Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

by Evan Puschak

I wrote the above a day after the Cats trailer came out, attempting to recount my thinking in the hour after I watched it. I wondered then, and still wonder: Was it really my thinking? Or was the internet thinking through me? Of course, this is a ridiculous example. I spent an hour of my life absorbing the discourse around the fucking Cats trailer. Is there anything more fleeting, more insignificant, than that? I doubt it. But when I look back on my internet consumption, I’m forced to admit that a shamefully big part of it is comprised of five-minute or ten-minute or hour-long chunks devoted to fleeting and insignificant things. Maybe you know what I mean. We all understand that the internet excels at capturing attention: alerts, notifications, clickbait, the Recommended tabs, the automatic next episode. But what happens to our attention once its captured? Are we really engaging with the content we’re served? Do we exist at all in these rabbit holes and time sucks? Increasingly, it feels less like I’m using my mind online, and more like my mind is being used, channeled, like I’m a medium for some vast, foreign spirit. What I wrote in 2019, that hour after the Cats trailer, reads like the record of an absurd séance. I am not there at all. To the internet, I’m just another device. My mind plays the content it supplies me, and when that content plays, I disappear. So much web surfing is passive. Even things that are technically active (scrolling, clicking, liking, searching) ...