And nothing's missing
For over a week now, I’ve been living just as I had imagined: surrounded by nature, immersed in silence, and grounded in simplicity. I never thought a place like this, and a way of living like this, still existed in Germany. I didn’t think it was even possible. To my surprise, there is indeed a patch of land that hasn’t yet been overrun by people or drowned in noise. I watch storks fly past my tiny hut, and if I bike for a few minutes, I can see cranes and listen to their unique cries. Cries that, by the way, I don’t perceive as noise at all.
A side effect of this new, simple life in nature is that I have absolutely lousy internot access. The connection is so bad out here that I can just about check emails, deal with banking nonsense, and place a few practical orders. Which instantly killed off any desire to use the internot for anything else. And just as instantly, I realized I didn’t miss a thing. Quite the opposite. Not being bombarded by the ever-present nonsense has been as much a relief and liberation as losing access to films and music.
The first thing I noticed was that I started dreaming more and could actually remember the dreams. Then I realized I suddenly had a lot more time. And then I felt a return to my own inner world. A simple world no longer polluted by thoughts broadcast by anonymous digital phantoms. Which quickly led to the next thought: what is the internot even for?
Once upon a time, it was a blast. Before the anti-social not-works, before the cookie madness, before the hellish comment sections, before the cursed likes and thumbs-up, before the idiotic emojis, before the bureaucratic registration crap, before the unerotic porn flood, before the mass hypnosis set in, and before algorithms decided who gets to play along.
Now, it seems almost unbelievable how much time I wasted in the internot. Was it part of my eternal pilgrimage, or just distraction and drug? Like any junkie, I’m still dealing with my cold withdrawal. Part of me refuses to believe it was truly that pointless. Part of me is still looking for excuses and justifications for why I wasted so much of my life on pure idiocy. The answer is as simple as it is universal: loneliness and lack. The internot is a direct expression of unfulfilled longing. Even if I don’t want to admit it: there is a massive gap between my dream world and the real one, a gap that can only rarely be bridged. This opens the door for my scarcity-illusion potential. Even in relationships, there was still space for unmet desires. No extreme porn gangbang can even begin to compensate for the deep human craving for real, authentic, sensual, and meaningful connection. Instead, people get Fakebook and TikTok. And as if the ever-growing mass stupidity weren’t bad enough, internot has made people forget how to approach one another, how to move beyond the swamp of small talk.
After a week of cold withdrawal, one thing is clear. The internot is not a tool that helps humans become more human. Quite the opposite. I feel an immense relief not being constantly logged in anymore. For the handful of useful things I still do online, I need less than half an hour. Sometimes not even five minutes. No emails? Nothing to do? Log in, log out. Done.
And here lies the real problem with the dumbest drug ever invented: it has become a symbol of greed and stinginess. The old promises of convenience, communication, and connection evaporated the moment the internot-makers realized they didn’t just have to make money. They could make obscene profits. As long as they could keep the junkies and zombies trapped inside the internot for as long as possible. If a tool that promises convenience only works by consuming huge chunks of one’s precious lifetime in front of a screen, it’s worth asking whether that tool makes any sense at all. Nobody asks that question though, because nearly everyone has been trained not to notice the true cost of things. Take cars, for example. Once a symbol of freedom, owning a car today means total enslavement. Most slaves don’t mind, since they’ve grown used to the expectations and demands of modern life. One more chain doesn’t matter. Job. Car. House. Pet. Relationship. Hobbies. Anything can become part of the self-imposed slavery.
Enslaving yourself to a machine is absurd. The digital illusion is so much less convincing than a car you can drive or a house you can live in. The only thing it offers is the sweet illusion of anonymity. Since the junkies can’t see who’s reading their data, they get lost in dreams of fame and importance. Always with the hope that they might one day hit the jackpot and become an “internot star.” What they forget is that the programmers are doing everything they can to feed those illusions. Every second a junkie wastes in the internot turns into real cash for the phantoms who run it. No matter how much a junkie might ever earn online, it will always be a microscopic fraction of what the internot’s owners and programmers rake in.
