{"id":35457,"date":"2025-07-31T17:47:22","date_gmt":"2025-07-31T17:47:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/35457\/"},"modified":"2025-07-31T17:47:22","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T17:47:22","slug":"the-internet-is-over-its-time-to-go-outside","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/35457\/","title":{"rendered":"The internet is over, it\u2019s time to go outside."},"content":{"rendered":"

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When my high school sweetheart\u2019s texts used to pop up on my silver flip phone in 2008, I would gasp. No greater dopamine hit for a teenage girl than a \u201c<3\u201d received over summer break via T9 texting. That, maybe, was the last time I was truly excited to get a message on my phone. Now, I\u2019m the most mid-30s woman to have ever lived: Nothing causes me disquietude quite like the feel of my iPhone buzzing, usually with a scam call or an email from the IRS asking for more money (HOW?) or a push notification from the world\u2019s ugliest man on Hinge, offering me a rose that I do not want.<\/p>\n

We used to have fun online, right? Or I did, at least. Every summer in the mid-to-late aughts, instead of getting a job or hanging out with my friends, I luxuriated in months of unfettered internet access on the computer already in my bedroom. I\u2019m among the last generation with a childhood that straddled both digital and analog media, but I always knew which one offered me the most expansive worldview. I joined forums and social media sites, I laughed at memes and made my own, I read journalism from different continents, started and abandoned blogs, watched reruns of The Daily Show, torrented the most brutal true-crime documentaries and watched them in the middle of the night while my parents were sleeping. I loved the internet. My \u201creal\u201d life was boring, but the internet? That was where I was always permitted to have some fun.<\/p>\n

We are all, decidedly, not having fun online anymore. Instead, the internet has become a magnifying glass for the worst atrocities happening in the world: ICE is kidnapping random people and comptrollers<\/a> off the street, political officials are getting assassinated<\/a>, there\u2019s a genocide in Gaza, a famine in Sudan, renewed violence in Kashmir, and everyone is mad at poor Ms. Rachel<\/a>. Summer has barely started and I\u2019m already looking at my calendar and trying to figure out how I can wring out more pleasure between our now-daily reminders of fascism. We get so few summers and I want to enjoy mine, but I can\u2019t seem to pry myself off the internet. When I was younger, I was inside and online because I wanted to watch Legally Blonde 2 illegally. Now, it\u2019s because I need to find out if the cops are raiding the coffee shop I like to go to, or if another plane has fallen out of the sky for no apparent reason.<\/p>\n

For a long time, we viewed the internet as a distraction, or a comfort. It was the place to go to avoid the doldrums of your regular day, to find a recipe, to prove your friends wrong at trivia. Maybe there was a brief period where we thought of it as a panacea, that a greater reliance on digital spaces would solve all our problems. It would, at least, make it easier to organize dissent. But now, as we sink further into autocracy and as war spreads from the United States to Israel to Iran, the internet\u2019s purpose has shifted dramatically\u2014it\u2019s a place that fuels panic, a combat zone, an instrument used by both compatriots and villains. There\u2019s a purpose to being online, but the fun of it has been drained. Take it from an internet addict now in rueful repair: This is the summer to slam your laptop shut, link arms with your friends, and go outside to touch some grass.<\/p>\n

Online, touch grass is an oft-repeated quasi-insult, a way to tell your opponent they\u2019ve spent too much time scrolling and need to reestablish a relationship with the sublunary. \u201cCan you go touch some grass?\u201d a friend said to me a few weeks ago after my 30th spiral about the cruelty of deportations and how insane it is that there are still women having children with Elon Musk. \u201cJust go run your hand through some leaves in a tree, at least.\u201d I used to resent this directive, but now it rings in my head like the only thing left to do. I used to scroll through Instagram to see what my friends were up to, but now it\u2019s all infographics about how many Palestinian children have lost a limb. What else can I do other than go outside and touch some grass?<\/p>\n

There are still tendrils of pleasure and joy left on the internet, sure. Memes about the president\u2019s military-themed birthday parade<\/a> (how\u2019s that for a Presbyterian quincea\u00f1era) were certainly welcome distractions from the prospect of, ah, nuclear warfare. But there are no more sacred spaces left. Once, you could scroll through Twitter and read only posts from your friends. You could get lost in an informational maze on Reddit about the invention of the BlackBerry Bold. You could even foster a nascent crush on an F-list celebrity on Tumblr! Now, a brief stroll through X features the most hideous opinions you could imagine, several GoFundMes for covering basic health care, footage of the swollen bellies of starving babies, and a reminder that skinny is back along with the recession. We\u2019re witnessing the real-time impacts of capitalism or mass shrimp farming or climate change or gun violence, or all of them within the same five minutes.<\/p>\n

