Every month, most days of the month, I find it harder to find anything at all that is worth looking at on the internet - well, anything good and new.
(The good stuff is pretty-much all old stuff - old books, essays, interviews, music, poems and the like.)
This is the ultimate extremity of the traditonal complaint of my generation that 'There's nothing good on The Telly'.
In my childhood this referred to two channels (BBC & ITV); by early adulthood it was four (plus BBC2 and much later Channel 4); from c 1980 supplemented by video recordings. Then from the late 90s the internet began to take over and there seemed to me at the time such a richness of good stuff that life was too short to get through it...
This was an illusion. Almost everything I used to read I would now regard as pernicious, pretentious, dishonest, foolish, hope-draining, blind-making, painting-into-the corner rubbish.
Quite possibly the criticism of nothing good also applies to this blog; I wouldn't know because I only write it, I don't have to read it.
But it is a fact - and it is actually a kind of progress in my own discernment. There never was much good on the internet; although there was more good stuff 15+ years ago than there is now; because the decline in honesty, beauty and virtue has been very rapid indeed!: news, magazines, personal web pages, blogs etc - like the major social institutions, and the traditional mass media - have gotten much worse, and the decline is palpable season by season.
However, mostly this is things coming to a point, getting clearer - the difference between the sides of God and Satan, Good and Evil, Love and Inversion, spiritual Christianity and secular Leftism are all getting painfully clear, obvious and explicit; so that it is now clear, obvious and explicit that very-nearly-everything, almost-everywhere on the internet aims to be destructive of Good; and is destructive of Good.
(Indeed, so is almost everything that supposes itself, or advertises itself, as going against secular Leftism, materialism, despairing nihilism - including nearly all the self-styled Christian material. This too I feel in my heart to be overwhelmingly nasty, cold and hard, fear and hate driven, power and ego driven... dragging me down to the same low level as mainstream modern society. Actively repellant, and increasingly therefore avoided.)
The internet is not just a trivial yet addictive waste of time, but a pernicious and systematic attempt to demoralise, terrorise and corrupt each and every one of us.
No need for hysterics! - that is just the way it is, and we must be calmly realistic about the fact.
As a strong generalisation there is indeed nothing good on the internet - and ever less.
NOTE: This was the general theme of my 2014 book Addicted to Distraction - http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk - but three years down the line from writing it, I would now regard that volume as having been insufficiently strongly expressed.
