My whole career, I’ve worked in the tech industry. I had the good fortune of arriving in college just as the age of the mainframe was ending, and although I avoided the engineering classes — I had a double major in English and Theater — I still ended up with a front row seat to the birth of the World Wide Web. Which is to say I had a couple years marinating in what the Internet used to be before it turned into what it is now.

People will tell you the Internet was created by the Department of Defense, which is misleading. It’s true the DoD funded a networking project, and that project evolved directly into what we now know as the Internet. Ostensibly it was intended to develop a system that could withstand a nuclear attack. But it was initiated by ARPA, an agency tasked with expanding scientific research without an immediate military application. It was done, in other words, by geeks who thought it would be cool and figured out a way to get the government to pay for it.

That’s the Internet I discovered when I started at university. Everything was built on open, collaborative standards because that’s the only way anything could work. Most of the infrastructure was arcane and obscure — it was largely written in C or Perl — which meant the people working and contributing to it had to invest a lot of time and effort learning the culture of the place before they could exercise any measure of control. It was the birth of open-source computing and the idea that the benefits of what was being built should be available equally for everyone.

Eventually that was all killed off, of course. The pivot point turned out to be HTML. HTML was simple enough that anyone halfway technical could figure out how to write a webpage in an afternoon, and web browsers meant it was trivial for anyone with an Internet connection to figure out how to read it. That was the beginning of the end; from then on the corporations really started to take notice and it’s been a slow, inevitable slog to get us to the current state.

My first job out of college was working for CompuServe, which was at the time the largest online service provider in the world. When I joined there was a debate over whether to open CompuServe’s network to the larger Internet or keep it locked up. CompuServe chose the latter and ended up hemorrhaging customers to its competitors. At the dawn of the commercialization of the Internet, the smart move was interconnectivity and open standards.

We all know how it played out, though. All the big social networks have built their empires on proprietary standards and closed systems: Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, WhatsApp. It’s not that these companies are evil — they are, but that’s not the point — it’s that they find it far easier to monetize users by keeping them segregated and isolated and trapped.

I’m not claiming the Internet of the early 90s was some kind of magical prelapsarian place. After all, the terms “flame war” and “spam” predate the World Wide Web and it’s always been famously hostile towards women and minorities. But for a long while there was a significant and thriving community built on what was, at heart, anticapitalist principles. There’s still pockets of that old guard some places, like the culture which has popped up around the Linux ecosystem, but most of it’s been replaced by corporations.

When I look at the where the current buzz is in technology, I’m struck by how terrible it all is. LLMs are a scam. Cryptocurrency is a scam. Blockchain is a scam. They’re all overhyped technologies which exist to con money from gullible investors, built on questionable moral foundations and solving no real problems facing the world today. If anything they create all new problems of their own. It’s an odd feeling seeing the industry you’ve effectively dedicated your life to overrun by grifters and swindlers.

It was predictable, though. Look at what happened to email, where the number of autogenerated notifications and newsletters you’ve been tricked into “opting in” to — to say nothing of actual straight-up spam — have made just keeping on top of it a thankless grind. Hell, look at telephone calls, a useful technology for a century rendered nearly useless by telemarketers running shakedowns.

I hit the sweet spot in the Internet revolution. I was in the last cohort to get online before the “Eternal September,” the point where the ubiquity of new users gaining access through dial-up services like AOL or EarthLink swamped the seasonal influx of incoming college students. Nobody after me really got to experience the old-school Internet of the grognards, and large swaths of those who were there when I arrived have since dropped out or retired without seeing how bad it’s gotten.

One term for this is shifting baselines syndrome, that mix of generational and personal amnesia which renders ecological catastrophe largely invisible to humanity as a whole. We’re only directly aware of how things have changed over the course of our lifetime, which renders us blind to the real scope of the problems. You might notice, say, there’s a lot fewer insects splattering across your windscreen than there used to be and find that vaguely disturbing. Your children won’t. They’ll just grow up in a world without fireflies.

It occurred to me, as I was settling into the month I’ve stayed in Lisbon, that there are two ways of living in a city. The first way, the way I’ve usually tried to live, is where you engage with the city. You go out. You visit the markets. You see movies and go to museums and hang out in bars. You relax in the parks, exercise by joining a sports league or by jogging around the block. If this is how you want to live your life, then where you live is absolutely critical.

There’s another way of living, though, where the where you live is largely irrelevant. You shop online. You watch Netflix and have friends over instead of going out. For relaxing you build a sunroom, for exercise you buy a treadmill. You don’t need to leave your home for anything.

