Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Abeeb, a weekly podcast featuring my conversations with countercultural figures and presenting complex, philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas in an engaging and accessible way.

Well, friends, I've been doing a series of episodes on tech because I think it poses particular challenges for us as we emerge, if we are emerging, from

this global crisis. I had episodes with Peter Beavergal and then Duncan Lorry about

occult technology with Wendy Liu on abolishing Silicon Valley. And in this final episode of this mini run, I thought I'd turn the

lens a bit and talk about what tech feels like for us. What's the experience of it, particularly

the experience of using the internet? This is not my idea. In fact, this idea was almost wholly

inspired by my friend, the incredible author,

cultural critic, and internet historian Joanne McNeil. Joanne's book, Lurking, How a Person

Became a User, came out just as the global pandemic quarantine conditions and so forth hit.

And it is unlike any book on the internet that you've ever read. So I urge you to go out and get this book. Why is it so different? Because it's not

a book of praise or condemnation of social media, entrepreneur, founders, or a journey through startupdom.

You know, it has those things in it written small, but the big idea is that it's an

exploration of what it's like for us to be on the internet.

What were the contours of our experiences when we were using MySpace or Friendster or Hotbot, remember

Hotbot, or Google writing and reading blogs, and of course, Facebook and Twitter, which

we talk about a bit on this episode. What kind of people do we become when we engage with these spaces? What happens

in us? You know, what pleasures does it give? And of course, what frustrations? And maybe most

challengingly of all, what good comes out of using them? What do we keep going back to them? What do we

want there? What are we getting out of it? We end up going

in all sorts of interesting directions here that don't usually come up when people talk about the

internet. We talk about why it's so difficult to remember our experiences of the internet early on.

I mean, if you think back, can you remember what those early experiences were like? Maybe

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