This palace is the work of the gods

The gods that built this place were mad

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, The Gothic Arch (1750)

Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Immortal” begins with a Roman tribune stationed in Thebes during the late fourth or early fifth century. Disappointed at not seeing any action in the reconquest of Alexandria and restless during peacetime, the narrator sets off into the unmapped desert in quest of the legendary river whose waters grant immortality, and the fabulous city of immortal men on its banks.

He finds both.

The river is little more than a sandy creek in the wasteland. The deathless men who drank from it appear as disheveled and filthy troglodytes who live on its banks, spending their days in rapt cogitation that comes off to the unawares narrator as a collective stupor of pre-verbal idiocy.

The narrator finally enters their walled and impenetrable city through a labyrinth of subterranean caves, and Borges waxes Lovecraftian in describing what he finds:

The impression of great antiquity was joined by others: the impression of endlessness, the sensation of oppressiveness and horror, the sensation of complex irrationality. I had made my way through a dark maze, but it was the bright City of the Immortals that terrified and repelled me. A maze is a house built purposely to confuse men; its architecture, prodigal in symmetries, is made to serve that purpose. In the palace that I imperfectly explored, the architecture had no purpose. There were corridors that led nowhere, unreachably high windows, grandly dramatic doors that opened onto monklike cells or empty shafts, incredible upside-down staircases with upside-down treads and balustrades. Other staircases, clinging airily to the side of a monumental wall, petered out after two or three landings, in the high gloom of the cupolas, arriving nowhere. I cannot say whether these are literal examples I have given; I do know that for many years they plagued my troubled dreams; I can no longer know whether any given feature is a faithful transcription of reality or one of the shapes unleashed by my nights. This City, I thought, is so horrific that its mere existence, the mere fact of its having endured—even in the middle of a secret desert—pollutes the past and the future and somehow compromises the stars. So long as this City endures, no one in the world can ever be happy or courageous. I do not want to describe it; a chaos of heterogeneous words, the body of a tiger or a bull pullulating with teeth, organs, and heads monstrously yoked together yet hating each other—those might, perhaps, be approximate images.

He later learns that the splendid metropolis of which superstitious travelers still whisper had been demolished nine hundred years before his arrival. From its rubble the immortals erected its second incarnation, and then abandoned it to squat in the dirt.

The source of the city’s horror is an uncanny discrepancy between form and function. Any city is a technological weave developed not only to shelter a dense aggregate of people, but to contain and facilitate the activities which sustain life and health, perpetuate spiritual and intellectual traditions, foster friendships and love, etc.—ideally, to be the hothouse in which humanity can be cultivated and brought to bloom. The city of the immortals takes up the architectural “language” of metropolis and wantonly garbles it unto obscenity. However purposive its individual parts, their aggregate composes a space that negates those purposes, and which is totally unfit for sane human habitation.

Maybe I’m reaching for a metaphor here, but somehow this reminds me of the contemporary internet.

I’m old enough to remember when the internet, for a whole lot of people, was an instant messaging tool, a handful of bookmarked message boards, and a galaxy of independent but interconnected homepages. That was when the “global village” most felt like a village. Perhaps it was appropriate that the frontier of culture had an aspect of provinciality back then, like a scattering of small hamlets across a prairie. I used to think of the web as a refuge. It was ludic, low-stakes, and generally pretty chill.

Of the terms I’d use to describe the internet today, “refuge” has got to be at the bottom of the list. I don’t know what I’d compare it to. It’s an electrical outlet we’ve fallen into the habit of sticking our fingers into. It’s huffing glue and taking speed and straddling the rift between ego death and autistic self-regard. It’s a support group that meets in a megachurch and invariably makes its attendees crazier, but we keep coming back for the free coffee and donuts and attention. It’s Lord of the Flies if it were also Infinite Jest and also the dream sequence from Rosemary’s Baby and also an acrimonious shouting match between grad students outside the Build-A-Bear Workshop in the Mall of America. It’s the everyday hallucinatory experience of possessing a modular nervous system with scores of hot-mic receptors planted across the noisy, smarmy, and invidious places of the Earth.

