I’ll be posting a little slightly less — though still regularly — as the CUA term gets into full swing. But in the meanwhile, you can also find me this week writing about T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets at the Free Press.

It’s been a strange summer. Somewhere between seeing Pepe flickering above me at a dive bar and attending an Anabaptist wedding upstate, hanging out with some cyber-feminist witches and my (default) friend Kat in San Francisco and drinking cider made from apples grown in Greenwood Cemetery, and spending far too much time thinking about Rosicrucians and the erotic sympathies of the Ficinian universe, I’ve reached — if not a state of equanimity—nevertheless a strange kind of calm. For this I mostly credit the Bruderhof. Singing to cows cures plenty.

But something that’s been on my mind lately, in particular, is how much less worried I am about The Internet. Or, more specifically, it’s about how much more narrowly worried I am about The Internet. Which is to say, I am far less worried than I once was (and by once, I mean two months ago) about disembodiment, digital atomization, and the idea that the Internet somehow picks us up from our natural physical embodied state and tosses us into a purely noetic landscape of intelligences.

Rather, I’m more worried about the Internet as a site of distraction and desire and dopamine. I’m more worried, in other words, about the attention economy than I am about message boards or Project Gutenberg or email or even the time I waste scrolling Wikipedia. I’m worried about how the algorithms of social media platforms and search results alike harness our collective powers of attention towards other people’s profits. I’m worried that our own capacity for love, which is always bound up with attention, is being bought and sold: a kind of prostitution in which we receive neither cash nor consummation.

But I’m not sure it’s fair to blame The Internet. I joke, probably too often, that the Internet is full of demons. But I think, upon reflection, the fact that we are not geographically bounded online, or that we can communicate information at a distance, has little directly to do with that supposition. And I think that blaming The Internet, as an institution, makes us less able to precisely pinpoint what’s so wrong, exactly, with being too extremely online.

Part of this feeling has come as a reaction against Paul Kingsnorth’s new book Against the Machine, which I reviewed (quite critically) for The Dispatch, but which has been on my mind ever since. Part of this, too, has come as a result of living under rather strict, and increasingly salutary, digital habits: I use a flip-phone (albeit a Cat S22 with the browser disabled, which allows me to keep a buggy Android sufficient for WhatsApp and Google Maps); when home I exclusively use a desktop computer, which confines my Internet use to a single desk area in a single corner of my apartment; I use an analog alarm clock and don’t let myself look at a screen until I’ve done my requisite morning journaling. But part of it, too, comes from the fact that several of my closest friends in the world have moved out of New York.

For the first time since the pandemic, I’ve therefore been using Zoom as a social, rather than a professional, tool. I’ve been videochatting friends — first those who just moved; then, inspired by the routine, friends who left New York long since -- at the very same desk where I allow myself to send emails (or, sometimes, even browse Reddit). I’m much more active on my various WhatsApp groupchats, than I used to be. I spend a decent, perhaps excessive, chunk of my day catching up with people I’m unable to see in person.

Would I rather spend time with these friends at a bar, or in my house? Of course. But the fact that I’m able to sustain not only individual friendships, but an extended sense of community, outside of my immediate geographic sphere — to say nothing of those friendships, of which I’ve already written, that started with online interaction, doesn’t seem to me like a betrayal of the commitment to communal living that groups like the Bruderhof have for years inspired in me. God knows it doesn’t seem — despite Paul Kingsnorth’s pronouncement that the Internet was a mistake — inevitable that this kind of expansion of community, nor the building of communities of affinity rather than only geography, lead inexorably towards atomization.

Rather, the idea that my sense of self, my sense of who I am and who I belong to, can expand through connecting with people I know and do not know through all the things I love, be they embodied practices (I’m getting really into shape note singing) or online book groups, reveals the best, and also the most dangerous, thing the Internet can do: which is to expand and yes, transform, my sense of self. Entering the digital landscape, for worse and for better, means entering an exponentially social space: a place where culture overwhelms us: a realm not just of human language but of hyper-language: where just about everything we encounter, and every rule we follow, is of human origin. Even artificial intelligence, after all, is downstream of human imaginative ingenuity. based (to take the demon analogy perhaps too far, I think it’s better to think of LLM chatbots as egregores or golems or animated statues —amalgamations of human consciousness or art or thought — than as, say, angels or gods).

For all that the Internet can be an atomizing place, after all, it’s also a place where we can come into contact with so much, too much, that shapes us. And we can come in contact, too, with a surfeit of ways to interpret that information. I can delegate the ability to form an opinion on an article I’ve read, a book I’m working through, a show I’ve watched, not only to Claude or ChatGPT but to Reddit, to recaps; hell, to my groupchats, whom I’m sometimes guilty of consulting before I’ve spent sufficient time in solitude to form my own opinion.

