Addicted to fatigue: Why we’re using the internet to trap ourselves in the crystals

The transformation of Twitter into X was certainly a watershed moment. But it was nothing compared to the transformation of X into a feeding tube for xAI.

Hold that thought in your head as I pivot for a minute to something that stuck out in my feed the other day: a worthy neologism. Many of us are starting to feel like even with the bazillion channels of wordy content on X, there is sort of nothing on. Another way of saying this is that we already know exactly what’s on; we’ve seen it all before.

When software exhaustingly consumes the world, we want to be bricked.

Rainmaker founder Augustus Doricko touched on this recently when he reflected (on X) that, as a Zoomer, the scriptedness of it all is taken for granted. “It’s all politicized, everything. All the time. I’ve never known anything but hyper polarized internet politics discourse. Zoomers know which side of an issue every influencer and politician is going to land on the moment they read the headline. Zoomers could practically write their commentary for them. … There are no surprising thinkers.”

Speaking as an Xennial, I relate — it really feels deranged to me that now a majority of my life has been spent unable to evade online discourse involving, to take a random example, Ezra Klein. Nothing personal — it’s just really evident that our political regime is still fixed around the principle that talking matters and that even the largest things are justified — can only be justified! — by people talking about them.

This approach has resulted in a fixity of “Voices” hardened all the more by the relentlessly taxonomical character of the digital medium, which flips Marx’s critique of capital on its head by solidifying even the most airy and ephemeral of things by locking them into place in the one huge fractal bracket of the internet: everything identified down to the smallest unit according to its classification. Like the Great Chain of Being but for transforming subjects into objects.

A bit creepy considering how much we associate digital life with disincarnation … but a strong reminder that to be incarnate is to be in the flesh, not merely to be matter; embodiment requires a body, a given body, given by God — not a golem, a cap table, an Excel sheet. All that “free” information flying around is more like a caged bird. The taxonomy is the tax — and the debtor’s prison.

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Photo by Cooper Williamson/Blaze News

You can hear the cries each day of people sure they have no choice but to spend inordinate hours on “this hellsite,” and while the perpetual gossip and envy and resentment and profane curiosity and so forth are certainly hellacious, the lack of surprise is a real killjoy — a special curse levied against the online intellectual, who can feel himself unaliving into a petrified rock crystal the minute he can’t find a new idea, a new insight, a fresh source of soyface, an of-the-moment mind-blower.

We all have our fatal weakness here. Speaking as a longtime online coiner of terms and concepts, I’m always monitoring the situation for fresh, vine-ripe terms and concepts to munch on, savor, share. And these are declining along with everything else, it seems, as the direction of all human-generated content flows toward the great maw crystallizing everything into the ultimate taxonomy. Zoomer slang can’t innovate fast enough …

And yet what to my wondering eyes should appear but a poaster coining a new term relevant to just this torment: “The algorithm is a military grade dopamine drip designed to subject us to levels of fatigue addiction beyond our comprehension.”

Many people might look at this and go yeah, yeah, we know, we know. But have you encountered the phrase “fatigue addiction” before? I didn’t think so … yet it so well captures the strange and uncanny character of our experience becoming unalived into mere objects by way of our virtual entombment in the great bracket of nonbeing.

As the “Naked Gun” reboot is out, I flash on that other spoof flick that probably won’t be remade — “Dracula: Dead and Loving It.” We all know how many people wake up, log on, and post obsessively about how exhausted they are. What is this? Yes, we are way too obsessed; many believe that only obsession is sufficient any more to provide any motile force to anything, which indicates just how petrified are the rock crystals we all already feel we are. Yes, we are therefore way too obsessed with obsession itself; but are we not also increasingly monomaniacal, toward an asymptotic point, about our own exhaustion? Are we not in the grip of a love of exhaustion?

There’s a phrase called “system working as designed” that we ought to see at work here. We consume vast quantities of drugs that make us exhausted and seek out meds that simulate exhaustion. We want to “hit the wall.” We want to sacrifice ourselves to “the grind.” We want it to be “so over for us.” We envy the objects that overshadow us everywhere we turn. We don’t want to find our identities forever in oppositional ideology. We want to find them in rocks. In sand. Real ones, that don’t have to think all the time, like our hyperactive silicon does. When software exhaustingly consumes the world, we want to be bricked.

In the end, however, at the end of this trail of petrification, we must encounter the final source of our will to paralysis: fear — the fear of life itself and its source. Yes, go back to Proverbs to see that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom; but few today seem fearful at all of God’s punishment, whereas many seem absolutely terrified of the implications of being created in the image of an incomprehensibly loving God. But only confronting this fear can show the way out from the labyrinthine entombment of addiction to fatigue, to the experience of the life going out of you and the rock crystal creeping in.