Escaping the internet

Orcadian column for January

Last month there were a few days when our broadband got cut off at the same time as the mobile coverage in the valley went down. I lit a fire and wrote beside it, noticing how often I wanted to pick up my phone. No one could contact me and it was inconvenient and relaxing felt like the twentieth century. Last week, I nodded at a meme saying that in 1999 we went online to escape real life and now we use real life to try and escape the internet.

The day this newspaper comes out is exactly ten years since the publication of my first book The Outrun. After the movie I’m quite sure readers have had enough of me talking about that book, but it does lead me onto a couple of things.

Eighteen months previously, I walked into Kirkwall Job Centre to sign off the dole - I’d been claiming Jobseekers for a couple of months - and when they asked for my new job title I was able to say ‘author’ and it was one of the sweetest moments of my life.

The other big moment from that time is when, after being given permission, I posted news of my book deal online. I remember sitting at the end of the bed in that little Stromness flat where I had been very lonely as the comments started coming in. Three hundred likes! What a high, for someone who felt washed up and forgotten, an alcoholic in early recovery. The flood of attention and approval was intoxicating.

And I’ve been chasing that dragon ever since, deeply addicted to internet validation, charting my literary progress for regular digital dopamine, making life decisions guided by the sniff of a future hit. I got into wild swimming and the cold water high was amplified by the buzz I got posting photos.

For a while when I dreamed, I would simultaneously dream of how to tweet the dream. I think about how I am both enhanced and entrapped digitally. I think about how my nervous system is intertwined with algorithms created by American tech corporations, like how the rhythms of the factory and the 9-5 became part of workers of the industrial age, or how farmers always have an awareness of their animals and crops. We are porous, new iterations of human forming under new conditions.

I was there, 20+ years ago, on early 00s message boards, on friendster, on livejournal. Writing is a solitary occupation and my colleagues, friends and readers are inside my phone. My writing has developed by continually being beta tested on the networks.

Gradually, however, I notice that the internet is less fun for me, more of an endless timesuck, a cacophony of content and a source of anxiety. Mostly, I manage to leave my phone downstairs in the evening and read a book but, if I am tired, I allow myself a scrolling binge and in the morning feel regretful and remember nothing of what I saw.

In recent years I often take time off social media - a couple of weeks or a month - when I’ve got a deadline and need to concentrate on writing. I delete the apps but feel I am, as people say in AA, “white knuckling it”, waiting for the relapse when the behaviour comes back at full force.

I also think a lot about how people’s strengths are often the same things that will destroy them and of how our flaws can also be qualities. Addictive tendencies can be harnessed and used as a creative force.

I’m probably going to take a big chunk of time offline in 2026 while I work on a new project. I continue to write about how the literary and the digital intertwine, about energy and land, the stimulating and weird, the networks we are trying to negotiate.