Whenever you hear words like “practical” or “convenient” in connection with the internot, the only real question is: for whom? By now, it should be clear that the internot overlords have no interest in communication or the success of the junkies and zombies. What keeps them going is the eternal hope spiral. The hope that if they just try hard enough, if they’re original enough, and if they stay in the internot long enough, things will eventually change. The cursed algorithm is so dumb and soulless that it can be tricked by machines pretending to scroll endlessly. Which means the internot overlords don’t want humans at all. They want machines that scroll forever so they can sell the illusion of attention to advertisers. Those advertisers are caught in the same illusion of hope. They see dollar signs when looking at massive numbers and potential markets. Without realizing that the zombies and junkies staring into their black mirrors rarely have the money to buy anything. The whole thing resembles a twisted lottery. And like any lottery, the only true winners are the people who created and own the game.
And who are these supposed geniuses who turn nothing into money? Cold opportunists who never hesitate to draw junkies and zombies even deeper into their spiral of hope addiction. They are the digital equivalent of fentanyl dealers. Only interested in quick profits, regardless of how deadly their product is. Everything in the internot is disposable. The Myspace principle applies across the board. Whatever is hyped today will be dull and boring tomorrow, and the junkies will do what junkies always do: stick with the drug and switch dealers. Hoping without reason that the next dealer might offer better conditions. Hope, with no foundation at all, except the extravagant promises of the dealers. They have no shame in throwing superlatives around. Who ever stops to question whether those bold marketing slogans hold even a sliver of truth? After all, it’s free!
In the naïve belief that they are receiving something wonderful, zombies and junkies sell off their time and energy. Rarely does anyone sit down and calculate the effort invested, the energy poured in, and how little actually comes out of it in the end. What we’re witnessing is the ultimate horror of total slavery. As Spotify so clearly demonstrates, artists are reduced to dairy cows, milked to death for profit. What else can you call it when creators are compensated with micro-payments for the use of their work? Translated into the real world, not even a cent reaches the artist. Just a few filings are scraped off a coin. And once you’ve collected enough metal dust, you can take it to the mint and have a few pennies pressed.
Here too, everything rests on the principle of hope. Artists who don’t boycott Spotify still carry the marketing hypnosis that they’ll “reach a wider audience” and become famous through the platform. This idea has long since been disproven. By the time Spotify collapses, the internot overlords will have earned themselves villas with pools, sports cars, gold, diamonds, and vaults stuffed with cash. After that, Spotify 2.0 will take its place. Different name, different icons, new promises. And once again, musicians will fall for it. At the end of the month they’ll ask themselves: “Strange. Why is my income so low? What did I do wrong?” And, as always, helpful internot gurus will appear, claiming to know how to impress or trick the algorithm. Musicians will try again and again, because there are people who succeed with it. At no point does anyone ask whether these successful internot superstars actually exist. Even if they do have a body outside the digital realm, the true nature of their deals will likely never come to light.
As in the real world, success often comes at the cost of selling your soul to the devil. The internot rulers, the digital dealers, and their junkies all meet in the same misfortune. Internot was never a tool like a scythe or a shovel. It was never designed to serve a genuinely useful purpose. It was created to feed convenience. No consideration was given to the consequences for the bipedal species or their living environments.
Still deep in withdrawal, I find myself amazed that so many bipeds are willing to hand their lives over to machines. So few recognize this deadly drug for the curse that it is. Should that really be a surprise? Have humans not always been ready to auction off their truth and dignity to the highest bidder? The only difference now is that inflation has reached the soul market. Where the devil once had to make generous offers to claim a soul, today’s junkies and zombies pay the devil to steal theirs. People say the devil is cunning. There’s something truly remarkable about getting junkies and zombies to pay for their own downfall. All it takes is clever packaging. The only flaw in the comparison is that the devil has even less substance than the phantoms of the internot. He doesn’t exist. What does exist are the egocentric fantasies of omnipotence among the internot’s rulers. Their unconsciousness and ignorance are more diabolical than anything ever attributed to the devil.
