It was 2015 when I first sketched out my ‘Map Of Britain After The 2029 Technology Crash’. Recently, I gave the sketch to my dad, Mick, and he came up with the infinitely more attractive and detailed version you can see above. 2029 seemed exotically, brain-meltingly far away in 2015 but now it’s no further in the future than the beginning of Covid is in the past. Or, to frame it in a way that seems starker and more brutal to me on a personal level: I have a shirt I bought around five years ago that I still think of as “brand new” and am yet to properly unveil in public. With that in mind, I probably should get onto a few pre-Crash jobs I’ve been putting off: make sure I have the landline numbers of all the friends I want to keep in touch with, finally print hard copies of some of my favourite digital photos and put together an album of them, collate all the home addresses of my Substack subscribers who wish to continue to receive these newsletters in A5 pamphlet form as the analogue 30s take hold. As always, it’s probably later than I think.
A small part of me is feeling the need to explain that the map above is a joke, even though I shouldn’t have to. I think this is possibly because of something that’s been happening to me on Substack Notes recently. I post a photo of an alpaca accompanied by a caption enthusing about horses and a stranger, embarrassed for me, pops in to inform me it’s not a horse. I post a photo of me tickling the chin of a beatific-looking sheep near Framlingham, UK, in January 2020 with the caption “This sheep I met for the first time today is now in my car with me and we are heading over the border into Mexico, with no firm plans” and, once the algorithm has shown the note to enough people, the dissenting voices begin: it’s not good to steal sheep… the US authorities are known to crack down hard on that sort of thing… what about the sheep’s owner… have I not thought of him/her and his feelings?
Replies like that will be something I won’t miss when the Internet explodes into a zillion pieces. But maybe I’m lying to myself. Perhaps I will miss them. Maybe I will miss people who think the Mexican border is somewhere near Ipswich or Torquay and think that if somebody online implies they have stolen a sheep, they have always 100% definitely stolen a sheep. Maybe I will miss them just as I now slightly miss the people who, when I used to post photos and captions like the one below on my old My Sad Cat Twitter account (around the exact time, in fact, when I was first passed the secret information from a trusted anonymous source that the Internet was going to explode in 2029) would think that I had actually made my cats smoke marijuana, call me a “c***” for it and make a public appeal for my incarceration.
So the aftermath of the Internet exploding is inevitably going to come with ambivalent, and even bittersweet, feelings. Many of us are probably going to miss the amazing sense of connection we have with people all around the globe and the book recommendations, free recipes and gardening tips, but, to no less an extent, are probably going to be extremely relieved to no longer be quite so pressured by corporations to be rampantly interested in our own surfaces or be beset by the constant lingering sense that we are arguing with people we’ve never met about a version of ourselves that doesn’t exist. Yes, having go into the city to our bank to transfer some money, just like we did during the 20th Century, will be a pain. But I am looking forward to being able to relax while eating some salty snacks without worrying about the way their residue sticks to my thumb and makes my online banking app impossible to open. It’s a case of swings and roundabouts. In fact, my relationship with the phrase “swings and roundabouts” is a good example of the complex arguments for and against living in a world where the Internet has spontaneously combusted. Before I had access to the Internet, I didn’t know the original meaning behind the phrase “swings and roundabouts” but then I got the internet and, within a matter of seconds, was able to find out where the phrase came from. Since then, my perception of it has been totally different. Once upon a time I just thought it was a stupid phrase. Now I think it’s a stupid phrase that I know the not particularly profound original meaning of.
I’m sure there will be some byproducts of the heat death of the Internet that we are unable to predict from our current standpoint, just as there were some byproducts of the growth of the Internet that nobody predicted when the Internet was first around. Quite quickly it was anticipated that the Internet would make people more jaded and voyeuristic and judgemental and narcissistic but what wasn’t so widely anticipated was that the internet, despite all its nerdy facts and erudition, would make people much more stupid. Similarly, we assume that setting fire to the Internet then burying it deep underground would improve social interaction, but is that true? Last Friday, for example, I was in a pub in Nottingham with my old friends Matt and Steve. Matt and I ignore our phones when we are in a 3D social situation but, at various points in the conversation, we saw Steve scrolling on his and, even though it didn’t detract from the warmth and humour of the evening, a look passed between me and Matt. “Steve seems very into his phone,” Matt and I - who, after 32 years, know each other well enough to read one another’s minds - were thinking. “In fact, it’s as if his phone is a more exciting younger friend that we must compete with.” But were we considering the bigger problems such a situation might entail in an Internet-free future? I happen to know that Steve owns a copy of the 1104 page novel Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, since I was with him when he bought it from a remainder bookshop in north London in June, 2000. Steve still hasn’t got around to reading Infinite Jest but, with no Internet to distract him, he undoubtedly will, and it’s a book that infamously requires dedication and concentration. Being with Foster Wallace’s writing is not like being with a phone, where you can simultaneously catch two thirds of what your friends are saying to you AND watch a video featuring a cute parrot. When Matt and I visit the pub with Steve after the 2029 Technology Crash we might discover that we can no longer even keep a fraction of his attention and that he will be finally, irrevocably lost to us.
