Burn out e offline

STA PRENDENDO CORPO in maniera sempre più definita l’idea di andare offline. È il burn-out di una generazione (la mia, temo) ma anche l’effetto Donald Trump (fuga dal controllo digitale), il bisogno di recuperare una dimensione antropologica più normale, l’effetto nostalgia e altre cose del genere.

In questo caso ha fatto sboom Andrew Sullivan, che decisamente è stato uno degli alfieri della “onlife”. Lo racconta lui stesso in questo articolo non breve (che ovviamente leggerete online dopo averne trovata traccia sul mio canale Telegram: si percepisce l’ironia?)

Money quote: “I was, in other words, a very early adopter of what we might now call living-in-the-web. And as the years went by, I realized I was no longer alone. Facebook soon gave everyone the equivalent of their own blog and their own audience. More and more people got a smartphone — connecting them instantly to a deluge of febrile content, forcing them to cull and absorb and assimilate the online torrent as relentlessly as I had once. Twitter emerged as a form of instant blogging of microthoughts. Users were as addicted to the feedback as I had long been — and even more prolific. Then the apps descended, like the rain, to inundate what was left of our free time. It was ubiquitous now, this virtual living, this never-stopping, this always-updating. I remember when I decided to raise the ante on my blog in 2007 and update every half-hour or so, and my editor looked at me as if I were insane. But the insanity was now banality; the once-unimaginable pace of the professional blogger was now the default for everyone.

If the internet killed you, I used to joke, then I would be the first to find out. Years later, the joke was running thin. In the last year of my blogging life, my health began to give out. Four bronchial infections in 12 months had become progressively harder to kick. Vacations, such as they were, had become mere opportunities for sleep. My dreams were filled with the snippets of code I used each day to update the site . My friendships had atrophied as my time away from the web dwindled. My doctor, dispensing one more course of antibiotics, finally laid it on the line: “Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?””