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While Doctorow’s diagnoses are damning and infuriating, his prescription is tinged with a sentimental vision of what he calls, without apparent irony, “the old, good internet.” I am a decade younger than Doctorow, but was myself a fairly early adopter, and I understand this wistfulness. I, too, made friends in early chat rooms, explored my sexuality, engaged in debate, and adopted and discarded all sorts of strange politics and intellectual currents that I never would have otherwise encountered. I miss that internet, but would I go back? Could I? “Lowering the barriers to entry for participation in digital life is an unalloyed good,” Doctorow writes. Simply: no. If anything, the opposite. License it like a car. Or a firearm. If there is anything that the past several decades have shown us, it is that “digital life”—access to tools of information and communication more powerful and universal than any heretofore invented or available—is something that most individuals, and perhaps even the most responsible among us, simply should not possess. Its capacity to enable demagoguery, to dissolve ideology, to promote conspiracy, and to encourage violence and antisocial behavior is wild and dangerous. Are corporate algorithms alone to blame? Perhaps, for your racist uncle, for your perpetually enraged hashtag-resistance aunt, for your Fox News dad, for your MSNBC mom. But for the disaffected young man, angry and future-deprived, lurking in some strange bespoke Discord channel or creating untranslatable racial slurs with which to bait his fellow gamers? Long before Elon Musk bought Twitter, before YouTube made celebrities out of “manosphere” pickup artists, before a Facebook group convinced your neighbor that vaccines cause autism, the internet proved a fertile ground for fervid weirdos to find each other and psych up strange beliefs. No less so today, whether on Discord or one of the “chans” or deep within Reddit, where, far from any particular corporate algorithm, hate, bile, violence, and rage express themselves nonetheless. When the conservative influencer and organizer Charlie Kirk was shot dead in September and it was revealed that his killer had scrawled messages onto bullets, one of the more alarming aspects was not so much the question of the shooter’s political ideology, which dominated the news, but that the language—inscrutable, irony-poisoned gamer argot—came from online. I am increasingly convinced that giving most of us access to online is handing a toddler a gun. The problem is giving it to the toddler. But the problem, also, is that it is a gun. Enshittification fundamentally is premised on the idea that we created a technological marvel (or a set of them), and then corporate greed and avarice ruined it. But what if that is not the case? What if, as was the case with nuclear weapons, we have created technology that we are not yet mature enough to wield? What if in our quest for infinite energy, we built a bomb?
That's cool and all. Why not shredding freedom of speech and expression as principle and vandalize all printing presses while we are at it? In the past before algorithm pushed brain rot, tinfoil hatters who were jiving about aliens and the holocaust, furfags and wannabe terrorist were seen as one thing only: Morons and weirdos.

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