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{shortcode-21cc3534b02e5a90dd1b6e61be0fe28423896a7e} few months ago, author and YouTuber John Green published a video entitled “Am I Cigarettes?” In the video, he analogizes using the internet to smoking — and content creators to the addictive substance.
John and his brother Hank can be counted among a swath of internet creators who are publishing content that criticizes the internet, and for some reason, the algorithm gods have decided I’m the ideal audience for this genre. My Instagram feed is full of “stop scrolling” videos and aesthetic hiking vlogs meant to encourage viewers to get off our phones and go outside. Interspersed in my feed are frequent, eye-catching ads for Opal and Brick — companies selling products that discourage internet use.
There’s a clear irony embedded in these videos. The Greens’ videos questioning whether they’re adding fuel to internet addiction are the very videos that keep me online. This whole genre of internet personalities go viral for critiquing virality. They make a living on the same internet they’re tearing down. From the perspective of a consumer, merely pointing out the problematic nature of the internet is insufficient — sure, I feel a brief spike of self-awareness, but I either quickly forget about the video as I scroll away, or I spend more time on the internet by further researching the internet’s problematic qualities. Is it really a sufficient criticism of how overabundant the information age is if you’re adding to that overabundance with your critique?
Each of these creators purportedly conceptualizes the internet as an addictive pseudo-substance — something to quit. But sharing these views on the very platforms they’re critiquing demonstrates the internet’s utility as something more akin to a plane of existence than a substance. Sure, scrolling through brainrot makes me feel like I’m being dragged along by my dopamine receptors, but being online also allows me to participate in vastly productive communities, do my homework, keep up with my family, and so much more. The internet mediates huge portions of what I do on a day-to-day basis, acting more like a parallel “e-universe” within which to conduct life than an inherently toxic substance to abuse.
These anti-internet videos, for example, don’t destroy the internet upon upload. In fact, the critique of the internet simply emerges as a feature of discourse in this e-universe, keeping it alive. Engaging with anti-internet commentary becomes a way of being online. There are communities for me to join, content for me to consume, and fandom conversations for me to participate in. There is a Luddite Reddit channel and a #digitaldetox hashtag with hundreds of thousands of posts — obviously keeping me online, but not necessarily in a counterproductive or futile way.
Essentially, I think that because the internet is such a ubiquitous part of modern, Western society, seeing it as a substance to quit fails to acknowledge that it is a place we already inhabit. We’re already dimension hoppers, leading full lives in both this physical universe and the digital one. The e-universe parallels physical reality, growing and breathing in much the same way.
In the physical universe, life-giving information spreads, mutates, and combines through units called genes. In the e-universe, we also have informational units. Richard Dawkins, a controversial evolutionary biologist, proposes in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene” the term “meme” to describe cultural information units. “When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell,” Dawkins writes.
Just like genes are the building blocks of physical life, memes are the building blocks of culture. Dawkins writes of skills and traditions as memes — all informational units surviving by being passed from one generation to another. Of course, in our minds today, the term “meme” has mutated — not so differently than a gene might — to mean something specifically digital. Still, Dawkin’s original analogy is applicable. What makes a meme a meme is not a particular photo layout or joke structure, but rather the idea’s reproducibility and mutability. Memes’ survival value comes from their psychological appeal, by being funny or relatable to us scrollers. The most memorable memes stick with us, becoming part of the way we think and communicate. We reference them in different contexts, changing their meanings as we spread them to the brains of those around us. Just like a biological virus injects its genes into cells, a meme is “viral” when it is effective at spreading its information widely — accosting us through our screens.
These memes are what make the internet a living thing, a platform that sustains life. The constant creation, mutation, and spread of ideas allow us to conduct our complex lives and relationships through this digital world. Even the anti-internet subgenre is a type of meme. The information about the internet’s dangers is constantly being reproduced and repackaged, combining with other concepts and surviving in the e-universe, no matter how ironic, because of its salience and relatability to viewers. John Green is just one contributor to the ongoing spread.
In response to his brother’s video about cigarettes, Hank Green published a video that rewrote the addiction analogy to better encapsulate the complicated nature of the internet. To Hank, the information on the internet is more like food: though it provides something important, it can come in forms both healthy and harmful. Hank says that the internet has created a world where, for the first time, information is abundant and easily accessible. Parts of the internet are as healthy and productive as eating greens with dinner. For example, the Green brothers’ fandom is currently raising money to support maternal healthcare in Sierra Leone — a project that could only have gathered its many contributors through the expansive capacities of the internet. On the other hand, many memes are like junk food, providing calories without nutritional value. Our responsibility as both creators and consumers of the internet is to promote a healthy diet.
Critically, in this analogy, the information itself is as necessary as food. If Hank and John Green stopped creating content, their audience wouldn’t stop consuming — they would drift to other, perhaps less healthy, internet homes. We don’t simply stop taking in ideas and knowledge. Arguably, information — or with Dawkin’s expanded definition, memes — makes us human. And in the modern world, where knowledge is abundant due to the way it is stored and spread online, it’s the internet that makes us people.
Perhaps the most impactful piece of media in my life is a 2.5 hour video essay by a creator called CJ the X. The video is ostensibly an analysis of the comedy special “Inside” by Bo Burnham, which addresses the way the internet shaped our experience of the pandemic. But the video essay extends far beyond the special, raising the argument that due to our reliance on the internet, we are all cyborgs. The internet is such a central part of how we conduct our lives today that we would be handicapped without it — unable to navigate to unknown places or maintain our relationships. This is both the result of our own increasing dependence on modern technology, and a world that increasingly revolves around (and sometimes, mandates) this dependence. Being dependent is not inherently bad so long as we’re willing to acknowledge the way our very definition of human is changing as a result of our e-universe consumption.
As cyborgs, we must sustain ourselves through both food and information. Just like grocery shopping requires us to navigate an abundance of options in order to curate our chosen diet, we can approach the internet as a grocery store of information to develop healthy habits of consumption online. When I walk into a grocery store, I don’t just pick up items from promotional displays, because I know the store places expensive and addictive food where I’m likely to see it. Similarly, memes are not neutrally accessible online — economically motivated media sites curate what they feed me to favor eye-catching content that’s easy to consume.
A meme’s “survival value” — how easily an idea spreads through the internet and sticks in your brain — is not the same as how healthy it is to consume. But that’s not to say that all memes are bad for you — sugary desserts are only one piece of the food pyramid. As cyborgs, the more control we can seize over what and how we consume digital media, the healthier our diet will be.
Arguing for deliberate internet use feels like a banal conclusion to an essay with parallel universes and memes as cultural building blocks. But although it may seem like sci-fi, this cyborg-reality is the world we are already living in. The task now is not only to consume enough information to stay alive, but to consume in such a way that we become who we want to be. After all, you are what you eat.
—Associate Magazine Editor Kate J. Kaufman can be reached at kate.kaufman@thecrimson.com. Her column “The Meta-Internet” examines internet phenomena to explore the tensions we embody through life online.
