It feels like some body-snatchers business watching so many people I used to feel kinship with turn into the exact kind of moral panic machine we used to make fun of.
We used to dunk on Boomers for writing thinkpieces about how social media was giving everyone narcissistic personality disorder. We understood, at least on some level, that “new technology exists and people are using it in ways I personally find alienating” was not the same thing as “civilization is collapsing because nobody has souls anymore.”
And now it feels like half the people who once knew better have turned into the collapse-porn addicts Leigh Phillips talks about.
I am not talking about serious critique. Serious critique is necessary. Platform capitalism is rotten. Surveillance is real. Algorithmic management is real. The ownership structure of tech matters. Labor exploitation matters. AI being folded immediately into management, policing, advertising, landlords, and every other miserable apparatus of control matters.
But that is not the same thing as turning every conversation about technology into a sermon about spiritual degradation and the death of the human.
There is a kind of anti-tech panic now that passes itself off as radical or sophisticated because it is grim. But a lot of the time it is just inverted naivety. Instead of “technology will save us,” it becomes “technology has damned us.” Instead of “progress is inevitable,” it becomes “decline is inevitable.” Same totalizing story, different lighting.
And it leaves no room for ambivalence, which is where actual thought lives.
A tool can be useful and exploitative. A platform can be life-giving and draining. The internet can be a mess and also the place where many isolated, disabled, queer, neurodivergent, broke, or otherwise nonstandard people found breathing room they were never going to find in the supposedly wholesome offline community everyone keeps romanticizing.
Some of us liked the machines because the village was not safe.
Some of us liked the screen because it was a portal, not a cage.
Some of us are not trying to “return” to a world that never wanted us.
And that is the part that gets under my skin. A lot of this “log off and return to real life” stuff quietly assumes that real life was waiting there with open arms. For many people, myself included, “community” has mostly just meant surveillance with muffins. It has meant churches, schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, and families enforcing conformity while calling it care. It has meant being watched, corrected, pitied, managed, punished, or treated as a problem to solve.
So no, I am not especially moved by people discovering that the internet is bad and deciding the cure is eye contact, hyperlocalism, wellness, and everyone becoming spiritually mature in the same beige font.
I miss secular curiosity. I miss people being interested in systems, machines, weird websites, glitches, forums, games, software, subcultures, and strange little corners of reality without immediately turning it into a morality play. I miss “what happens if we poke this with a stick?” more than “what does this mean for our collective nervous system?” I used to follow New Agers because they posted cool art and pictures of rocks. I quickly unfollowed them because they often wrung their hands in this way. And then everyone else started doing the same thing - do I have to unfollow everyone now?
I miss when weirdness did not have to justify itself as healing.
I miss when interest was enough.
I do not want techno-libertarian optimism, either. Those people are their own nightmare. I am not asking for “move fast and break things”. I am asking for a little more curiosity and a little less collapse liturgy. I am asking for critiques that do not treat despair as proof of intelligence. I am asking for a politics that can tell the difference between “Silicon Valley should not own the future” and “the future itself is obscene.”
Because the problem is not that people are worried. There is plenty to be worried about.
The problem is the way worry keeps getting converted into purity politics, lifestyle policing, and a weird nostalgia for forms of community that were often hostile to the very people now being told to return to them.
Sometimes modernity is alienating.
Sometimes modernity is also antibiotics, refrigeration, mobility aids, recorded music, weather forecasting, online work, obscure archives, midnight research spirals, and being able to find another person who understands the specific shape of your weirdness.
Both things can be true. That is not contradiction. That is reality.
And I am so tired of being asked to trade messy, compromised, material freedom for somebody else’s pastoral fantasy.
