WWTD?

There is a framed portrait of Ted Kaczynski hung on the wall of my bedroom. It captures him in black and white on the prisoner side of a visitation booth, microphone and speaker system visible within frame. His graying beard and toothy smile are complimented by a button up prison jumper. With his eyes peering downward, I wipe the crust from my eyes and peel off a nose strip. Rolling over, I reach for my phone. My thumb instinctively moves toward the Instagram icon on my home screen and taps.

A blockheaded man flexes his biceps and screams alongside his chubby-cheeked son, “IS IT A BOOM, OR A DOOM?” I swipe up.

Dashcam footage of a car weaving through traffic starts to play—the car swerves into the median and begins to flip and the camera feed cuts. I swipe up.

Kamala Harris says, “Do not come,” it cuts to Donald Trump, he proclaims “I’m gonna come,” – the crowd roars. I hit “Like.”

As I put my phone down, I look up and feel Ted’s warm smile and judging eyes follow me out of bed as I start the day. Entering the kitchen, I throw on a podcast to drown out the quiet of the morning as I flip between applications. Closing one, I reopen another. When I refresh Twitter I’m shown an Elon Musk tweet, despite not following him. He encourages “Dark MAGA” to “assemble” amidst the ongoing political campaigns. I ask myself, what would Ted do?

In his famous manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future, Kaczynski speaks to the erosion of the human spirit as it loses freedom and becomes enslaved to an industrial-technological society. He warns of the degradation of a society that embraces antisocial behavior. This was far before the existence of TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram. While there are criticisms to be made about the effectiveness of sending mail bombs to computer scientists, lobbyists, and executives, Ted’s writing inarguably mirrors the modern world as we continue our plunge into a technological hellscape.

“Let’s stick to the practical and the concrete: Would you like it if people lived in a virtual world? If machines were smarter than people? If, in the future, people, animals and plants were products of technology? If you don’t like these ideas, then for you the computer and biological sciences clearly are dangerous.”

The digital world has never been more alluring as our feeds are engineered to cater to personal interests. The rollercoaster of the algorithm brings instantaneous pleasure upon a single swipe, though the next could ruin your day. It is the unknown that keeps me here, a thirst for what is beyond, a fear of missing out. Much like you, I find myself navigating the digitized balancing act of connection and isolation.

A video plays of a teen walking behind an older man in a supermarket. He punches the man in the back of the head. The man collapses to the floor. I swipe up.

It has been like this for as long as I can remember. My early teenage years were spent browsing image boards and playing video games with friends around the world. Later years were spent terrorizing the innocent through elaborate phone scams and phishing attempts. I was born too early to be an iPad baby, but just in time to have my brain transformed into mush due to unsupervised internet access throughout my adolescence.

My mother took me out of public school in seventh grade. I was caught up in the wrong crowd. The majority of my friends were on drugs and my grades were flatlining. At the time, online charter schools were archaic, lacked structure, and toed a line of questionable legality regarding truancy laws. I was upset to leave my friends behind, but I came around once I realized my newfound freedom. The day I saw a brand-new desktop computer arrive in the mail, everything changed.

An image of a minion wearing a thong walking seductively toward a bed. I swipe up.

By the time the school year began, I had liberated the computer from its NetNanny surveillance software. I was averaging 12–14 hours online each day. The majority of this time was spent browsing forums and playing a game called RuneScape—a popular browser-based fantasy role-playing game that I still play to this day. The game rapidly took over my life.

The game, much like the internet, allowed for a reinvented self. I carefully crafted new narratives both in and out of the game as I interacted with new friends on Skype and Ventrilo. RuneScape even connected me with my first girlfriend, and yes, I swear, she was not a catfish. By the end of my freshman year, my account had well over 300 days of playtime. But as time passed, I began to experience the mental and physical repercussions of my sedentary lifestyle.

A video plays of a man lighting himself on fire, he screams. I swipe up.

