Unpopular Opinion: The Internet Is Meant for Fun
How We Strayed from Humanity's Greatest Invention—and Can Maybe Still Save It
I once delivered a pizza to a complete stranger 763 miles away—for no other reason than it sounded fun. True story.
One late and lonely night in 2015, I posted a message on Twitter: “How can I help?”
Within minutes, a follower from Canada, someone I did not know and had never met before, replied, “Well, a pizza sounds nice!”
Indeed, I thought, it does.
Immediately, I direct-messaged the man, asking for his address.
Bewildered, he gave it to me, then added an “LOL” to the end of the message—millennial-speak for “don’t take this seriously.”
Of course, I did the opposite, asking my then-assistant, Lorna, who is the real hero of this story, if she’d help me after hours find a pizza place still open in Toronto so that we could make this guy’s dreams come true. She said of course.
His local time was approaching midnight, so this was no easy feat. Nonetheless, Lorna made some calls and found a place about to close. She gave the pizzeria my number in case of any issues, and when a late-night call from an unknown number showed up on my iPhone screen while I was brushing my teeth, I picked up.
It was the delivery man telling me that the man from Twitter was nowhere to be found. Turns out, it’s harder than you think to track down a stranger in the middle of night and give him a free pizza.
I returned to Twitter to DM the guy: “Hey, do you want this pizza or what?”
Apparently, he had been working late and was mortified to hear that Toronto’s finest food delivery people had been dispatched and were waiting patiently on him. Nonetheless, our cause prevailed, and the man from Toronto enjoyed his hot-and-ready pepperoni-and-cheese just before one o’clock in the morning.
Why did I do it?
I’m not sure. Call it a mix of boredom and curiosity, maybe throw in some loneliness, and you have my motivation at the time. Mostly, though, it just seemed like a silly thing to do, something worthy of a story. It sounded like fun.
A few months later, in the middle of winter when I had forgotten all about that Great Pizza Caper, I posted a tongue-in-cheek status update on Facebook: “They really need to invent a cappuccino delivery service.”
At the time, food delivery was not the modern marvel it is today, at least not where I lived, and this also happened to be the week of Nashville’s annual blizzard when the entire town shuts down every year for seven days, so going out for any reason, much less a warm and tasty beverage, was out of the question.
Twenty minutes after posting this message, I heard my doorbell ring. When I opened the front door, all I saw was my friend Daryl walking back to his four-wheel-drive truck parked in the cul-de-sac outside our house, and at my feet were two cappuccinos on the doorstep, still steaming.
This might sound strange coming from a guy who quit social media over a year ago, but I miss those days.
To be fair, I’m sure there are plenty of good people doing good things on the old “interwebs,” but it’s getting harder to find them. And I don’t think any of us would say the primary function of social media is fun, anymore. Entertainment? A way to kill time? Something to do when you’re bored? Absolutely. But fun? True enjoyment? I don’t think so.
Frankly, I blame democracy. At least the democratization of online publishing, that is. Sure, it’s great that we don’t have to deal with censorship. But the same thing that so many of us once marveled at is now the cause of so much digital clutter and stress in our lives. Is it not?
Many of us are posting things many times per day, and most of what is posted is not so nice, positive, or interesting. When I scroll a news site, peek into a place like Instagram, or even turn on the car radio, I am struck by how much negativity there is to imbibe, how much endless bickering and complaining, how much gossip and fear-mongering.
We literally have the world at our fingertips, and we are wasting it.
We are an impatient generation, it seems, we who demand overnight shipping, who want the best of everything and will not wait another minute for it. To quote the now-scandalized Louis C.K.: “Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy.”
But what else can we expect from an information highway overcome with traffic and smog? Even I, the guy who used to use the web to send pizzas to strangers in other countries, is now sitting here complaining.
This was not, I’d like to think, how it was meant to be.
When I first started publishing online, initially in the form of bad poetry on message boards in the late 1990s, then in the form of playing text-based roleplaying games (this was obviously before I ever had a girlfriend), and finally via blogs in 2006 and beyond, I was amazed at what such technology could offer a curious soul.
Using what we then called simply “new media,” I could take my same old table scraps of writing that had been cluttering old notebooks from high school and share them with the world. Or, at least, share them with a few more people than just myself.
So I did. I wrote and I shared. I left out little bread crumbs of ideas on different blogs (ten in total), started some podcasts, joined various groups and online communities, and met all kinds of interesting people. Together, we searched for ways to bring more like-minded individuals together, finding ways to do cool things.
What was so interesting then, and frankly so addictive, was how quickly people responded. You’d write a post, publish it, then five minutes later see someone leave a comment. Sometimes, they’d write their own take and link to your piece, and then someone else would do the same—and on and on it went.
This was an extraordinary opportunity, to be an average person on the Internet with so much access to so many others, not bound by geography, time, or space. For those of us who had not grown up with tiny computers rattling around in our pockets every day, it was magic. We knew how lucky we were.
Today, though, the opportunity to publish anything from anywhere is far from extraordinary. Now, we have nearly unlimited opportunities to say so many things to so many people. You can, sadly, write the worst book in the world, even a blank book, and publish it on Amazon within a few days of writing it. If you play your cards right, you can even get some poor sucker to buy it.
Now, there are life coaches wherever you are, broadcasting tidbits of advice on a tiny screen you can’t stop staring at. I mean, life coaches! Who would have thought we needed instructions on how to live? But apparently, we do. And you can find them, or a therapist, with a press of your thumb. We have memes and Youtube shorts; artificial intelligence models serving as paralegals; and gamers playing Fornite for profit while millions of fans watch them do it live.
