I love your work, love this article - but I think you're wrong.

I'm contemporary with you is my guess, perhaps even older. I remember having nothing to do. I remember wasting my time in almost as bad ways.

Thing is, those things were essentially dull too. The first time you put firecrackers in dogshit, it's interesting, but the second time, it isn't. Someone killed a toad with a firecracker and I stopped hanging out with him.

And real world actions had immediate consequences. The first time I came home late drunk and threw up, my parents simply pretended it hadn't happened and continued with the regular activities early the next day. Very teachable moment without having to say a word (they later told me they knew).

The issue with the Internet is different because it's a system that adapts to be as addictive as possible and to have as few consequences as possible.

For example, I've always had addictive issues towards video games. I have luckily had a strict rule - "No epic games", i.e., nothing you can't play in a short sitting - but I'm an old guy and I still probably spend eight hours a week playing Go and an abstract multiplayer shoot-em up.

When I was a young, I was hooked bad on that and pinball, but each go cost a quarter, and a quarter was real money, and ten quarters was more than I had. It was self-limiting. No more.

No matter what your tastes or interests, you can find something free that will cover it, and when you get bored, there's always something else.

Imagine a free drug in unlimited quantities with no hangover that adapted to your whim. That's the Internet.

I think humans don't handle it well. I wouldn't say I handle it well and I'm aware of it and struggle against it. By making everything virtual, it levels the field, so the destruction of the planet and Twitch streaming occupy the same amount of space and importance in your mind.

I remember about ten years ago I was wandering through Bushwick in the summer, taking a break from some underground show and having some cannabis.

I walked past this beautiful new community gymnasium, all lit up, a few kids in there playing basketball, a welcoming sign - but there was almost no one there.

Where were all the kids in the middle of July? I expected to see a mob of people. That's what it had been like when I had first moved to New York City, in the mid-80s.

And I had a sudden vision of all these kids sitting at home in front of a screen.

https://www.theonion.com/report-90-of-waking-hours-spent-staring-at-glowing-re-1819570829

Note how many of your activities were performed outside. Mine too. In the summers, you'd just loiter obsessively and randomly: we used to lurk in parks disreputably after dark up to no good.

I don't think it's a coincidence that kids are spending less and less time interacting with the natural world at just the same moment in history that that natural living world is going away forever, because we are killing it.

Finally, I think that the Internet allows for a brand-new class of infectious mental illness that could only have evolved in a situation where the feedback loop for infectious mental concepts takes seconds, and not the generations it took for most of history. (Kesus preaches a slightly different message at the same time as Jesus. Both are long dead before it is clear that Jesus' message was more infectious: Kesus has no chance to revamp his message in response to this.)

Trumpism is the most prominent example of such an infectious disease right now.