Why am I filled with nostalgia for a pre-internet age I never knew? | Isabel Brooks

A recent survey suggests that almost half of young people would prefer a world without the internet.

There’s clearly something we feel we’re missing out on that older people have had, and we attribute it to the internet or at least to its current form, dominated as it is by social media.

Life now in comparison seems streamlined, efficient, more yassified, in a phenomenon that writer Michael Harris calls a “loss of lack”.

The internet has allowed unparalleled access to older music, knowledge, ways of living and by nature democratic.

If this survey is a canary in the mine, what should we do? I don't think being misty-eyed about the past is the solution.

“Authenticity”, I think, looks like the power to opt in or out, perform or not, when you want to.