Welcome to the Internet
it did all the things we designed it to do
Before we get started, a disclosure: Today’s song, “Welcome to the Internet,” satirically depicts instances of violence and sexual harassment. I won’t be discussing those instances in the post below, but you’ll hear them if you listen to the song, and if that’s not something you’re up for, feel free to skip out now. We’ll see you next month.
The Song
Title: Welcome to the Internet
Artist: Bo Burnham
Album: Inside
Year: 2021
The Story
In Greek myth, Prometheus steals fire from the gods and gives it to mankind, which then uses the literal power and metaphorical knowledge of fire to develop civilization. It’s a good myth, and maybe even more apt than you might think.1
To our ancestors, fire provided warmth and protection, and those immediate benefits were incredibly valuable on the road to establishing and growing civilization. But recent studies suggest that fire played another role in the growth of humanity, this one much more gradual but no less important: By unlocking cooking and the calorie-rich foods that require it, fire allowed us to develop our big ol’ human brains, and then we used those brains to become the dominant species on Earth.
I think the internet is like fire.
Like our control of fire, the widespread availability of the internet had immediate benefits. Where fire made cold temperatures more habitable, the internet provided an unparalleled degree of global communication, a power that I know can be used for good because I’m old enough to remember that social movements like the Arab Spring were greatly facilitated by Twitter X before that platform became a digital hell-hole.
And just as fire can be used to threaten and can burn the unwary hand, the internet also brought immediate, cascading danger. A microcosm: The show To Catch a Predator was a sensation because it focused on early examples of how the anonymous, connective power of the internet could be used with evil intent. And then the show was canceled when a suspect committed suicide on camera.
These immediate impacts—and they are extremely important and often depressing impacts!—are the subject of Bo Burnham’s “Welcome to the Internet,” the centerpiece of his 2021 comedy special Inside. The special purports to be the work of an isolated Burnham as he lives through the lockdowns of Covid-era 2020 but Inside isn’t really concerned with any non-lockdown element of the pandemic; its focus is the digitization of human life. And while I didn’t necessarily enjoy Inside, I did find it and its subject matter extremely interesting.2
Because, as omnipresent as online access has become, we are still in the dawn of the Internet Age. These last two or three decades of widespread internet access are an absolute blip in the history of humanity, which has featured anatomically modern humans for at least 160,000 years.3 That means the internet4 has been around for 0.019% of the time that people have generally been like we are today.
Looking at how much the internet has shaped the world in the last 30 years, I’m overwhelmed trying to imagine what a true future state might be. The bogeyman du jour is artificial intelligence, and sure, maybe we’ll all be paperclips by 2050, but I’m wagering that the more impactful development of the next generation will be the continuing impact of the internet on social constructs. How people interact with one another is the fundamental exchange that governs essentially everything about humanity, and the internet is actively and continually reshaping those interactions. How does that look in the long term?
I don’t know, and neither does Burnham, who keeps his view tighter with “Welcome to the Internet.” Generations from now, we may look back and see that the connectivity of the internet expanded what our collective mind was capable of, just as fire expanded what individual ones could do. But right now, as Burnham incisively notes, we’re still learning how to play with fire, burning our fingers, and setting fire to the cave next door, sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose. It’s a harrowing time to be alive. Fascinating, too. Like Prometheus, none of us can escape. And, just like Burnham, I can’t look away.
I give “Welcome to the Internet” four out of five stars.
Zeus wasn’t big into rehabilitative incarceration, though, so Prometheus got right fucked for his transgressions.
That said, and at the risk of spoiling the final-line rating of this post, I do enjoy “Welcome to the Internet” as a piece of music. Its baroque-pop vibe is both anachronistic and also contemporary—big Dear Hunter energy here—and some of its moments are really effective, like the bridge’s concluding thought: “and Mommy let you use her iPad / you were barely two / and it did all the things we designed it to do.” In his lyrics and performance, set across an enchanting melody, Burnham captures the classical tragedy at hand. We have built this technology that we can’t resist, but we did not foresee the consequences of that action. How upsettingly poetic!
I should also note that “Welcome to the Internet” is, at best, the second-best song from Inside because “That Funny Feeling” is a legitimately great track. Among a litany of quality wordsmithing, “twenty thousand years of this / seven more to go” is an all-timer. (Though I’d squabble with his timelines.) And I’m not the only one who thinks this is a great piece of songwriting; check out this banging cover by Phoebe Bridgers, and be sure to stay for the triumphant finale.
In his book What’s Our Problem?, Tim Urban sets the beginning of modern humanity at 250,000 years ago. Then he notes that, if we write about those 250,000 years of history in a 1,000-page book with 250 years covered on each page, the first 949 pages would just be a bunch of hunter-gathers poking around until agriculture starts around page 950, then Christianity begins on page 993, and the entire history of the United States would be on page 1,000. The invention of the internet would be near the bottom of that last page. The story of a digitally connected humanity has barely even begun. (In fairness, as Burnham implies in “That Funny Feeling,” being at the beginning of the internet age does not preclude us from also being near its end.)
Just as I referred to anatomically modern humans, who are essentially biologically indistinguishable from those of us living today, I’m talking about the anatomically modern internet here—your easily and widely accessible websites and social media and news outlets and scams and listicles and whatever else—rather than a handful of nerds making a closed network in the computer lab.