Without going into granular detail (there’ll be time enough for that), the modern internet has become an abstract built environment that’s lost sight of its original purpose, as determined by the hobbyists and amateurs who were responsible for cobbling together most of its content. Maybe it’d be too flowery an idealization to say that the Usenet/homepages/ICQ/etc. scene was a space for intellectual cultivation, the exploration of art and culture, and the good-faith exchange of ideas—like Star Trek in cyberspace—but we can certainly say it was supposed to be fun. And for a while, it definitely was.

It’s not that the internet is overcrowded or centralized around a handful of firms’ sites and platforms—those are separate (but not unrelated) issues. It’s a matter of the incentives set out by the economy of advertising, the exigencies of engagement, the conditioned reinforcers of notifications and metrics, and the structuring of online spaces around them. If social media is agonistic and hysterical, it’s because gibberish catalyzes emotional reactions and demands attention, and attention is delicious and potentially career-making. If content creators are continually chasing trends and controversies, pandering to algorithms as much as to people, and crafting Personal Brands with transparent cynicism, that’s because they don’t have much choice if they’re hoping to reach and maintain an audience. (There are objective metrics for success now, and “it didn’t go viral, but I had a good time making it and I’m satisfied with how it turned out” is a self-conscious admission of failure.) If the pages and platforms that constitute the internet’s central nexus seem to be evolving in a direction in which every new increment makes the experience subtly more onerous and less enjoyable than before, and beams Sponsored Content into our eyeballs a little bit more aggressively, it’s because the shareholders expect a continuous ROR increase. These platforms exist for their benefit, after all. The internet is for making money, not friends.

That was the switch point: when the irresistible trend towards centralization under a relatively small number of platforms, sites, and “networks” (think Gawker) run by for-profit firms. The City of the Immortals was insane by design; it was to be “a temple to the irrational gods that rule the world and to those gods about whom we know nothing save that they do not resemble man.” Its purpose was to profane the very notion of purposiveness. Web 2.0 achieved something similar as a side-effect of the ascendant business model of giving away content for free, reaping user data for targeted advertising, and striving to maximize user engagement in terms of both duration and frequency. It’s certainly sensible, and maybe even innocuous on the face of it, but the result is a space combining the features of a centrifuge, an opium den, a psych ward, a bum fight, and Times Square.

Culture, community, and conversation are nominally what happen on the internet, but like any operation of capitalism, the mere satisfaction of human needs is treated as something utterly beside the point by the digital landlords. Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, etc. are ends in themselves, designed to promote compulsive engagement for its own sake. If you’re not losing sleep, if you aren’t paranoid, and if your emotional state isn’t contingent on the reception of your most recent contributions, then you’re probably a user who hasn’t been sufficiently “reached.” It’s a state of affairs the internet’s rentiers will endeavor to correct, and do their damnedest to ensure you’ll be made to feel like you’re kidding yourself if you go looking for an alternative.

It’s a consequence of my age, and of my having been online since the days of dial-up access, but the internet today makes me feel crazy because I have a concrete recollection of what once made it enjoyable, and I still see disintegrated traces of it wherever I look. Actually, in terms of what the spaces are “made” of, not much has changed. We’re still working with URLs, indices, hypertext, embedded media, reply threads, search engines, and all the other elementary building blocks antedating the millennium. But their arrangement, combination, and the speed they facilitate (plus the addition of the human catnip called the Like button) produce grotesqueries and gibberish.

The most significant change in the last twenty years is that “residence” has been made compulsory, particularly for the younger generations. The mad digital city is become the seat of culture, and to opt out is to resign oneself to living as an eccentric and a crank—or perhaps as one of Borges’ troglodytes. Nobody ever liked the “I don’t even own a TV” guy when they met him at parties, and his successor, the “I don’t have a wifi router and still use a dumbphone” guy, doesn’t even know there is a party.

Notwithstanding Web 2.0+’s measurably deleterious effects on our politics, social life, and psychological health, it would be melodramatic to repeat Borges and say that none of us can ever be happy or courageous as long as it endures. Anyway, it’s beside the point: it will endure, and living with it must entail a gradual redefinition of happiness and sanity. Acculturation to a strange city takes time, after all.