For those of us who write for a living, the ambivalent feelings that will inevitably go hand in hand with the blistering fire death of the Internet may well be even more complex and volatile. Right now I sometimes find myself lamenting the way that the Internet prompts people to scan long nuanced pieces of writing and miss their point entirely, or merely read the top few sentences of those pieces and fire off an opinion based on that. But what if I become really shit at writing endings at some point in the future, after the Internet has exploded? Then I will no doubt crave to return to the days when the vast majority of people only read the beginning of anything I wrote. In a different society where the instant outlets for it no longer exists, some of us might even look back fondly on the harsher, less considered criticism once aimed at us. Sure, at present I don’t gaze back pleasantly on the time a few years ago when a man got angry at me for posting a photo of a tree on my now deleted Twitter account then told me that because he disliked the photo my books must be terrible, but who’s to say I won’t feel differently, one day, once the playing field has shifted? Who’s to say, in a moment of nostalgia, I won’t one day have an urge to turn up at the man’s house, holding a glossy photo of the tree and a bottle of Prosecco, in a bid to relive old times? We moan about algorithms right now and what they are doing to suppress our better work but it’s all about context: we are living in a time when algorithms have the universe at their feet and, as a result of that, they act with according, dislikable arrogance. But soon everything will be very different. My prediction is that, with no Internet, algorithms will soon become humbled and lonely. I for one am not going to hate on algorithms, just because, years ago, when they were someone else, they relentlessly fucked me over and tried to turn me into a robot. If I see an algorithm shivering in the street, near my house, dressed only in some trousers it stole from a washing line and a threadbare towel it found caught on some barbed wire, I’m going to invite it in and feed it a hot meal. I might have luddite tendencies and a penchant for analogue life, but I’m not a monster.
We have no idea what our future selves will be, no way of predicting the ways they will surprise us with their nostalgia and sentimentality. This will probably go double for a planet where the Internet has long-since been destroyed in a controlled explosion at sea. I was unhurriedly admiring the cow in the above photograph during a country walk on Sunday and thinking, “This! This is all I need. I don’t need WhatsApp, or Wikipedia, or to see someone I used to quarter-know getting drunk at his work colleague’s leaving party.” But then I took the above photo of the cow using my phone and wrote the caption you can see under the photo and put it on Substack Notes and as a result of it I gained somewhere between three and six new subscribers. Could I have done that with a heavy analogue camera? No. I probably wouldn’t have taken the photo at all and thus never got chance to get the photo printed in my big pre-2029 Technology crash photo sort out. Thus me and this cow would never get the chance to sit together in 2036 on a sofa I bought from an actual physical sofa shop and look at the photo and think about the special memories we had made together on that day in 2024. Which, thankfully, we now no doubt will. “Do you remember when I took that photo of you, looking over the hedge at me like you thought I was a massive twat?” I will ask the cow. “I do,” the cow will reply. “How could I forget? We really made memories that day.” “I used to hate that phrase, ‘making memories’,” I will say. “Whenever someone said it I’d run to the nearest bin and hover over it, making loud vomiting noises. But now I kind of miss it. I suppose it’s one of the unpredictable ways I’ve become more sentimental and find myself yearning for an unreachable past in a world where all traces of the Internet have been obliterated.” “You do realise that photo was taken in 2020, not 2024, though?” the cow will ask. “I do,” I will say. “I told people it was taken in 2024 as to do so suited my purposes better. You could do that sort of thing because people’s memories were fried by all the stuff that was coming at them on screens, all the time, and they probably wouldn’t remember the previous time you posted a photo. It’s another thing I miss about the Internet.”
My next novel, 1983, is out on August 8th in the UK and October 1st in the US and Canada. You can pre-order it here or from bookshop.org in the US and Canada here. Or pre-order it from Blackwells in the UK here.
If you’d like to, you can also help with the funding of my subsequent novel, Everything Will Swallow You, here (it’s now complete, and will be published in March 2025). Here is an excerpt from it.
If that sheep is somehow roped into smuggling drugs back across the border, and will then be described as a mule, the ensuing comments may well shatter the internet. Tread carefully, Tom.
As someone who still thinks it's 1995 (mostly lamenting the ridiculous price of things in shops and the general lack of good old fashioned humour around and about,) I find the idea of a return to the good old days before pubs were full of screens and I was able to read a book in an afternoon without distraction, hugely attractive. As a person who is also hugely into maps, I thoroughly enjoyed looking at your dads' cartography. What a lovely entertaining and uplifting post.