Internet Time Shock

A sidebar to Artificial Lovers

One night in a dream, I traveled back in time to the days of the 1990s, when “surfing the web” was becoming the coolest thing. I found myself standing in an internet café in San Francisco. Suddenly, as if in spite of myself, I shouted to everyone, “Enjoy it while it lasts! Twenty years from now, surfing the web will no longer be a national pastime but an activity limited to researchers.”

“Really?” said one young man with obvious incredulity. “Do you come from a future without any internet?”

“On the contrary,” I replied. “I come from a future where the internet will dominate us more than ever. And that’s precisely the point: the internet will become so pervasive that you won’t even have to surf it. It will come at you in something called feeds.”

By now everyone in the internet café was listening. “Feeds?” said a young man. “You mean, the internet will become something we eat?”

“No,” I said, “It’s more like the internet eats you.” A gasp went round the room. Then I qualified myself. “No, that isn’t quite right. You won’t have to surf because everything online is curated for you by these artificial forms of intelligence. The feed, also sometimes called a live stream, comes at you.”

After a pause, the young man stood up and said, “It sounds like you’re saying the internet comes to life and attacks people by force!”

“No,” I said, “nothing happens by force. We participate in our own enslavement through an activity called doomscrolling. That’s how it gets hold of us. It takes all the fun out of the internet.”

“Wait,” said a woman sitting at the second row of computers. “You mean, the internet stops being fun?”

“Yes,” I said. “You see, over the next thirty years, these things called bots will arise, and they will be directed by algorithms to herd people together into these virtual spaces called echo chambers where they will be bombarded with infectious content in the form of memes.”

A gasp went round the room, and I heard one person exclaim, “I don’t know what you mean by ‘doomscrolling,’ ‘memes,’ and ‘echo chambers,’ but this all sounds dreadful. Do people still go to internet cafes to get connected?”

“No,” I said, “the internet will become omnipresent, and people will be constantly connected through this thing called the cloud. Just as today you all go into an internet cafe to connect to the internet, in the future there will be special places where people go in order to disconnect from the internet. And the coolest programs (we call them apps) will be those that help us disconnect.” Then I added, “In the future we will have an online superstore from which merchandise will be shipped directly to us with the swiftness and profusion of the Amazonian jungle. In fact, receiving a special delivery will stop even being special.”

“Really?” said the young woman. “What will people give each other as presents?”

“Well,” I said, “for my last birthday one friend donated to an online charity in my name, and on Christmas, I got three free subscriptions to cloud-based services. Someone else texted me an e-hug.”

“What’s an e-hug?” she asked.

“It’s kind of hard to explain, but it’s like a combination of a virtual hug and an emoji.”

“What’s an emoji?” she asked.

“It’s a thing in the future that helps us express our emotions.”

She looked at me with a blank expression.

I sighed. “It’s kind of hard to explain that, too.”•