Maybe this is just a restatement of Jung’s concept of extroverts and introverts. I see more parallels with Ruskin’s idea of a civic sphere and a domestic one. It’s not exactly a novel observation. It’s also clear that nobody lives their life at one extreme or another, excepting the kind of doomsday preppers who grow their own food off in the mountains somewhere. Everyone else needs to buy groceries, and even if all your supplies come mail-order you still need a post office to drop everything off and garbage collectors to pick it all back up after you’re finished with it.

So it really comes down to how you choose to divide your time. I’m assuredly not the most outgoing person, but whenever I’m someplace new I want to experience a place. I walk everywhere. I try and get lost. I especially make a point of ordering food from street carts and making reservations at fancy restaurants. I love beer gardens and whiskey distilleries and swanky cocktail bars. Food is an easy way for me to find a connection to a place.

One of the events I attended regularly when I lived in New York City was “Choice Eats,” where fifty of the best restaurants across the city would gather in a warehouse space and offer up free samples for an evening. Tickets were a little expensive but the food was plentiful and all-you-can-eat and the restaurants were an eclectic assortment of sandwich shops and Filipino fusion cuisine and street tacos and Italian red sauce joints. Even as a vegetarian I always found more than enough to stuff myself rotten.

I hadn’t fully realized how important food was to how I understood a city. When I go someplace I usually hit all the museums and as much as I love them they’re typically a little sterile, sometimes almost fossilized, draped in cold marble with everything under glass. The culture of eating in a city is the other half of that, noisy and vibrant and joyous. It’s the perfect antidote to too many architecture tours and cathedral visits, whether you need a short break at a café with a cappuccino and a pastel de nada or a long meal at a raucous neighborhood joint.

Since my heart attack I’ve cut most of that out. It was already a little tricky eating as a vegetarian, where I was generally ordering from 20% of any given menu. Further cutting out sugar and bread and cheese and eggs and pasta and potatoes and fried foods has taken most of the fun out of finding a restaurant. And eliminating alcohol means I just don’t enjoy hanging out in bars alone any more, which was how I typically would unwind after a long week if I was lonely or stressed or bored.

So if I’m not going out, I’m staying in. I haven’t really been in the mood to see Lisbon — I’m coming back, like it or not, so there’s not a lot of urgency — and all I’m really getting from the city most days are supermarkets and a few restaurants to order salads and poké bowls from. And if that’s all I’m getting from living in a city, it’s kind of hard to justify how much it costs. I could get a nicer and cheaper place on the outskirts of Lisbon, but then I’d have to make my own salads and poké bowls. And if I was doing that maybe it’s better to move even further out to an even cheaper place with an actual decent kitchen and get a car to shop once a week. And if I’m doing that then why not find something remote and only come in to town every couple weeks for fresh vegetables?

Follow this line of thinking too far and you end up churning your own butter in the middle of nowhere. I have to admit the worse the world seems to get the more appealing that sounds. But is that really what I want? I’ve spent a lot of time over the last six months thinking about where I want to live, trying to square that circle between independence and interdependence, and I’m not much further than when I started.

Many fantasy stories start with an escape into a magical place. They present the reader with a secret realm called something like London Below or Wonderland or Oz. They’re modern reimaginings of a mythological “otherworld” where the laws governing the mortal sphere no longer apply. But I noticed the heroes never seem to stay there for very long. Even in Narnia the fifteen years the children spent ruling as royalty is glossed over in a handful of sentences. Fantasy is all about the quest, not the contentment.

Travel has been my variation of that story, an endless pursuit of … something ineffable, I suppose, set against a changing backdrop of fanciful locations. I’ve never had a goal in mind other than to keep going. And even now, with more reasons than ever to settle somewhere semi-permanent, I find myself inventing more excuses to leave than stay. In all the places I’ve lived since I left for college, there’s only one where I genuinely thought I was going to live for a long time, maybe forever. I lasted four years. So I’m distrustful of permanence. Everywhere I’ve been I’ve been passing through, and that was true even before I started traveling.

Like most people I’ve got a list of what I’d want in a home. It’s a mix of things which are reasonable (a hot tub, carbonated water on tap), things which are a bit of a stretch (a commercial kitchen, fully integrated home automation), and a lot of wholly impractical thoughts (a slide from the top floor to the ground floor, a two-story wood-paneled library with a secret passage behind the bookcase). But that’s all stuff. It’s fun to imagine a ball pit or a soft-serve ice cream dispenser but fixating on those kind of details is a mistake. Smarter is to focus less on what you would want in your home and more on what you want for your home. That’s trickier to imagine. It’s also trickier to describe. But I’m slowly getting a grasp on it.

