The Great Logging Off

Millennials might have grown up online—but now they are wanting to log off.

I can still vividly remember the exciting bright lights of the MySpace homepage. It felt like an arcade. 1 New Friend Request! 5 New Messages! 2 New Comments! 1 New Event Invitation! Ding ding ding. So many juicy and delicious morsels, stacked on top of each other. It felt like being a kid in a candy shop. A supermarket sweep: with a basket and countdown clock, not knowing where to start or what to gobble up first. Each clickable link was written in an urgent deep red font with exclamation marks tempting you in, knowing that as soon as you click, you’ll instantly want another.

Because I had to wait until 6pm to log in (cheaper landline costs) I would actually feel the dopamine rush as I hit refresh, like a big swoosh over my whole body. Hook it into my veins. My eyes would widen — the reflection of the late-night computer screen twinkling in the middle of my large pupils. (“The Glaze”, I now call it, when you fall into a scroll hole like your mind has been hi-jacked and I still have to watch out for it). I remember being livid that I had to share the computer with the rest of my family; that I only got an hour to feast. I wanted to be deep inside the Internet world. I wanted to stay there. I wanted to climb inside. (Little did I know: that would actually be an option later in life. A hideous option: to be online 24/7.)

Between endless pings of MSN friends and the Sims ‘cheat’ password, I was in heaven for most of my teen years because of this new exciting world. It felt new because it was: the Internet had only been around for a couple of decades. A privilege to have a computer in the home. The online world at that age felt more exciting than school, the playground, even books. It was a world of fantasy and opportunity. An endless roulette of chatrooms, games and the excitement of boys saying ‘hello’ to you first.

Now: I’m trying to look back at this time objectively. Did I enjoy it as much as I thought? Was it, deep down, my choice to spend so many hours in front of a screen? How long did I spend doing things that were useful to me vs making the platforms money and giving me nothing? Was it freewill, or was I taken in by the razzle dazzle of websites created by digital scientists who consider you a mere lab-rat, who see dollar signs in your glazed-over eyeballs?

I have split memories: there’s me enjoying my online ‘life’ and there’s me looking like I’ve been entranced by a hypnotic animal, like Kaa from the Jungle Book, convincing me to step further into the wilderness. It’s too painful to think any external thing might have robbed years of your life; especially something you are so loyal to, something that feels so safe and warm in my pocket now. It’s hard to accept responsibility for how time — your precious time — has been spent. It’s much easier to make up another version of events. When we are old, will we pretend it was fun, being glued to the Internet for so long?

***

When people make generalised assumptions about the differences between Millennials and the youngest generation currently on their phones, people assume Millennials ‘had a real childhood’. By that, they mean: mostly offline, with muddy shoes and scraped knees. Yes, we climbed trees and weren’t constantly plugged in — but the notifications were constantly on my mind. Once I’d tasted it, I wanted more.

Whenever my friends and I hung out, we would gather around the computer. It was an activity, a sport. We were getting good at building our Internet selves before we knew what ‘personal branding’ was. We were teaching ourselves to ‘research’ (stalk) people from the year above or below: fancying ourselves as mini detectives because people hadn’t quite learned what ‘putting your account on private’ meant yet. Exhibit A: the excruciatingly public “Facebook Wall”. But is it fair to call an offline childhood a ‘real one’ and a digital one ‘a wasted one?’ What does this suggest about what we consider to be ‘real’ anyway —because as the Coronavirus pandemic has shown, the Internet is very much our real world. It always has been. There is no distinction. During pandemics and otherwise, it is often our only portal into connection and a social life. 

***

We normalise and justify our Internet usage every day. It’s fine. It’s just the way we live now. We don’t bat an eyelid when we see children hooking themselves into their digital devices, propping up their giant iPads, wearing huge headphones; exiting this world and entering a new one. We don’t worry too much that we’re all looking down all the time, necks curved like hungry giraffes. We don’t think anything of “The Glaze”. We don’t worry that our souls are being hoovered up and spat out as pixels. This, is, just, life! This is how we want to spend our time!