By the end of tenth grade, I had gained over 60 pounds, and my back began to form a natural arch from the poor posture of my regular sitting position. After physical issues came mental. At fifteen I had my first panic attack. After washing down dinner with a can of Mountain Dew, I ran up the stairs to my bedroom and felt my heart flutter. My chest pounded; my breathing was erratic. I spent twenty minutes pacing up and down the hallway outside my mother’s bedroom with two fingers firmly pressed against the side of my neck, fixated on my pulse as I marched onward. I rushed to the bathroom, stared into the mirror, certain I could see my heartbeat pounding through my chest—I was convinced I was going to die. Within seconds, I convinced myself I was experiencing the Google’d list of heart attack symptoms one by one. I pleaded for my mom to call an ambulance. Thankfully, she did not.

An advertisement plays, ARE YOU EXPERIENCING THE SYMPTOMS OF A HEART ATTACK OR STROKE? I swipe up.

In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy ravaged the East Coast. My house was without electricity for two weeks. I was forced to confront the realities of this dependency. When battery powered devices died on day two, my mental state quickly unraveled. By day three, I burst into my mother’s room in tears and demanded to stay with my grandma at the senior center, where they had a generator. I was dismissed in my delirious state and sent back to the dark den that was my attic bedroom. As I looked out the window toward the street, I saw Halloween skeleton props dangling in the windows of the neighboring apartment building. They moved and mocked me as I stared outward.

Whether forced or universally gifted, everyone has revelations. But few come from the stresses of hallucinatory psychosis. The once cure-all to my loneliness and boredom has become an addiction, a disease. A sickness that has robbed me of my ability to function properly, disconnects me from the natural world and leaves me scrambling to make the most of the remains of my short-term memory after a two-decade bombardment of digital waste.

I open Twitter while awaiting a green light on Broad Street.
Kanye West tweets an image of a swastika and calls himself a nazi.
I click Unfollow.
The car behind me lays on its horn.
I put down my phone and accelerate.

I was gifted the photo of Ted at my 24th birthday party from a friend who knew I was deep in the rabbit hole of crazed fanatics clamoring over anti-technology writings and the accompanying memes. I often wonder how he would feel about the growing popularity of his writing, how it stemmed from internet meme culture, or what he would think of the many drawings of him in the form of cutesy anime girls disseminated across image boards. Someone once uploaded a scan of a letter they had received from an imprisoned Ted. It was short and to the point—slandering the sender’s handwriting, insisting that he spend less time typing and more time writing by hand.

“To those who think that all this sounds like science fiction, we point out that yesterday’s science fiction is today’s fact. The Industrial Revolution has radically altered man’s environment and way of life, and it is only to be expected that as technology is increasingly applied to the human body and mind, man himself will be altered as radically as his environment and way of life have been.”

Ted spoke directly of information overload and the dangers of oversocialization, pointing to the warning signs of a society dependent on a digital infusion. I have been in a vegetative state for over a decade in his eyes. The only reflexive movement I am capable of is pressing a button in hopes of another controlled dose of Mr. Beast’s latest uploads or a flickering feed of mind-numbing reels.

My load limit was hit years ago. I’m nearly incapable of finishing a video, book, or piece of writing without finding myself in a maze of bookmarked links and old browser tabs. I once read somewhere about the effects short-form media content has on memory, how bite-sized media in excessive volumes interferes with memory retention, fragments memories, and permanently affects one’s processing ability. There must be some truth to it. On a cognitive level, I’m cooked—long overdue for an Adderall prescription and an extended hiatus from social media.

A video plays of a man overdosing on the sidewalk of a street. I swipe up.
An image of a small chihuahua wearing a bonnet. I hit “Like.”

There is no explosive-savvy political martyr that can convince me to turn away from a banger meme, only a swipe or two away. As I write this essay, my mouse gravitates toward various tabs aligning the top of my browser, and an Instagram group chat derails my writing process. After responding, I click the next tab and watch a thirty-two-minute video essay titled “The Rise, Fall, and Return of YouTube’s Most Hated Troll.” I have now accumulated roughly 30,000 hours of playtime across multiple RuneScape accounts. Ted, still looming above, stares down as my phone buzzes, notifying me that I was sent an Instagram reel from my girlfriend who is sitting ten feet away.

I open Instagram.
A video plays of two orangutans holding one another in a tree; text is displayed overtop the video. It reads “Us.”
I hit “Like.”