I’m just going to go ahead and claim prescience for writing a play about a guy named Paul who leaves the Internet. (We can also rack up a few serendipity points for the fact that the actor playing Paul this summer is the one who pointed this article out to me.) It’s fascinating to see someone dealing in real life with a lot of the themes that made me tackled this subject in the first place, and real-life Paul crystalizes some of the ideas that character-Paul, and everyone else in Paper City Phoenix, give voice to throughout the play. The whole thing’s worth a read, but this stood out:

I’d read enough blog posts and magazine articles and books about how the internet makes us lonely, or stupid, or lonely and stupid, that I’d begun to believe them. I wanted to figure out what the internet was “doing to me,” so I could fight back. But the internet isn’t an individual pursuit, it’s something we do with each other. The internet is where people are.

Would Miller’s experiment have been different if nobody else had the Internet, either? Probably. But people who talk about its “detrimental” effect on society often miss that one, central fact: it’s not a thing that we all use from time to time. It’s a whole part of us, by now. It is connection. It is an interface. It’s not just something that disseminates or engages with culture: it is the culture. And so to leave it all behind also means, in many ways, leaving society. Is that scary? Maybe. But no more than saying the same thing about, say, public transportation, or phone service. The Internet isn’t making us become anything; it’s allowing us to become who we’re generally predisposed to be, and also helping us share that person with the world. And that seems like a sum positive, to me.