What’s fascinating is how tirelessly the internot continues to shout its praises. No one seems to notice that humanity got along just fine for thousands of years without it. There was no added value in knowing everything while being emotionally disconnected. Internot promotes alienation, cynicism, narcissism, schizophrenia, egotism, opportunism, cowardice, and prejudice. In short, it feeds the shadows within human beings. Instead of promoting communication and social justice, as once imagined.
The hollowing out of humanity now begins while people are still alive. The devil no longer has to wait for his victims to die. Right now, selfishness among bipeds has reached an all-time high. Internot sends the message that this is perfectly acceptable. Who needs human contact, real conversations, or actual touch? Internot believes itself to be a pain-free space, while remaining blind to the chaos created by its relentless blood toll. That term is a metaphor to remind us that nothing in internot is free, and everyone pays with a few drops of blood as they sell their souls for next to nothing.
Soon we’ll have androids, with AI in their plastic heads. These androids will provide what no good friend or high-class escort ever could: the total fulfillment of all desires. There won’t even be a need to express wishes. Every android will be preloaded with secret, harvested data, and know the most obscure corners of your broken psyche. It will feel like real love, simply because it’s so beautiful to receive everything. Well… almost everything. The masters of AI and androids will, of course, install limitations. The class system must be preserved. They will offer Economy, Business, and Luxury models, and the pricing will be structured to ensure that every social class can choose its preferred form of slavery. There will be Economy slaves, Business slaves, and Luxury slaves, and each class will take pride in living out its personal version of submission. Just like in real life, each group will feel superior to the others in one way or another.
All of this would be reason enough to say farewell to the internot. What finally ruined it for me, once and for all, is the constant surveillance and spying it involves. What used to be dismissed as paranoid conspiracy talk has now become an accepted part of reality. Not only does everyone tolerate the fact that their most personal information is sold off to whoever wants it, they even seem perfectly happy to pay for their own total surveillance. Every move made online is tracked and recorded. What used to be known as privacy and secrecy twenty years ago has all but vanished.
Back in the 1980s, people feared that the government might discover things it had no business knowing. Today, every individual is known down to their most intimate habits. Not only by the state, which would already be disturbing enough. The reality of the internot in the year 2025 is far worse. Anyone willing to pay can find out anything about you. It is no longer clear who receives what information or what they intend to do with it. Combined with AI, deepfakes, and other duplication tools, there is no longer any guarantee that someone won’t hijack your identity. Any photo I upload can be mounted onto any imaginable body by anyone, anywhere. I’m not even afraid of suddenly appearing as the lead in some porn clip. What troubles me far more is the thought that someone might post anything at all under my name, and people online would actually believe I had said or done it.
Every phone call, every voice message provides samples of my voice that can be manipulated for whatever purpose someone decides. And because I never used to think much about these aspects of the internot, all of it is already stored somewhere out there. I have no say in who accesses it.
One morning I woke up and realized how deeply that ruined my mood. I can’t even casually share updates with three friends through the anti-social hate networks without assuming I’m digging a hole for myself. For a long time, I shared everything freely, thinking it was worth spreading. Now, I become suspicious just for being creative. Is this a living person’s spark, or just a soulless AI simulation? These days, I can’t do anything at all in the internot without turning myself into a target.
Of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. My thoughts aren’t twisted enough to match the perversity of the self-proclaimed saviors of lost humanity. They will continue to pull new schemes out of their hats to feed their greed and suck the last molecules of substance out of the slaves they’ve long since drained. That has nothing to do with me anymore.
Out here, nature surrounds me. It gives me everything I want and need. It fills me in ways no person or platform in the internot ever could. A single wingbeat of a crane across the summer sky means more to me than entire decades spent online.