It's Time to Lie Down and Be Counted

The internet is no place to hang out

The first weeks of summer are a good time to think about how we hang out. Hanging out is important. Most of us should probably hang out more than we do, and better. We also probably believe we’ve been hanging out more than we have, because the internet simulates the feeling of hanging out so persuasively. By providing an ersatz version that is in many ways its opposite—a fundamentally solitary activity—the internet often blocks us from getting the real thing. This may be obvious, yet so much of the language that describes our online interactions, from the reckless invocation of “communities” to the term “social media” itself, seem desperate to convince us otherwise. Is “hanging out” on the internet truly possible? I will argue: no it’s not. We’re bombarded with constant thinkpieces about various social crises—young people are sad and lonely; culture is empty or flat or simply too fragmented to incubate any shared meaning; algorithms determine too much of what we see. Some of these essays even note our failure to hang out. The internet is almost always an implicit or explicit villain in such writing but it’s increasingly tedious to keep blaming it for our cultural woes.

Perhaps we could frame the problem differently: The internet doesn’t have to demand our presence the way it currently does. It shouldn’t be something we have to look at all time. If it wasn’t, maybe we’d finally be free to hang out. The first time I ever heard about Facebook, back in 2004, was from someone proudly declaring that she had just spent four hours using it. At the time, it was outrageous to spend four consecutive hours online; now we do that every day (if you don’t, congrats). Facebook hadn’t yet settled on its eventual ad-driven business model, which of course required eyeballs—the dominant paradigm of the past 15 years online, which seems inevitable in retrospect, but is actually a weird arrangement when you think about it, and fairly tragic: How many hours have been stolen from us? With TV, we at least understood ourselves to be passive observers of the screen, but the interactive nature of the internet fostered the illusion that message boards, Discord servers, and Twitter feeds are digital “places” where we can in fact hang out. If nothing else, this is a trick that gets us to stick around longer. A better analogy for online interaction, however, is sitting down to write a letter to a friend—something no one ever mistook for face-to-face interaction—with the letters going back and forth so rapidly that they start to resemble a real-time conversation, like a pixelated image. Despite all the spatial metaphors in which its interfaces have been dressed up, the internet is not a place.

The illusion persists because there’s so much money in it. Back in 2016, Ben Thompson wrote that Google’s AI efforts were at odds with its business model: “If a user doesn’t have to choose from search results, said user also doesn’t have the opportunity to click an ad, thus choosing the winner of the competition Google created between its advertisers for user attention.” If AI does usher in a new digital paradigm, as so many expect it to, it might also undermine the idea of the internet as a place to which we allocate our presence, or negate the financial incentive to make it seem that way. Maybe AI assistants will find better ways to advertise to us than by tricking us into looking at the ads, or maybe they’ll just do the shopping for us, with computers only advertising to one another. In the best case, the internet becomes more like something that works for us in the background—less spatial, more tactile. Worst case, the chatbots will also want us to hang out with them. Even without AI, the pretense of digital hanging out is already collapsing. Discussing Twitter’s decision to start hiding Likes, Delia Cai writes that the network has “morphed into a primarily photo and text-based version of TikTok, where virality trumps any kind of painstakingly knotted network of human users.” In other words, the internet is becoming more like TV, suggesting that the sociality of social media was just a necessary stepping stone on the path to a more fully monetized user. Far from a cause for despair, this is actually an opportunity: We can finally restore hanging out to its proper domain.

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Here’s an essay I wrote for the design agency Modem Works about AI’s implications for the future of digital interfaces.

Reads:

• Aaron Gordon revived his great Signal Problems newsletter for One Last Job, an emergency issue about the 11th-hour cancellation of congestion pricing in NYC. “If I could summarize Signal Problems’ purpose in one sentence—other than its tagline ‘What the hell is going on with the subway’—it was to elucidate the contradictions between the MTA being an independent authority while also utterly beholden to Albany and the Governor in particular. Signal Problems was about how this contradiction makes the MTA work in the only way it can: poorly, but just well enough.”

• “How deep are the deepest holes in the world?” Claire Evans asks. Bonus points for the discussion of 2003 film The Core and its bad science (“a scientifically accurate version of The Core wouldn’t have been very exciting to watch.”)

• The Polly Pocket toy from the ‘80s/’90s as a design philosophy for small living spaces.