None of this is to say the Internet in the late nineties and early aughts was some golden age of human kindness and ingenuity—it wasn’t.
Once in high school, I received an email from a friend with the subject line: “Got milk?” It took minutes for the attachment to download, and my adolescent body surged with excitement as I began to see an image of a naked woman’s body appearing on the screen. As the photo continued to download, however, the full image arrived, and I saw a fully naked woman defecating directly into a man’s gaping mouth.
So, you know, it wasn’t all great.
But in those early days of the Internet, and then online publishing, to receive any kind of message, anything at all, was outrageous. It was an embarrassment of riches. We knew not what power we possessed.
Now, most of us tend to take this sort of thing for granted. Sending images, posting stories, sharing ideas with strangers on the other side of the planet is not extraordinary—it is expected. What once was incredible is now taken for granted.
Sending images, posting stories, sharing ideas with strangers on the other side of the planet is not extraordinary—it is expected. What once was incredible is now taken for granted.
Everywhere we look, there is a preponderance of “content.” You know. Content. The stuff you use to fill a jar. The kind of thing that lines the inside of an aerosol can. As in, “contents under pressure may explode.” It’s everywhere.
But back then, content was rare. If someone had a blog, it was exceptional. If someone wrote online regularly and shared their thoughts with dozens of others, it was remarkable. We all commented and responded, then reacted with our own thoughts. And we had a blast doing it. It wasn’t perfect, but it was enjoyable. I don’t think any of us would have described that experience as stressful or anxiety producing.
Contrast that with the so-called “creator economy” which continues to emerge. Musicians and authors are often sharing their discomfort with having to stay at the top of the feed, feeling the need to keep producing average work so that they don’t get forgotten and don’t go broke. Nowadays, content is not novel; it is assumed.
In some cases, influencers are pressured to speak out on certain topics and then are maligned by millions when they refuse or delay. One such case I heard was of a woman who was criticized by her fan base for not publicly decrying recent atrocities in Gaza while she was in the hospital, giving birth to a human child. She deleted all her social media accounts after that—several million in all, I believe.
Things are, I think we can say, getting a little out of hand.
This weekend, I spent an hour replying to old emails, messages I’d received over the past month that kept getting buried. I knew I needed to get to these but just didn’t have any time. So after a lazy morning, I put a record on the hifi and started digging myself out of the deluge.
One email came from an effusive eighty-six year-old in Arizona who had recently read one of my books. It had been sitting on her shelf; and after reading it, she was convinced it was time to start her own book.
Another message came from a college grad in Houston who had just landed a good job but discovered a newfound affinity for art. She felt conflicted, found a book I’d written, and was sharing her thanks for it. I returned the gratitude and encouraged her to keep making good money at her job while continuing to make good art.
Another came from a man in Italy looking for a Spanish or Italian translation of my latest book.
I traded messages with others, as well: some readers, some past and current students of writing courses I had taught, even some potential con artists and scammers and some other lonely souls seemingly looking for connection.
As I did this, I remembered that scene in Walk the Line where Johnny Cash, strung out on drugs and trying to put his life back together, opens up his mail after a long time of not reading it. It’s piles and piles of letters, parcels to the brim, all reminders of his impact. In those letters, he sees—after the dust clouds of fame and success have settled—that there is more to a message or a song or any piece of content than mere ego. There is a chance to connect with a real human, and that never gets old.
This, I think, was a fact we all understood in those early days of blogging, something we forgot at some point. The idea that anyone could do any of this for a living was inconceivable. Blogging and social networking were not about getting famous. This was not a consideration, at least not at first. Our intent was to play, to poke these things that we weren’t even sure what they were, and see what happened.
We were not digital natives. We were tourists, still learning the language and what might be possible in this brand-new landscape. Some of us did pretty well, but we were just kids then, invited to a theme park that we never could have imagined visiting much less living in. We did not know what we had or what any of this would become.
It was fun.
Even now, as I write this, I do not understand what is happening here. I do not know how any of this works—this free tool that allows me to reach thousands of people with just my fingers and a keyboard. It’s still a mystery to me, still a bit of magic, and I hope this little rant is not just another piece of content, one more chunk of information getting stuffed into the never-ending container of the Internet. Then again, I’m probably fooling myself. But still, I can hope. I can long for better times, for more of what I’ve always wanted, what I think most humans want—which is not another argument or controversy but just a chance to connect.
Short of that, though, I’d settle for a pizza.1
P.S. I wrote this post over the weekend while taking a break from my current work-in-progress, which is now over 21,000 words. If you want to follow my 25-day book-writing challenge (I’m about halfway done!), click here.
My wife encouraged me to put our address at the bottom of this piece just to see how many people would send us free pizzas, but I told her no. If you really want to do something nice, though, you can become a paid subscriber.
Jeff, you must still be doing something right because I read the whole article. And enjoyed it!
I stay off the internet as much as possible, but you lead me to
Jerry Jenkins and Joseph Michael. These two gentlemen have helped me on my writing journey and I am in the middle of writing my book.
Thank you, Jeff. It all started by reading one of your free articles from pro writing aid.
I don't need a pizza, but a lot of people are benefiting from your writing, so on keep on fueling the internet with content.
Ah, those halcyon days at the Frothy Monkey, scribbling away at lunch, and then listening to you teach and introduce Joe Bunting, among others. Good times. Years later, I’m still writing, but the landscape feels like a glut of marketing and self promotion. And yet, good stuff still filters through. Speaking of good stuff, think I’ll make myself a coffee! Thanks, Jeff.