It’s time to face the truth: The internet has ruined everything

The internet is so annoying, but no one is allowed to say so. If you do, you get called a Luddite or, worse, “an old-fashioned fool”. Even if you want to criticise some tiny detail of the internet, you must – as if by law – add the proviso “of course, it has brought so much to our lives”.

But has it really? Now here’s a challenging idea: perhaps it’s made our lives worse. A lot worse.

There’s no escape from the digital hellscape. Credit: Sydney Morning Herald

For a start, the algorithms of social media have, by design, amplified the most divisive of voices and created new levels of hostility and disharmony. Misogynists such as Andrew Tate cannot exist without the internet. He’s dependent on a system that foists divisive content onto ordinary teenage boys who haven’t even expressed an interest in receiving it.

Trump, his sails constantly puffed by conspiracy theories and Russian bots, likewise owes so much of his success to the internet.

Then there’s the sea of pornography resetting ideas of normality for children still in primary school. Plus, the gambling halls that never close because they are nestled in your pocket. And then the addictive, networked computer games, rewiring young brains.

Want more? You can also throw in the acres of cheap rubbish, ordered online, which would never be bought if the purchaser could first see the item – smaller than you thought, shoddily made, overpriced even at the few dollars you paid.

Worse still, there are the vulnerable teenagers who, on social media, have described themselves as “worthless” or “ugly”, only to have their details sold by the social media companies to people spruiking cosmetics, clothes or plastic surgery.

“What a Luddite you are,” I hear you say, “can’t you at least mention the positives?”

OK, let me have a go. Internet banking has made my life easier – paying a bill while sitting on the train. I also like the way my doctor, following a telehealth call, can text a prescription to my phone. And Google Search seems good fun when you’re trying to remember the name of that actor in The White Lotus.

But even those positives come freighted with negatives. Internet banking is the main way scammers gain entry to your money. Telehealth is great, but so is a physical visit to a doctor with the chance to spot the thing you hadn’t thought to mention. And by constantly googling half-forgotten facts, we never honour the librarians who reside inside our heads. Google is just a way of outsourcing your ability to remember.

If the positives are so shaky, what about the unalloyed negatives?

It’s only robots who can confidently pass the ‘I am not a robot’ test.

Email is the world’s biggest creator of wasted time. If people need to contact you, they should face some small cost or inconvenience. There used to be a name for this “barrier to entry”: it was called “a postage stamp”.

The internet also loves submerging you in advertising for the product you’ve only just purchased. How annoying is that? The hedge-trimmer, the plane ticket to Vietnam, the pizza oven: since you bought one yesterday, surely you’ll want to buy another today. Since the internet is meant to be so clever, how come it’s often so very dumb?

And then there’s the constant need to prove you are not a robot. Pictures are provided of bridges in Texas, or motorcycles in Arkansas, or those weird American school buses, but the pictures are so grainy and weirdly cropped that a real person, burdened with human doubt, will be unable to provide an answer. The result: it’s only robots that can confidently pass the “I am not a robot” test.

The capitalist innovators of the early 19th century – factory owners with mechanised looms – were deemed evil by the loom-smashing Luddites, but they have nothing on this lot. Targeting the vulnerable, encouraging social hatred because it increases “engagement”, accelerating people’s worst urges.

Then add the mere annoyances, like the flurry of passwords necessary to perform the simplest of tasks. I want to buy a set of sheets, but first I must set up an account, hand over all my details, then dream up a password that I can remember in four years’ time when I might next want to buy a set of sheets.

Then, at work, there’s the nightmare called “Microsoft Teams”, an interface that requires you to make phone calls over a dodgy internet connection, while enduring meetings where everyone sits at their own desk, ignoring the discussion, and orders groceries on their phone.

Then there’s a ding every few seconds, signalling the arrival of an email at the bottom of your screen – usually from someone you’ve never heard of, complaining about the air-conditioning in the Adelaide office.

Again, I hear you: “You can turn all these things off, Richard, if you know how to properly configure your computer!” Sure, but like most people, I can’t be bothered. The whole thing is a sort of electronic herpes. You just learn to live with it.

But oh, for a modern-day King Ludd who might at least express the reality. The promised dream of an internet-enabled world of ease and leisure has turned out to be a rather hasty trip to hell in a handbasket.

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