I want to live someplace beautiful. Someplace welcoming. I want it to be the kind of place which makes you relax when you first walk through the door, where there’s inviting and comfortable places to sit and unwind and bright, cheerful rooms to socialize in. I want there to be private places to retreat to if you need to be alone, and shared spaces where people can work together or separately. I want it to feel solid, constructed of natural materials and furnished with heirloom furniture, a frame for you to build a life around.

Reading over that, it’s clear why I’m having trouble reconciling myself to living somewhere. That house only makes sense if it’s filled with people. And I haven’t got anybody to fill it with. I can’t find the home I want because the precondition is to find a community I want to live in. And that’s just so much harder to do. I don’t even know where to start.

Today is Good Friday. All of Portugal has the holiday off; I’m just worried it’s going to be hard to find someplace I can order dinner tonight. My flight from Lisbon leaves tomorrow, although I could have stayed indefinitely. While I don’t have a residency card I’m reluctant to spend much more time in Europe than I already have lest I get trapped. So it’s back to my itinerant lifestyle for at least a few months. Beyond that, who knows?

I’d usually talk a bit in these essays about where I’ve traveled or how far I’ve come since the last time I wrote one, but I’ve had a month grounded in New York in December and a month grounded in Lisbon in March so I haven’t really felt like I’ve done much. So much of my life over the past six months has been an extended health crisis. I’m only just feeling like I’ve regained some measure of stability.

The last book I read was Team Human, Douglas Rushkoff’s manifesto for humanity. Rushkoff’s an old-school cyberpunk whose philosophy has drifted from the techno-utopianism of the early Internet to a more skeptical, humanistic approach, and the book managed to articulate a lot of what’s been buzzing through my head as I’ve been thinking through my place in the world and our current cultural moment.

One thing Rushkoff brings up is the Algonquian wendigo, malevolent spirits which haunt the wilds consumed by an insatiable craving for human flesh. They’re common in the folklore of a lot of Native American tribes. Often they’re humans who have starved to death alone in the snow. They stalk the outskirts of civilization, preying on those who venture a little too far beyond the campfire. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of them, moving through the shadows of the woods at night. Sometimes they whisper to you.

Some Native Americans are starting to use the wendigo as a metaphor for colonization. In folklore the wendigo can spread from person to person, an infection that devours those who become isolated. In the metaphor that becomes a kind of spiritual virus, an ideology that consumes your empathy and blinds you to the connections between yourself, your community, and the natural world. Those who succumb get caught up in a ceaseless pursuit of wealth at all costs. It is in many ways the default setting for the Western world, and even if you manage to escape it it is always lurking, ready to pull you back in.

It really feels like we’ve reached that point in society, where the optimism and promise of our technology has run aground from a combination of laissez-faire capitalism, unfettered greed, and bad faith. Early in my career I sometimes felt I was contributing, in some small way, to building the future. I don’t feel like that any more. We’ve instead constructed a monstrous system that threatens to consume us all.

The final section of Team Human talks a bit about the future. It doesn’t have a lot of practical suggestions — I think a lot of people are only just realizing how bad things have been allowed to get and how there’s no one left to save the world but us — but the book does have an idea of what a path forward might look like.

Lots of people think we’re overdue for some kind of revolution, but Rushkoff reminds us those rarely turn out well for the average person. It’s not just the bloodshed. All too often once the smoke clears and the last of the tumbrels have departed from the Place de la Concorde you look up to find the same tired systems reasserting themselves, even if the names on the doorplates have changed.

Instead, Team Human calls for a renaissance. A renaissance is about rediscovering all the things of value from the past that we’ve misplaced. It doesn’t attempt to recreate it, but to reimagine and integrate the best elements of it. And unlike a revolution, it doesn’t fixate on replacing the leadership. It’s a wholesale rethinking of our relationship to each other and to the world at large. It touches everything: philosophy, technology, politics, art, commerce. It doesn’t overthrow the government so much as make the ideologies which enabled it untenable.

Maybe a renaissance is farfetched. Working towards it still sounds better than doing nothing or hoping for a revolution that’s only going to end up shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. We need to change how we relate to one another at a fundamental level, and we need to make that change at every level of society so it becomes the deep magic of the world, as natural as breathing.

And as above, so below. I need to find the same thing in my own life. I don’t need a place to live so much as I need a community to be a part of. I don’t know how to find it. I’m not even sure how to go about looking for it. But at least, for the first time in forever, I have some idea of what I’m looking for.

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