Welcome to the internet

Below is a copy of the article that was published in the Hermeneutic Circular (Oct 23'), an Existential psychotherapy magazine that focuses on the lived experience and interests of existential phenomenology and existential therapy. 

It all started while I was browsing aimlessly on the Internet. I came across Bo Burnham’s ‘Welcome to the Internet’ – again. 

I have watched this video on YouTube countless times. It’s rather addictive actually. It’s all at once thrilling, eerie, exciting, seductive and thought-provoking – and it’s the voice of a digital generation. 

If you can, I’d urge you to pause reading and watch ‘Welcome to the Internet’ on YouTube, as this article will (to borrow Gen Z slang) ‘hit different’ if you do. 

Generation chasm

I’m interested in the nature of the internet and its interaction with Dasein from the perspective of a trainee existential therapist who grew up online. Our existence and our ability to be present and be-there in the world are complicated by the internet. 

It is interesting to me because I have noticed the generation gap between psychotherapists and the generations that are likely to seek therapy. Millennials and Gen Z are more likely to seek therapy than older generations. Consider that the average UKCP therapist is 57 years old and likely interacted with Facebook at age 40 when it went public. I on the other hand was 14. 

There is a huge chasm between the experience of generations, yet, it’s not anything that you can see, it’s something more sinister. It is a complete reformulation of the structure of Dasein and our ability to care – and no one is talking about it.

Psychotherapy, in general, doesn’t have too much to say about working inter-generationally – after all everything is grist for the mill. Yet, the internet acts as the great divide between generations. 

The average registered member of the UKCP is considered a digital immigrant – someone raised prior to the digital age. I, however, am a digital native. My school life was punctuated with the use of social media sites, illegal videos, and constant communication with friends after school despite spending eight hours straight together. 

We never turned off, we were always reachable in our social circles and there wasn’t really any space or boundaries – if you did experience space from friends there was always the worry that they were avoiding you. Yet, I am also lucky, because I was born ‘early’ enough to recall a time before this ubiquitous techno-culture. Before being constantly on and connected to digital life. I regularly saw discarded bikes carelessly strewn across my neighbour’s front gardens. I remember a childhood before screens; I was lucky because iPads didn’t exist until my late teens. 

It is likely that digital immigrants will predominately be therapists to digital natives. I wonder whether digital immigrants understand the hold the internet has on young people’s sense of self and their being-in-the-world despite not experiencing its effects during their own development. As a digital native, I wonder whether older therapists understand how 

the experience of being online has altered our being-in-the-world. 

If you paused and watched ‘Welcome to the Internet’, you may have a better sense of what being online for digital natives feels like. The internet is affecting young people’s existence, it’s becoming a part of us like nothing before. 

In this article, I’d like to attempt to connect the structure of Dasein and how the phenomenological experience of being online, using social media as an example, might be altering our fundamental care structure set out by Heidegger. 

Dasein’s care structure

In Being and Time Heidegger argues that we, as Dasein, are defined not by what we are, but by our way of existing – our existentiell possibilities. Care is a primordial aspect that cannot be disentangled from Dasein, it is the primary structure for our being-in-the-world. Without care as the essence of Dasein, human existence would lack significance and purpose.

The internet and specifically social media affect our ability to care – it affects our ability to be Dasein. The everyday German usage of Dasein means existence, yet its technical usage where Da is the location in which sein (being) is disclosed is significant for our relation to the internet. We are all caught up in the ubiquitous techno-culture that is our modern existence, which calls into question where being is disclosing itself in light of the internet? 

The internet is another world; it is an entity in this world but it is also separate from this world. It’s similar to consciousness, in that you cannot locate where the experience of being online takes place in our world. If you were to travel to one of the many locations where the computer servers are stored, you’d find no experience there. 

The experience of being online occurs while we are opposite a screen that for all intents and purposes acts as a portal – but a portal to where? Where does the Da (location) of Sein (being) go when online? Does being on Instagram disclose anything about us to us? What does my being reveal itself as when I am on Instagram? Can I care in the same way on Instagram as I do offline? Our concern for our being characterises Dasein; but do I possess that same concern for my being while I use Instagram and other social media sites?

Welcome to the internet, put your cares aside . . .

