I am in no way qualified to be the determiner of a vibe shift. But I will now attempt to lick my finger and hoist it in the air to determine where the winds are blowing: a lot of people are finally realizing that the internet is simply not a good place to be. It’s been taken over by companies and bots, turned into a ghost town. The Dead Internet theory is alive and well. Burnt-out adults have responded by turning to the real world via activities like birding, or in some cases, filling the time that used to be spent scrolling with self-assigned homework.
Actual school-style homework. People are literally going old school in a desperate attempt to flee the trappings of the internet.
A CNN feature details the earnest attempt of some people to ditch Internet algorithms and quite literally do their own research. One of its profiled subjects is a 33-year-old Singaporean copywriter named Claire Yeo. Claire is long removed from her schooling days, yet fills her nights with deep dives into the works of literary masters like Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare in the same way she used to in her schooling days because — get this — she actually likes it. Crazy, right?
She’s not just reading the same kind of books you read in a college lit course. By year’s end, she wants to write an essay about “what shapes our ideas about heroes and villains.” Nowadays, we would call that a YouTube video essayist. Honestly, she’s not that far removed from it.
You can follow her journey on TikTok, where she’s amassed nearly 21,000 followers. Her TikTok bio succinctly sums it all up: “chronically online to classically well-read.”
This whole “personal curriculum” thing started snowballing when people like TikTok user Elizabeth Jean (not her real name) began sharing their self-styled study tracks online. One month, it’s manifestation and baking; the next, it’s tuberculosis and psychology. No strict deadlines and no failing grades to make you feel miserable. It’s the simple joy of independent learning rebranded for the TikTok age.
Is it at least a little bit odd that their attempt to flee the algorithms brought them right back onto the platforms those algorithms originate from, so they can turn it all into content? Yeah. Definitely. But it does speak to a larger fear that we’re all forgetting how to think.
This growing fear is no better demonstrated than in another one of the article’s subjects, Eleanor Kang, who built herself a reading syllabus, started watching Criterion films, and launched a Substack series called “How To Get Smart Again.” Her first post exploded with over 40,000 likes.
In all of this, there is the very loud acknowledgment that our brains have turned into goo. That didn’t happen on its own. Social media companies and their algorithmically driven drivel have turned so many once-bright thinkers into brain-sludged zombies who have had their views so skewed by these apps that they can no longer recognize the banality of evil when they come face-to-face with it.
So, like Yeo, they pick up a copy of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, a book about a Jew who fled Hitler’s Germany, to better understand the world outside of the social media lens.
It all could just be another BookTok fad that’ll get lost in the shuffle of the other couple dozen social media fads happening concurrently, or it could be the start of a new Renaissance, a revolution that rejects the algorithms pushed by our corporate and political masters. I mean, they all seem eager to ban books that don’t jive with their worldviews. What better act of revolution than to read what they don’t want us to? Or, in this day and age where US literacy rates are at the lowest levels in decades, just to read at all?
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