As a member of Gen Z who grew up in the remorseless glare of social media, says Isabel Brooks in Air Mail, I wasn’t remotely surprised to read that “almost half of young people would prefer a world without the internet”. If anything, I expected the percentage to be higher. To watch grainy footage from before the internet age is to be transported to a vanished era, where pleasingly scruffy people bop around unselfconsciously, and nobody is filming but the cameraman. Watching the way people “look and behave and inhabit the space” tugs at my heartstrings and “fills me with nostalgia” for a world I never knew.

Before the internet, people behaved in more “authentic and idiosyncratic” ways. Social media has sped up trend cycles, resulting in an “eerie uniformity” across styles and personalities: we buy the same products, wear the same clothes, act the same way, refer to the same memes. Even what passes for “quirkiness” can invariably be traced back to some online fad. If we weren’t on display all the time, our friendships would be “less commodified”. Today, hanging out is “material to be documented and then demonstrated” to a faceless online audience. Having grown up with limitless streaming and scrolling, many of us now yearn to be less connected – we have a sense that there was a value, “now largely lost”, in the practical effort required for social interaction, for finding good music, or joining a subculture. I am haunted by the feeling that our phones have stolen something human and vital from our lives, that can never be returned. As Donald Trump said: today, “everything’s computer”.

⚽️ 📺 An older colleague recently explained to me how he and his friends used to “watch” football matches on Ceefax. The score would load on a television screen via the changing of a single digit. They would just sit on a sofa all afternoon, he said, waiting for the digit to change. “I felt envious of this.”

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The rest of today’s newsletter includes:

🤖 James Marriott on why the AI doom-mongering is overblown
😡 Marina Hyde taking no prisoners on the Post Office scandal
😂 Donald Trump talking through his changes to the White House decor

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