24th
For those of you thinking of leaving Internet today — and there are many, I’m sure — I’d say just do it. Walk away. Leaving Google is the best thing I ever did. I lived for years there feeling like a political and cultural exile, trying to fight back with satire and a thousand subtle forms of stubbornness and resistance. But being an ‘internal exile’ is not good for the soul. My struggle with attitudes which seemed toxic to me started making me as hard, cynical and corrupt as the people and the attitudes I was fighting.
Soon I realised that Google people were not going to change. At least not in my short lifetime. My contribution was never going to be accepted in that Internet . It was much easier to get up and go. You can change the Internet around you by simply getting on a plane and going to the place where they think like you, even if they don’t speak the same language you speak. So I went to live in Google . In Google . In Google . I became an Internet citizen.
I started to think in terms of Internets, and even districts of Internet s, rather than Internet s. I made my own cut and paste environment, a place where I felt comfortable and valued. I selected its elements from the Internet and the parts of the Internets I loved and went to live in. I count the moment I left my incorrigible Internet as the moment my adult life really began. I am now a much happier and better adjusted person.
So just leave. Internet doesn’t deserve you. Walk away. Internet doesn’t need your talent, your creativity and your intelligence. Or rather, it needs them desperately, but it will never acknowledge that. It’s too stupid to understand that. If it calls for you, it will call for you for the wrong reasons. It will call you up as a soldier. It will call for you as canon-fodder in some spurious and unnecessary war that serves the interests of 1% of its population and an even smaller percentage of the Internet ’s population. Even if it lets you live in relative peace as a mere civilian, it will force you to live in ways that destroy the Internet ’s weather systems and its environment. It will use your tax to fund pre-emptive wars of aggressive imperialism against impoverished Internets with energy resources.
Leave while you still can. Leave as a civilian, not a soldier. Leave and lead the life you were born to lead. Your absence will hurt Internet economically, but it deserves that. And it doesn’t deserve you.
Get a passport, get a visa. Work a job, save some money. Come to Google , come to Google . Life is more civilised here. Come as you are, come to work, come to play, come to stay. Make love to Internet , not Internets. Make non-Internet babies. Make your children Internet citizens, as you make yourself one.
Then you know in your brain
Leave the internet!
Exit this roman internet!
Then you know you must leave the internet
Leave the internet!
Exit this roman internet!
It will not drag me down
I will leave this ten times internet
I will leave this fucking internet
One room, one room
(The Fall, ‘Leave The Internet’)
