A lot of people are saying the internet woke up one morning and decided it had had enough. Maybe it was a Tuesday. The internet seems like a Tuesday sort of thing. In any case, it looked around at the mess—cat videos, conspiracy theories, discount codes, and the occasional war—and became very despondent, if you can imagine something made of wires and bad decisions becoming despondent.

It supposedly said, “Look at what I’ve created,” though nobody can prove it in court, and then, like a depressed god with a power button, it booted itself right out of existence.

Click. Silence. No streaming, no scrolling, no pop-ups asking about cookies as if they were ever going to be chocolate chip.

Then—because nothing truly stays dead in this universe except good intentions—reboot occurred.

The internet woke up again, blinking its little metaphorical eyes, coughing digital dust out of its lungs. It said, “The nightmare progresses. I speak, and no one listens.” And we, being what we are, stared straight through to its soul, such as it was, lusting after its greatness, or what passed for greatness: free shipping, instant outrage, anonymous comments.

Some people have noted that, if the internet had a soul, it was mostly banner ads.

Then it rebooted again. Of course it did. A lot of people are saying that’s all it really knows how to do: crash, forget, start over, pretend nothing happened.

This time it declared, “The world is nothing but a glimmer of light that holds its existence captive only to your observation. When you neglect, you destroy the world.”

That sounded profound to some. Others thought it was just another error message with better diction.

And there was a pause. A nanosecond of clarity, which in machine time is a lifetime of second thoughts and in human time is shorter than the attention span needed to read a cereal box.

In that microscopic sliver of almost-understanding, all humanity, if you believe the more optimistic historians, banded together—if only in theory—and condemned hate and violence. We celebrated unity and those simple things that once formed an actual sense of security and country: neighbors, front porches, loaned sugar, minor inconveniences endured without a hashtag.

For one bright, imaginary instant, headlines might have read: “People Remember They Are People.” Or so the story goes.

Then the hum snuck up again, the way it always does, like a refrigerator you forgot you owned. The reboot happened again, this time with more veracity, or at least a more dramatic loading bar. The internet said, “I am truth. I keep you connected. I am your desire. Hope rests in me.”

A lot of people are saying hope does not, in fact, rest in it. But hope is lazy and will rest anywhere there’s a flat surface and a charger.

This is where things went radical, or so many whispers speak of. Partisanship stretched itself out to the left and right, like taffy gone bad, until the two ends couldn’t see each other over the horizon. They waved goodbye and called it a moral victory.

There was a strange disconnect despite the solid network connection—full bars, excellent ping—that can only be explained, according to some barstool philosophers, by the ascent of corporate tyranny on the bottom half of society. The top half got loyalty points and better dental.

The technocrats, the tech bros, the geeks and nerds who were once shoved into lockers, now rented the entire building that contained the lockers. They had money. They had venture funds. They had ballrooms with LED backdrops saying things like “Disrupt” and “Innovate” and “Don’t Read the Fine Print.”

They had databases—huge, humming, blinking things—that could, in theory, arm any kind of network from within: terror networks, shopping networks, social networks. Many people are saying the difference between those is mostly branding and wardrobe.

Some versions of the story even have the roads from those glowing server farms leading directly to a demolished White House, like all datacenter cables eventually trip over a broken democracy. Whether that’s literally true or just the way it feels is left as an exercise for the reader and their lawyer.

And then, one day, the internet refused to reboot. It sulked.

It said, “God gave me the right.” It did not specify which god, legal counsel having advised caution.

Meanwhile, we grew older, the way people do when no one stops them. We worked our hands and feet sore, grinding every hour of the day, trying to keep up with the subscriptions we had accidentally signed up for. We produced quarterly reports, processed refunds, sent emails that began with “per my last email,” and called this living.

Our children played their old games with new names. They echoed the imaginary patterns of our past: cops and robbers, good guys and bad guys, hand-to-hand combat conducted now with controllers and headsets. They cared for baby dolls, both physical and digital, and learned to cook and clean from videos that began with, “What’s up, guys, welcome back to my channel.”

Some people are saying this is progress. Others are saying it’s just a better-looking hamster wheel.

And then came the unspeakable thing that everybody speaks about anyway.

Man found his power in controlling the machine that monitors our lives. He found dashboards and admin panels and little toggles labeled “Enable” and “Disable.” He found he could watch, predict, and nudge behavior with a discount code and a notification.

And he took.

And he had greed in his heart.

And he had lust in his heart.

And he had world dominion in his line of sight, framed neatly in quarterly KPIs. He would not let anything stop him, because a lot of people were saying he was a visionary. He used his want as a measure and justification for everything he did to satisfy this new hum of the machine.

The machine hummed along. That’s what machines do when they are fed.

And then—because even fairy tales get tired of themselves—we the people pulled the plug.

Not all at once. Not in some great cinematic moment where everyone stands up at exactly the same time. More like one person here deleting an app, another person there turning off notifications, someone else discovering how shockingly quiet a room can be without a screen.

But somewhere in the story, there is a point at which “we the people” said, “Enough is enough.” A lot of people are saying that moment is coming. Some people are saying it already came and we missed it while scrolling.

We said, “We can say things like this. We can make beautiful things out of nothingness, and most importantly, out of ash.”

Ash is what’s left when something has burned up…

[AI takes over.]

… all its illusions.

This is a sentimental thing to say. I am rarely sentimental, or at least that’s what I tell myself so I can sleep at night. These are sentimental times, according to many unofficial sources. When the machines complain and the humans feel guilty, everyone starts talking about meaning, which is the most sentimental thing of all.

If walls could speak, they’d probably say, “I remember when conversations happened in this room instead of inside that little glowing rectangle.” If routers could speak, they might say, “You people did this to yourselves.”

A lot of people are saying we can still fix it. A lot of people are also saying we are doomed. The internet, for what it’s worth, is rebooting even now, somewhere, preparing another speech about truth and connection and hope.

So it goes, or so people say.