But, is it though? I keep thinking about what Zadie Smith said recently on the Literary Friction podcast about the evolution of our technological world: “You are told day and night it’s inevitable, and this is just how it is. It starts small, and then the amount of things you hand over to the technology gets larger and larger [..] The exchange was always convenience. Very convenient with the [Google] Map and everything. Can’t deny that. Bloody useful to have a map. The despair comes from — in any political system — when you feel you have no choice.” Zadie explains, beautifully, that there is a fear of feeling like our freedom has been slowly, subtly taken away. When you stressfully reach for your phone first thing in the morning, before perhaps thinking about your partner, family, self — is that freedom? Because it is starting to very much look like what it is: digital shackles. An invisible glue, bonding us to our tech.

***

In 2016, I wrote a book. A ‘millennial memoir’ called Ctrl Alt Delete about growing up online, all about being the same age as the Internet (born in 1989) from dial-up days to hi-speed WIFI and everything in between. It’s a nostalgic book. Anecdotal. I thought it would be funny to compare the way we acted online then, and now. In 2007, it was totally normal to upload 300 blurry pictures from a nondescript uneventful night out, including the back of someone’s head. Now, we painstaking curate our feeds, picking the one filtered photo that truly reflects us, expresses us, but will more importantly ‘engage’ our ‘followers’ and work well against the app’s algorithm. So much has changed, but at the same time, nothing has. We’ve always been online, always hunting out the next notification. But going in to my thirties made me reflect on this in a big way. 

Looking back, I used to assume my Internet addiction grew gradually, because the technology did. At 14, I would pay for a bundle of SMS messages (using them sparingly), log on a slow computer at an Internet café for a 10 minute session, or clutch a chunky Nokia phone that couldn’t accept photo messages. I wasn’t spending as much time on it, but I felt the same way towards these things as I do now, towards my speedy Google Pixel and MacBook Pro. I was hooked then, and I am hooked now. An innocent childish curiosity of buttons and codes and screens eventually turns into a day job full of buttons and codes and screens. The technology has changed and grown and sped up, but I still feel that insatiable uncomfortable feeling sometimes, like I did staring at the MySpace homepage.

I do feel nostalgic for the past in many ways. In the early days of being online you might use it for some basic online shopping, arranging a meet-up with a mate and discuss what you ate for breakfast on Twitter. Facebook didn’t advertise political adverts to us. You had to type in a URL before you read the news. Of course having an online identity means having an outwardly facing political identity too. But cancel-culture has grown into being the dark underbelly of the Internet. It is hard to stomach when you watch people ripping each other apart every day — and not even ripping apart a so-called ‘enemy’, but ripping apart the very people who are in many ways fighting for the same world as you are. Any statement written in 140 characters can be ripped apart. That’s why Twitter is the perfect breeding ground for pointless arguments.

Is it possible that many of us are finally bored of the World Wide Web?

***

Many friends of mine are leaving the Internet. Twitter is full of goodbyes and declarations for a better life. The reasons for leaving are wide-ranging, not only because of the data collecting, information mining or cookies (I suppose many of us have come to terms with that) but mainly because it’s become an unbearable place to hang out. Whether it’s feeling bored of being constantly sold to; or told off, or told what to think, or aspirational people inviting you to watch tours of their million pound ‘forever homes’ on the day your boiler packs up, or simply because it feels overwhelming, uncreative or stale to have to think of something to post every day.

Then there’s the growth in the amount of online abuse, mainly targeted towards women, and specifically towards women of colour and the trans community. You wouldn’t go a pub where people were shouting and threatening to kill you, so why would you want to hang out somewhere like that online? 

***

As much as the Internet has made me great friends, built my career, given me opportunities to travel — I feel like I want to get back some control again. Remember the world outside of the hypnotic jungle. Do things that never ‘happened’ in this ‘pics or it didn’t happen’ world. Aeroplane mode will become a new friend. Out of office messages will become sterner. DMs will go unread. Notifications will get deleted. There comes a time when you really need it to all go away, just for a bit, just so you know that it can. Time to step away; so that maybe one day it’ll feel like a choice again.

Ctrl Alt Delete indeed.

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