel community outside of it with the intention to avoid it.

Even then you’re under constant assault from it creeping in… So weird.

It’s making us sick in ways we don’t really understand yet because it’s only been 10-15 years of the cell phone era. It’s the blink of an eye, even if it seems like most of your life if you’re 15-25.

This is something I think about a lot, and it’s a problem I want to work on.

Need to think about this really carefully once I settle a little more.

I want to create more human moments. Make space for more genuine interaction in meatspace, and find ways to distance myself from the memeplex a bit without going full hermit.

I think a lot of my anxiety comes from this kind of constant attention assault and over-stimulation, and I don’t think I’m alone.