A Year Without Internet
by Hamza Shaban
Highly educated Americans tell the world that young people are increasingly distracted or emotionally incompetent due to incessant pointer-clicking and unrelenting thumb-pressing. From the stuffed genre of airport-friendly socio-criticism, we’ve learned that networked technologies are making us lonely and small-minded. Apparently no one has ever sent Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, or Sherry Turkle, of Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology And Less From Each Other, a tastefully brief Snapchat. In their best-selling sermons, “the Net” is the devil. Search engines, hyperlinks, and texts ensnare our intellect with the seductive fork tongue of reptilian temptation.
From these admired and popular writers we get big questions like Is Google Making Us Stupid?, and oh-so-profound op-eds like The Flight From Conversation, in which we’re told that our stifled concentration and stalled sociability stems from frenetic web browsing and Facebook’s trivial pursuits. This helps to explain why Paul Miller, writer for The Verge — in an effort to reclaim his humanity and become one-with-the-world — staged a 365-day-long experiment: absolutely no Internet.
In April of 2012, Paul decided to unplug. “I was 26 years old and burnt out,” Paul wrote when he returned.”I wanted a break from modern life — the hamster wheel of an email inbox, the constant flood of WWW information which drowned out my sanity. I wanted to escape.”
Beginning May 1, for one year, Paul would say no to forum-link-binging and cat-vid-gorging. He would forego text messaging and renounce Twitter.
And then, he returned. What soon became clear to Paul (around his fourth month) and for the reader (in the first few sentences of his homecoming essay) was that his paralyzing anxiety and enveloping sense of dejection had little to do with his Reddit overuse.
That Paul did not emerge from a mountain of seclusion like Muhammad or Zarathustra, that he did not return a walking Deepak Chopra of prophetic wisdom and Gandhian patience, is not so surprising. In fact, Paul’s failed experiment helps to refute the Internet fear mongering that has propelled the notoriety of the professional “thinking about the Internet” class.
In “Finding Paul Miller,” a short documentary made by Paul’s coworkers at The Verge, we are encouraged to dispatch the gimmicky notion that the “Internet” has a specific purpose and ideology. Instead we’re allowed to marinate in Paul’s melancholy and celebrate his humble attempt to self-cultivate and improve. With just enough lens flares and a moody, instrumental soundtrack reminiscent of an Explosions In The sky Pandora station, we hear Paul’s vulnerability: “There’s deeper, deeper reasons for most of my problems that really didn’t have a lot to do with the Internet — they just manifest differently on and offline.” Later, he confesses: “Some of the loneliness and boredom that came from leaving the Internet was really instructional because it just let me know that my problems are much more internal than external.”
Rich with piercing self-reflection, Paul is all too aware that his Wi-Fi-less year was heavy on the Xbox but light on epiphanies. (“I ended up playing a lot of videogames,” he said.) The first few months of his journey inspired a personal renaissance: a mending of relations with his sister, a torrent of creative writing, and an embrace of serendipitous, boyish amusement. But his initial flurry of unencumbered human flourishing was pulled down by the gravity of the mundane. “By late 2012,” Paul tells us, “I’d learned how to make a new style of wrong choices off the internet. I abandoned my positive offline habits, and discovered new offline vices. Instead of taking boredom and lack of stimulation and turning them into learning and creativity, I turned toward passive consumption and social retreat.”
During his project Paul never finished that novel he’d been working on for five years. Nor did the journalist compose a book reporting his voyage through networked abstention. “I didn’t want to meet this Paul at the tail end of my yearlong journey,” he says, without regret, but with some disappointment.
In Paul’s version of There and Back Again, it’s telling that along the way our young hero meets Nathan Jurgenson, a sociologist and strident critic of Sherry Turkle, Nicholas Carr, and every other ponderer who views the Internet as a destroyer of brains and community and life. Jurgenson, like Evgeny Morozov and Zeynep Tufekci, seeks to undermine and alter our common and unuseful ideas surrounding networked technology. We tend to think that the offline and the online are of two different realms, with sign-in screens acting as a portal. On the one side: babble, blog posts, centrifugal bumble puppy, Tinder, disengaged tweens, the Kardashians, hyper-regressive attention spans, Facebook farce, The Matrix. On the other: books, truth, orgasmic eye contact, the Socratic Method, a hike through Canadian forests, reality, patience, conversations with Oprah.
From Jurgenson, Paul learns to articulate what his own experiment was revealing: that while virtual worlds are different from analog ones, our lived experience has always been an entanglement of technologies. Logging off Facebook for 12 months didn’t make Paul more real, it just altered his ability to communicate with friends and loved ones. In a similar vein, Tufekci, in her criticism of Turkle, reminds us that feelings of alienation need not be traced to social media. She points to actual menaces, like soul-crushing consumerism and isolating suburban sprawl, in addition to a stack of social science that show how people use digital networks to maintain existing relationships and to forge new ones.
In his own assault against thinking of “the Internet” as a monolithic technology that has its own goals and predetermined features, Morozov urges against Nicholas Carr’s “the Net will eat your mind” thesis. Since ebooks, Instapaper, #longreads and ad-free magazines exist in digital space right alongside the circus of diversion, it would make more sense to consider the diverting practices of particular content providers rather than encourage us all to become Paul, to renounce what they used to call cyberspace.
On the evening of April 30, 2013, The Verge hosted a live podcast to capture Paul’s glorious re-entanglement with the Web. Midnight marked a full year. Armed with champagne flutes and a Google doc of “things Paul should click on when he comes back to the Internet,” the first of Paul’s connected minutes were spent attempting to reclaim forgotten Twitter and Facebook passwords. In what seemed like a bachelor party of friendly humiliation and hearty congratulations, Paul’s Verge coworkers took him on a guided meme-tour of hilarious/terrible YouTubes he’d missed: Chuck from the Bronx’s ghost pepper challenge, Bane rapping, that new one where the cat licks a vacuum cleaner hose.
Amid the shenanigans, the year’s trial did not so much herald the return of the Internet as it did renew Paul’s obligations to his sister and family, to his craft as a writer, and to his positive intentions.
With just minutes remaining on the podcast, Verge editor-in-chief Josh Topolsky asks if Paul has one last thing he’d like to share with the world. Paul pulls up an old video from his Facebook.
“This was the first thing I wanted to do on the Internet,” he says.”It’s just me and my little brother.” It’s a playful little movie of him staring at a computer, while his little brother dances and surrounds him with methods of distraction: books, guitars and a cat. While the video plays on Facebook on one of the many laptops and devices before Paul, it’s also broadcast behind him on a giant screen. The video is also boxed, in-screen, for the viewer at home. Paul doesn’t take his eyes off the movie. Sometimes he seems mournful, sometimes he laughs. When it’s over, the seven men in the studio watching him watch the video of himself watching his computer applaud.
Hamza Shaban’s tech writing has appeared in Cyborgology, The American Prospect and The Root. He’s on Twitter.