Back in the mid-1990s, Andrew Sullivan, the former editor of the New Republic, learned he was HIV-positive. Twenty years later, a series of health issues, including infections that wouldn’t clear up, caused him to shut down his popular and influential blog, “The Dish.”
The ironic, or perhaps telling, thing was that his HIV infection had little, if anything, to do with his health troubles. What was making him sick was the Internet.
Sullivan tells this story in the cover story of the September 19th issue of New York Magazine, entitled “I Used to Be a Human Being.” In it he described his version of what is sometimes called “living in the web”: “For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week . . . Each morning began with a full immersion in the stream of internet consciousness and news, jumping from site to site, tweet to tweet, breaking news story to hottest take . . .”
The “reward” for this obsessiveness was being among the first people to make a living and a career out of what has been called “Web 2.0.” He turned being a blogger into a being a “brand.”
The price was a “never-stopping,” “always updating” way of living that was incompatible not only with being healthy, but also, as the article’s title suggests, being truly human: “Vacations,” he wrote, “such as they were, had become mere opportunities for sleep,” and “my friendships had atrophied as my time away from the web dwindled.”
Finally, in January of 2015, he walked away, not only from blogging but to a large extent from the web itself. He even attended a silent retreat as a kind of detox.
If running people ragged was all that “living in the web” did to us, that would be bad enough. But Sullivan, like my BreakPoint colleague Shane Morris, is even more concerned about what it does to our souls. It has, in Sullivan’s words, caused “our oldest human skills to atrophy.”
Continue reading BreakPoint – The Web and Our Humanity: Take Time Away from the Screen
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