Returning from holiday, asked where I have been, I want to say “offline”. The more precise answer is France, where the internet is available. But I tried not to use it compulsively because there isn’t much point in getting away from it all if you carry it all with you on a phone and check it every few minutes.
At some point in the past decade or so, the condition of vacation came to be defined more by detachment from the digital realm than departure from home. The break begins not in a departure lounge but with the act of logging off, setting the out-of-office email auto-reply, archiving work-related WhatsApp chats, deleting social media apps.
The benefit isn’t immediate. The cacophony rings in your ears for a few days before you notice the stillness, the change in tempo. It is the difference between gliding on thermal currents of private thought and hurtling along rails, propelled by the burning urgency of other people’s opinions. The contrast is even starker in reverse, the roar of the tunnel as you go back to work, the jostle of notifications, the bowed head, scrolling the horizon away.
I’m not an analogue nostalgist. I don’t prefer getting lost to having Google Maps. I don’t think people were better informed when they had fewer channels or were less vulnerable to superstition when clerical authority was absolute.
We are now in the third decade of the first digital century. The revolution is irreversible and of unknowable duration. History has had a number of these explosive profusions of interconnectedness, driven by a radical innovation in communication technology. But not many. The writer Naomi Alderman calls them “information crises”, and argues that the present one is only the third. The printing press was the second. The invention of writing some time around the fourth millennium BC was the first.
The comparison doesn’t have to be exact for us to marvel at the scale of what we are experiencing. It is immeasurable because we don’t know how far along the track we have travelled. AI is only getting started.
Readers of the Gutenberg Bible in the late 15th century had no means of anticipating the ways that movable type would transform European social, cultural, economic and political organisation. Are we better equipped to imagine the world after another 100 years of digital Reformation?
My measly fortnight of technological temperance isn’t likely to afford much additional perspective. But it is a reminder that the transformation under way is operating at a cognitive level. When you switch the information flow off for a moment, or just dial it down a bit, you appreciate how intense and overwhelming it is the rest of the time.
Our brains evolved to handle the relatively limited dataset of an immediate physical environment, tracking the bush for predators, eking a survival strategy from scarce resources. We are organic processing units. Our capacity for rational judgment is limited by the rate at which we can turn signals from our senses into a workable mental model of the universe, and choose an appropriate course of action.
App stores have ‘huge disincentive’ to remove pornography due to profits says eSafety boss – video
It is an extraordinary talent, but fallible, especially in conditions of sensory overload. That doesn’t mean we are incapable of handling perception of the world on an altered scale, or at much higher speeds. We can adapt to the tsunami of additional stimulus, just as we adapted to life in cities after centuries of rural subsistence. But such accelerated transitions are turbulent, stressful and usually violent. Information crises generate cosmological upheaval. They change the way humanity organises and views itself. Hierarchies tumble. Social norms are recoded. Morality is redefined. New philosophies are hatched. Gods are discarded.
Under the circumstances, it isn’t surprising that democratic politics is struggling to adapt. How is one parliament on a small north Atlantic island supposed to impose new rules for the application of technology that spans the globe, dissolves national borders and vaporises the authority of analogue institutions?
In the short period of my internet abstinence last month, long-delayed provisions of the Online Safety Act came into force. Social media platforms and search engines are now obliged to restrict underage users’ access to content listed as harmful by the new statute – abuse, pornography, material promoting self-harm, terrorism and suicide.
Tech companies have lobbied ferociously against the change. Donald Trump’s White House characterises it as an assault on free speech. Nigel Farage agrees and promises to repeal the act if he ever forms a government. Labour ministers have said the Reform leader’s position aligns him with the interests of paedophiles.
As a law-abiding adult user of social media, I cannot judge whether the new restrictions perform their advertised function. The age-verification process is efficient, painless and feels no more or less sinister than any of the other personal data submissions we now routinely make as the price for a frictionless internet.
There are reported cases of non-pornographic news and public health sites being blocked by accident. There are claims that the protections are easily circumvented with a modicum of digital knowhow. It seems plausible that risk-averse or lazy tech companies are applying ill-designed, overzealous filters. But the impact on political liberty – the impediment to free speech that might justify some of the lurid comparisons being made to totalitarian censorship – is probably still in the order of zero.
Of course, any instrument for policing flows of information contains the theoretical foundations of a more repressive agenda. A future government could redefine “harmful” content to include criticism of the government, for example, or anything that undermines traditional family values. Liberal defenders of the new law should not be complacent about its potential misuse.
But its most vigorous critics, especially in the Trump administration, are not credible advocates of political liberty. The cause they advance is not free speech as a civic virtue. It is the commercial interest of companies that control much of the world’s digital information infrastructure. The system is awash with toxic material. Poison flows into the public realm and the pump’s owners deny responsibility, resisting regulation for the same reason that polluters have done since the Industrial Revolution. Because they can. Because their business is more profitable when someone else cleans up the mess.
The Online Safety Act can be flawed and necessary at the same time. It is just a tiny skirmish in the early stages of the battle to decide how power is wielded and by whom in a world reordered by the information crisis. It is a faint but vital signal – a cry for help by analogue politicians drowning in digital noise.