The poignancy of Burnham’s song is subtle at first and then it hits you like a truck. Our cares are the very things that make us unique, they tinge life with the ‘mineness’ of an authentic existence and deliver us from the norms of society or Heidegger’s ‘they’. It is through caring for things that we can take a stance on our life and relate to our death. 

Do we put our cares aside when we enter the digital landscape? What would putting your cares aside look like? Without cares, what are we? Without care the very nature of Heidegger’s being crumbles, and when we are scrolling on Instagram or are plugged into our Facebook feed do we still possess our cares? Or are we something else? 

I think of zombies when I see people scrolling on TikTok or Instagram: our bodies are still there, we still look like ourselves, but there is a distinct absence or vacancy behind our eyes. We may even fail to respond to a loved one in favour of staying tuned into our respective digital devices. 

For the uninitiated this behaviour is called ‘phubbing’ – a portmanteau of ‘phone’ and ‘snubbing’. Being online can turn us into zombified versions of Dasein who in the real world look like we are on autopilot destined to doom scroll forever. One might ask whether we are even Dasein at all when engaged in this specific way of being. 

Yet, we know that being online is a form of escapism, why should we think about being online as anything different to getting lost in a good book? Well, we know we are reading a book for one, and the boundaries for this activity are well defined, but being online can mean a multiplicity of things, and it’s this lack of definition that means we as individuals are less protected from its effects. 

Social media is not just a story in the same way a novel is. It is people you know and stories that are personal to you, but it is also not necessarily real life, except that it is. And it’s not just people you know, it’s companies and activism and capitalism – it’s a version of our world. 

Unlike Plato’s cave of forms, the digital world is one of signs. Notice how hard it is for me as a digital native to define? Perhaps our ways of relating in the digital world affect our ability to care.  And if our fundamental structure of care is compromised . . . then what, exactly?

 The internet flattens our world of meaning

Kierkegaard’s comments in “The Present Age” on the then-newly minted public press are relevant for the internet today. The internet, like the public press, is serving no one in particular. Stories of curiosity are pursued over stories of merit. Mass-produced content is easily accessible, allowing for indiscriminate absorption of information. 

The public or user has no idea about the quality of information online. Even historically trustworthy institutions have lost trust and people are looking to social media for their news and mental health diagnoses. What does this mean for Dasein? 

Well, the digital world represents a space where individuals, due to this levelling effect, struggle to care. Since we are exposed to almost infinite views and perspectives and information the internet encourages a certain inauthentic interaction. The internet becomes like a large dinner party where we can all engage in idle talk since no one is pressured to take a stance on any particular topic. Our ability to care therefore must be affected. Why care about anything when you can just move on to the next interesting argument up for discussion? 

In the real world, we can marvel at the awe-inspiring valleys of Yosemite and the rolling hills of Yorkshire. The real world is 3D, it is a landscape that has peaks and troughs while the digital landscape is flat. Flatness in a landscape means that everything exists on the same level, the hierarchy of information is lost, there is no higher or lower, there is just what is. 

In life, you can’t experience the top of a mountain while on the valley floor, but in a digital space you can experience everything all at once, all of the time. The flat plains of the digital space create a levelling effect so profound that it negates the inclination to order anything because you can experience ‘anything and everything all of the time’ – without discriminative structures like ethics or being. 

Can I interest you in everything all of the time? Anything and everything all of the time?

Burnham’s line above speaks to this levelling effect but it’s not just bytes of information that have gone through this levelling effect. The internet levels everything from thought to emotion. 

You can scroll through Instagram and hear a clip from a junior doctor about a man’s last day on earth spent waiting for 8 hours in A&E while he leaks bodily fluids, and before you even register this, you are shown a 5-year-old piano prodigy playing Vivaldi. How do you process this, the tragic and then the miraculous? It must affect our existence, our ability to care.

I experienced this the other day. I heard that painful story about a man seeking care through the NHS and our system failing him, but before I could feel the height of my sorrow I was choking on the beauty of this tiny human doing something most adults do not achieve in their lifetime. 

It felt as if I was being force-fed stories detailing the extremes of what it means to be human, with seemingly no discrimination of the content. I suppose this is why they call it an Instagram feed. It’s feeding you with information constantly but instead of growing plump and juicy we become altered in our fundamental structure of being. 