What interests me most about the Internet, in other words, is not the much-vaunted loneliness it is supposed to engender but rather its opposite: the teeming nature of real-life friends and internet friends and interlocutors and also celebrities and journalists and Substacks we admire and also memes and takes and opinions and brainworms. There is nowhere, on the Internet, to be truly alone. Even a night scrolling Reddit feels to me, sometimes, like eavesdropping in a noisy bar. To be intensely suspicious of the Internet, as Paul Kingsnorth is, would require me to be intensely suspicious of cities. Kingsnorth of course is. But I’m a New Yorker. I love New York too much to hate cities. I love cities too much to hate the Internet.

Because the Internet is a city, too. It’s a city at its best and it’s a city at its worst. At its best it offers, I think, a glimpse of what the new Jerusalem might be like: a place where we all belong, to and with one another where different forms of desire and attention and curiosity provide us with unexpected forms of political community and self-understanding. It offers, too, a glimpse of the best of human creation: where language and technology and human ingenuity allow us to shape each other in the imaginative realm that leads, inexorably, to shifts in the material.

But the city, too, is always Babylon, too. Or maybe it’s Gotham: the city of eternal corruption, subject to the reign of those capable of arbitraging that very desire —as money, as power, as will, as flesh— that is the currency of a fallen world.

Precisely, I think, because the more ability we have to shape and affect one another’s imaginations, the more power we have to harness and control them. If we are, as I believe we are, fallen and sinful creatures, then I think that much of that fallenness and sinfulness lies in the way that our imaginations, and the desires that fuel them, can be invaded, and re-routed, towards other people’s profit. The Internet, particularly the algorithmic internet, is a city structured by the powerful, for the powerful, running not on steam or coal or electricity but rather cunningly harnessed desire. The more imagination, the more corruption of imagination. But, no less than in Babylon, or Gotham, it is still a city of human beings.

What I love about New York, after all, is not the fact that I can have my desires sated there. I don’t love the brand name stores, or the restaurants, or the expensive private clubs, or the desire to see or be seen at the right places or at the right parties, even as I am certainly someone susceptible to all of these perversions of my desire. It’s the fact that, in a city of nine million people, I can find a critical mass of people who shape-note-sing on a Wednesday night; I can find an Episcopal church that does morning prayer in walking distance from my house; I can find, through the very resistance to the worst of urban life that only the density and collective energy of a city can make possible, ways to live in opposition to the way the city is structured. I can figure out ways to gather (cheaply, with a bottle of wine in a park; for free at the Metropolitan Museum; collectively, at the houses of friends, taking turns cooking) that do not give in to whatever Babylonian conglomeration of clout-chasing looks down over Equinox studios or Raya dates. New York gives us both something to resist and the tools with which to resist it.

And what I love most about New York, I think, is how weird the people I meet here are, and how many of them I can meet, and how many of them are able to get even weirder in dialogue with one another.

The particularity of the individual -- which is, as Kat Dee has so often written so well, among the Internet’s greatest sources of fascination -- is the greatest tool we have available to us to to resist the flattening nature of AI slop: which by design seeks out middling patterns, common denominators, surface similarities. Whatever similarities chatbots serve us are not universal truths so much as generic banalities -- a sea of Instagram faces. The only way to resist them, I think, is attention to the specifically weird, which means paying loving attention to as many bizarre people as possible. You can do it on the New York subway, at two in the morning. You can do it on Reddit. Either way, you’re opening yourself up to the teeming nature of otherness. Either way, you’re letting other people change you. You’re interrupting the linearity of your own thoughts in favor of the revelations only otherness can provide.

That should be done with care. There are times where letting your thoughts carry on to the end of the line is the only way to come to terms with their implications. But it’s also, I think, one of the primary responsibilities of personhood. Discerning when and how to be open to people and experiences and things outside ourselves and when to cloister ourselves inside our own interior castles, is one of the most vital ways we exercise moral responsibility.

I don’t think you have to be online — or, for that matter, out and about in a city — all the time. Far from it. I’ve become more, rather than less, stringent about my solitude; I’ve even become — a surprise to myself — more intentional about spending time in nature. I try to make it to Central Park every day, just to see the leaves change, and to remind myself of the differences between trees. I make a point of spending time at home alone — even when my instinct is to go out into the city — precisely because there are times where the best way to experience New York is to reflect, quietly and in solitude, on the New York I have just interacted with.

But that’s why, I think, the best way to think about the Internet is also as a place. A place you can enter under specific and conscious circumstances — in a dedicated room in your house, or at a dedicated desk (I cannot stress enough my conviction that anyone who has to work online should do so with a desktop rather than a laptop computer). A place you can leave behind: including, especially, in one’s own home.

But a place worth going to, all the same.