There was a time I\u2019d beg my mother for more time on the internet; now, I\u2019m desperate for situations that take my phone out of my hands. \u201cOh, a funeral? Yes, I\u2019d love to go. Churches have awful Wi-Fi.\u201d<\/p>\n

The internet we have now is perhaps not the gathering space we want, but it might be the one we need. Invariably, though, the more the internet is tied to our activism, the less compelling it becomes as a space for leisure. Once, you went online to find out what people were talking about\u2014what jokes they were making, what conversations you were missing. Now, we\u2019re online to find out which kindergarten class ICE is invading, what pro-abortion organizations to donate to, and how to help your neighbors if they\u2019re hit with tear gas.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that our online experiences should be spaces of less activism, less information, and more distraction. We don\u2019t live in a world luxurious enough for a digital space free of pain. The internet is just a tool, and that\u2019s never been clearer than it is right now. A tool can be deployed in service of anything, which is why the internet is currently a tool of political oppression, of social resistance, of the distribution of both accurate and false information. We treated the internet like it was an invention akin to a wheel, something we could harness. But the internet is actually more like the tools we used to make that wheel: You can do anything you want with them, and one option is, always, running people over.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Luke Winkie
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Undoubtedly, the tool is valuable, but it\u2019s also a quick way to burn out. Spend a little too much time online and you\u2019re in an onslaught of the most dreadful news imaginable, both in your personal life events and with regard to global bloodshed. My brain has evolved to run through a panicked loop any time my phone perks up. Is it bad news from my parents? Is it my doctor telling me that the little bump on my finger is, indeed, finger cancer? (Everyone on Reddit agreed it was finger cancer.) Is it a drone strike, and will it hit someone I love on the other side of the world? Or maybe it\u2019ll hit a stranger\u2014is that supposed to make me feel better? Maybe it\u2019s just a push alert, showing me photos of men shielding their children from rifles on Father\u2019s Day. What do I do about the fact that these men look like my uncles, or that their children look like our children? Even if the bad news is something more mundane, it\u2019s still bad news: another rainy weekend in New York after we\u2019ve already suffered so many rainy weekends in a row. But all of this is just information, and I get to decide what to do with it. My phone, now, feels like a knife: a tool I could use to build something, but one I can always turn inward and use to destroy myself if I want. It\u2019s heavy in my hands and I can\u2019t believe I used to dream of one day having unfettered access to this little computer in my pocket. It\u2019s a knife! What was I doing getting excited about holding a knife?<\/p>\n

The pandemic offered us a view of a digital-first world, and it actually wasn\u2019t that enticing<\/a>\u2014staying home reminded all of us how much we wanted to be among other people. Now, all I want is to get offline, and I don\u2019t think I\u2019m alone. Last weekend, more than 5 million people<\/a> attended the 2,000 \u201cNo Kings\u201d protests around the country, despite the rain and threat of police violence. Dating apps are struggling <\/a>with more and more people trying to meet in person instead of on sexy LinkedIn. People are back outside, at concerts and bars and festivals and shows of a united spirit against the government. The streets are full again, the bounceback to IRL culture that we were waiting for after the pandemic.<\/p>\n

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Peter Thiel Just Accidentally Made a Chilling Admission. Five Decades Ago, One Man Saw It Coming.
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It\u2019s the Most Hated Personality Trait in the World. The People Who Have It Think You Should Listen to Them.
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We\u2019ve also learned the hard way that there\u2019s no real safety on the internet. As the U.S. government cracks down on student activists<\/a> and tourists<\/a> who have posted critically about Israel, it\u2019s clear that our digital audiences aren\u2019t all that private. We once turned to the internet to help us build our senses of self, but now, oligarchs and despots are using that data against us. In some ways, we\u2019ve seen the limits of digital-only protests. Tweet \u201cThis is not normal\u201d all you fucking want\u2014it didn\u2019t work in 2016 and it\u2019s not going to work now. What might work is if you can save a piece of your soul through the brutal and vital work of witnessing carnage, while also preserving yourself for the fight happening just off-screen. It needs you more than the endless scroll ever did.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t like being online anymore, but I view it as a duty. I am too comfortable and I live too far from real carnage. I live in a safe place, with a passport that allows me to travel to almost any country I want. The hospital I was born in is still standing, which makes me feel lucky, which then makes me feel terminally sad. My job, now, is to witness that which the internet allows me to see, and to call it what it is: a genocide, a famine, a brazen act of war.<\/p>\n

But for now, outside, it\u2019s summer. You suffered through a hard winter, and you\u2019ll hopefully suffer through several more. The grass is getting longer. New prisons are built every day. I want to stay out of all of them for as long as I can.<\/p>\n

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