I felt like I was emotionally engorged on the experiential rollercoaster that is being-on Instagram. I didn’t even recognise the absurdity of the experience until a few days later when I was trying to write this article. 

What does it mean that this experience is part of the everyday experience of Dasein on social media? On the one hand, we can say we are living with more awareness of the state of things, but on the other – it’s too much. I wonder if our being can care appropriately when one’s mood is constantly altered.

Emotional rollercoasters and a respectable distance

Social media creates an experience of novelty, stimulating dopamine systems through feeding you happy, sad, polarising, enraging, terrifying, wondrous, awe-inspiring and legitimately life-changing content within seconds. (I’m aware that there are too many adjectives in the sentence above, but this is the experience of the internet – everything is important and needs to be mentioned, to condense for brevity is not a luxury we have.)

We feel all of these experiences with little to no effort. We feel because we care, because we are Dasein, but we are not there.  We’re not in that room with that 5-year-old hearing him play Vivaldi. We are not witnessing his little hands fly across the piano. Equally, we are not feeling that man’s dread and terror in A&E. 

We are outside all of these experiences but we feel affected and, yet, we just keep scrolling. Furthermore, there is no end, there is no death, no closure and no conclusion for this rollercoaster of an emotive experience. That hollow pit within us that devours the stories of humanity is never satiated – it is never finished. 

Without feeling each video on Instagram and letting the experience touch you it becomes just a story: without opening up to the possibility of being touched by it, by giving a piece of yourself to feel what it meant for a person to spend their last waking hours surrounded by strangers leaking out of their bowels in an uncomfortable chair in a crowded A&E room surrounded by fear, stress and death. Without creating space to feel that, really feel that – it’s just a story. A story that induces shock, rage, and sadness. 

Instagram gives you a million different ways to engage on its platform with its content but at what cost? In this modern world, humanity is lost and we become entertainment, we cease to value who and what we are as humans, as Dasein. 

Apathy’s a tragedy and boredom is a crime

Boredom as a mood was significant for Heidegger. Moods influence Dasein’s understanding and interpretation of the world; they are primordial and a pre-reflective experience. The contextuality of human existence is revealed through moods and in the context of care, they influence how Dasein projects itself onto possibilities, anticipates its future, and takes responsibility for its existence. Moods are not just fleeting emotional states but are constitutive of Dasein’s mode of being.

For Heidegger, boredom is a privileged fundamental mood because it leads us directly into the very problem complex of being and time. Profound boredom can set us on the road to authenticity. When boredom works its magic, what is left is nothing less than Being itself and its meaning – if it has any. 

Boredom in some sense is like the absence of a mood, it isn’t necessarily negative, but it can be. It’s almost neutral in its discomfort, yet, we find that our ability to withstand boredom is failing. We pull out our phones when we wait in line, when we are travelling, at the doctor's office and when we are waiting. We almost are never waiting and are never bored anymore. 

We might have an increased sensitivity to feeling disengaged, and we might feel more disengaged and ‘bored’ now than ever before, except now we needn’t work through the boredom since we can escape it – to the online world. We no longer walk through the gate of boredom to experience the clearing, with untold riches, behind it. 

Heidegger thought boredom was a fundamental mood, that in the best of circumstances, boredom allows one the opportunity of authentic existence. But what if we lock ourselves out of the mood of boredom? It is by way of a mood that we relate to our surroundings. Instead of letting the mood of boredom change our way of relating to our immediate environment, we jump into the digital theme park that is brighter, more intense and less real. 

The magic of boredom would let you see your room in a completely new light, it would give new meaning to that guitar collecting dust in the corner, it might spark your curiosity to see if you can fix that broken door and it might let you see your partner’s beauty anew that day. Paradoxically it might renew one’s authentic being-in-the-world with vigour. 

Now we just jump into another world that isn’t a world really but the facade of one. Without boredom where is the flexibility and fluidity to perceive many meanings in your environment? 

It was always the plan, to put the world in your hand

Burnham sings this toward the end of his song, right before a chilling, nefarious laugh that induces horror – or at least this was the effect on me. The evil tone is suggestive of a great plan coming together that alters the structure of our being without our knowing. In many ways we are already becoming cybernetic organisms – organisms with both biological and technological components. For many of us our phones are already in our hand, they are already extensions of our being. To have the world in our hand, is to be in two places at once. If our being is split, how do we structure our care?