losing time online

Time is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events that occur in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future.

To trawl the internet, and sit within its blue-light embrace for an hour or a day, is to step beyond the realms of time. Within online spaces, dates become blurred or purposefully changed, updates reanimate the dead, images, chants and history repeat themselves, hours are wasted without the user knowing while whole events, issues or even people are condemned to the sands of time within a day. For the first time since the sun was first tracked for time we are cast off, given space to float within the vast data-corridors of the online world, populated with website-witches, fortune tellers and sorcerers playing with the pace of online time. The cunning folk and hedge-riders of the past would find great intrigue in the transgressive space of our online social world.

Sometimes, I look away from my phone after hours and find my soul struggling to negotiate between our two realities. Digital spaces are technicolour, they are sugary, they are lightning-fast opium, they are seventeen symphonies playing at once while the outside world seems too quiet. Which one are we all collectively choosing? Which one are we hard-wired to select - sugar or bread?

Occultia spreads fast on the internet, which continually surprises me. The foundational cultures of the internet were established upon an Enlightenment-esque level of rationality - accessible information to all, simplified scientific data transfer and unimpeachable machine algorithms. The user was taught to adopt a discerning eye - piece apart the good from the bad, approach other internet users with cynicism. And yet, as always, alongside this data-based objectivity comes the ever-present witch-sister, the esoteric. Astrology is a firm staple in modern online discourse - internet users sharing their birth charts and categorising followers on star signs. Supernatural conspiracy theories spread throughout the global online population in seconds, with stories of desert monoliths, viral cryptids and alien sightings moving far quicker than word-of-mouth folk tales and stories. Mashed-up images and edited videos are increasingly hard to cleave from reality, especially now that internet content consumption is lightning-speed, leaving little room for critique. To be successful on the internet is to be a Pythia, to sit atop your stool and predict the future, untangling riddles and interpreting distant voices from a lost speaker. Where do the images come from, who is writing the articles? What will be popular in a day, a year, three years? The faster content creators jump on a trend, the better their divination, the more they will financially benefit. But once a prediction is made, another one is needed - influencers are creatures of the future, never the present, lest they become ghosts of the past and lose relevancy, gaining the epithet “dead.” Dead accounts, dead websites, dead trends, whole dead social medias. The internet graveyard is dangerously full.

Social media algorithms are designed to distort your idea of time. TikTok is undoubtedly one of the most powerful social medias to date, and it stands apart from the rest - the app is threaded perfectly to encourage speed-viewing, with most clips only fifteen seconds long, stimulating continued doses of dopamine from new entertainment faster and faster. The algorithm, unlike Instagram or Twitter where communities can be found easily by searching, creates closed content-loops via the best recommending engine in the social media industry - resulting in micro-cultures visible only to those who “like” or engage with particular strands of content. These are initiation-only - it is difficult to chance upon these niches of the app by false pretence, and members already from these communities must engage with your content in order for the algorithm to recommend your content into the loop. Owing to the machine-learning AI, the more time you spend on TikTok the more about you it knows - the more perfect the content is for you. And the more time you spend, the more money for the owners, ByteDance. Typically people spend 52 mins a day on TikTok, roughly twice the amount of time than on other popular social medias. You are willingly being manipulated into forgetting time - like Odysseus with the Lotus Eaters, we lose all thoughts of returning home once we eat the intoxicating fruit, and emerge from the island with no memory of the time we spent.

For centuries, practitioners have been predicting the future through tarot, runes, casting stones, scrying. But to look into a social data set is to see without cards, to see millions of individual’s personal data - what they’re listening to, reading, watching, clicking, buying - minute accelerations in the popularity of small things can indicate trends, product niches, booms and busts, far into the future. Those who own the data spin the threads of fate, and can profit accordingly. This manipulation of the real world through divination and dark sorcery on the internet, in the shadows and quiet message boards, is what the Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian called “the great big secret” during a TED talk - “No longer is the message coming from just the top down […] you’ve got to be OK to lose control.” This was evidenced by the mass ritual event of Reddit’s short-squeeze of GameStop stocks, months in the making - a divination was made, a hex was planned, and through the power of many, an event occurred. What was predicted came to be.

In online spaces, history becomes muddled. Up until a year or so ago, when news outlets began applying date warnings to old publications, digital articles, Youtube videos and news stories existed outside the dimension of time - suspended in publication. Individuals could reach into the past, collect articles and make them occur in the present - outrage flaring up at an event that happened 10 years ago, believing it to be happening right in the now. Words from the past are dragged to the surface fresh as the day they were spoken, and used to topple public figures. There is rarely objective truth or initial source on the internet - online history is changed from tweet to tweet, mouth to mouth. To attempt to find the truth within online history is to scry into a black lake.

But yet, censorship algorithms on platforms like Youtube forbid discussion of divisive current events. As a result of advertiser pressure, uploaded videos by private individuals are automatically indexed - words such as “gun” “shooting” “Coronavirus” “suicide” are hexes that cripple the demonetisation of that creator, and the video will be restricted, and seen by less people. You will find creators escaping the crawling thousand-eyed spider of Youtube’s algorithm by whispering or blanking out utterances of real-time events. History occurs outside the Youtube sphere, but within the site, there is fearful silence. What crisis, what event? History trundles along dampened, and within advertiser-friendly channels you can step outside of historical events for hours, or days - however long you desire.

Heaven forbid anything occurs wherein the structurally sound exterior to the internet world, what we term “reality”, is disrupted for a long period of time, leaving vast portions of society to fall through the net of days, hours, weeks, existing primarily and exclusively within internet time, waking up simply to log on. Zoom calls feel like Caroll-ian distortions of time, minutes turning into hours. The allure of heading into a space of the internet where time goes faster, content is brighter - dopamine in exchange for hours - is often undeniable.

There’s two graveyards near my flat in London that date back to the eighteenth century. I love to visit - you can retreat back in time, letting modern London fall away and imagining the patch of grass back when things were different - an old city, long gone. And so one can see the future. This city is bound to be swallowed up by another, too, and this phase of the internet is soon to die. Often, once trends and news stories bubble to the surfaces of the internet, they have already passed on. But gain a knowledge, learn the history, become initiated into the craft of the internet, and the power of online divination is not outside your grasp. The internet is a participatory space, forged by every user, created in real time - we all hold a thread.