This was long before “red-pilled” got co-opted into a crude political metaphor for embracing hard-edged conservatism. The Matrix was never partisan; it was a product of the late Nineties, a time when artists still felt queasy about the idea of society being consumed whole by silicon-flecked capitalism. “Hey man, slow down,” Thom Yorke begged us on OK Computer, the technophobic Radiohead album. The Matrix likewise presented the acceptance or rejection of networked technology as the epiphanal moment of its hero’s journey. The blue pill offered Neo a sedative that would return him to blissful ignorance by wiping his memory and once again tuck him into a comfortable, simulated dream full of endless computer-generated novelty. The red pill offered a disturbing wake-up call to an unsettling reality: humans were literally being harvested as batteries for a machine-ruled world. 

In the theater — remember that? — we collectively cheered for Neo to take the red pill. We rooted for the man who would rather shiver in a post-apocalyptic wasteland than live in a high-resolution lie. Yet, in the 25 years since, we have quietly, and almost universally, taken the blue pill daily ourselves, and chosen to live in the illusory comforts of the mediated online world, while the social fabric and material realities decayed around us. Or as author Jenny Odell poignantly asks in her book How to Do Nothing: “what does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?” 

But as 2025 draws to a close, we can see evidence of a rebellion afoot. Not a revolution, mind you, but a series of distinct signs that the internet-first mode of life that defined the 2010s and early 2020s is finally and mercifully on the wane. It’s the year of the Great Unplugging, if not for everyone, then for a growing cohort of red-pilled rebels.

Ironically, it was the reelection of Donald Trump that has the early adopters — the liberals — reaching for the red pills in greater quantities. For nearly two decades, anti-tech sentiment was most evident on the Right. Conservatives long bemoaned the influence of the media, Hollywood, and academia; and the platforms of Silicon Valley were the staging ground for their constant losses in the culture wars. During the first Trump administration, the content moderator was perceived as a defender of woke capitalism by the Right, but a hero of democracy on the Left. “The power of Big Tech is something that William Randolph Hearst at the height of yellow journalism could not have imagined,” said Ted Cruz back in 2018. 

Meanwhile, the relationship between the Democratic establishment and Silicon Valley, especially during the Obama years, was a cozy, mutual-admiration society. The Dems embraced tech in every classroom, while Big Data’s Big Money fueled the campaign machines of neoliberal Dems. The firms themselves gatekept information in their favor, while insisting with a straight face that “reality has a liberal bias”. But that spell has definitively broken. When Elon Musk, the ultimate Silicon Valley turncoat, transformed X into a digital staging ground for the New Right and helped propel Trump back to the White House, and the other oligarchs of Big Tech kissed the ring at the inauguration, mainstream liberals underwent a sudden, violent conversion to Luddism-lite. They realized that the “connected world” they had spent 30 years helping build was no longer under their control. If they couldn’t control the simulation, they might simply unplug the machine. 

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The evidence of the shift is becoming impossible to ignore — manifesting in a visceral, street-level rejection of the tech-state alliance. In response to the Musk-led “DOGE Days” of the American government, the very people who once prized a Tesla as a sign of enlightened progress began staging Tesla Takedowns, sometimes with fiery results, literally burning the vehicles that were to save the planet from global warming.

Even the mainstream media is changing its tune on tech. Just in the last few months, there’s been a spate of articles questioning the status quo of tech maximalism of the 21st century, and suddenly issued whoopsie-daisies. Abundance, this year’s buzzy policy-prescription book for Democrats, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, is a tacit admission that we need to rebuild the physical world outside of the one powered by software. 

Twenty years ago, Wired was the unofficial house organ of Silicon Valley; now it is publishing essays from tech-hater Paris Marx. For almost two years, the liberal commentariat studiously ignored the work of Jonathan Haidt in his massively best-selling book, The Anxious Generation, regarding the dangers of unlimited tech for the young. His warnings were dismissed as “moral panic” or, more effectively, “Right-wing coded” — too close to the scolding traditionalism of the past to take seriously. Now mainstream commentators are suddenly aware that social media ruined the mental health of a generation, and that iPad kids are depressed, socially paralyzed, and — to put it bluntly — insanely dumb. 

By 2025, the reassessment of Haidt’s conclusions has quickly moved from theory to practice. Across the country, Millennial parents have begun rejecting smartphones for their children and reinstalling landline phones at home, or opting for Tin Cans: simplified, screen-free Wi-Fi devices that allow kids to call friends without access to social-media feeds. Haidt’s own Anxious Generation website now lists over 50 grassroots organizations fighting for a phone-free childhood, including Appstinence, Screen Sanity, and Landline Kids.

In 2025, schools across the country — even in deep-blue cities — began taking Haidt’s warnings more seriously and banned phones. As of December, 35 states plus the District of Columbia signed or already enacted laws or policies limiting phone use in K-12 classrooms, tripling the number that banned them in 2024.

Australia’s decision to ban social media for teens and children under 16, which officially took effect on 10 December, was a watershed moment. It isn’t a perfect policy, and it will surely be circumvented by the tech-savvy, but it was a public admission by a major state that being “permanently online” is a public-health hazard, and it was time to treat it with the same skepticism as cigarettes or lead paint. Many countries, including the United States, are considering age-gating social media in similar ways. “We know the world will be watching,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a September speech at the United Nations.

Let’s not pat ourselves on the back too hard, though. The internet has a hand in its own murder — death by its own contradictions, including the fact that it is the world’s most expensive apocalypse generator. Logically, you’d assume that a society living in a high-tech “gilded cage” of instant delivery and infinite entertainment would be the most complacent population in history. If the simulation is comfortable enough, why would anyone want to leave? But the great irony of the 2025 version of The Matrix is that instead of producing a world of happy consumers, it has produced a generation of Doomers — with many convinced that we are living in the literal End Times. If you lean Left, the algorithm hints that something called “late-stage capitalism” is a terminal disease that will inevitably lead to a climate-scorched wasteland. If you’re on the Right, the cage tells you that “Communism” is a shadowy, all-powerful force that has already hollowed out your institutions and is coming for your leafblowers next.

But this Doom Machine doesn’t even work as well as it used to do. As Cory Doctorow describes it, Big Tech is in so-called enshittification mode, meaning that as platforms mature, they prioritize extraction and monetization over a healthy ecosystem. AI has intensified this process, as it’s become incredibly easy to flood the zone with shit, to paraphrase Steve Bannon. Now social media feeds are increasingly a slurry of “shrimp Jesuses” and other AI-generated content that is frictionless, impersonal, and ultimately disposable. It’s so pervasive that Merriam-Webster named “slop” its 2025 Word of the Year. 

There’s evidence that the internet’s slop era may be its flop era, as well: the growth of everything-all-at-once social-media networks that once appeared omnipresent is on the decline. A sprawling new study by the Financial Times, which tracked the online behavior of 250,000 adults across more than 50 countries, found that usage across the major social platforms has dipped nearly 10% since 2022. The share of people using these platforms for their original purpose, to actually meet or stay in touch with friends and family, has cratered by 25% over the last decade. 

These apps are now anti-social media, which is likely why Pew says just 21% of Americans use X, down from 25% in 2021. Another report claims the social network saw its user base decline by roughly 10% since Musk purchased it. Bluesky? It now looks like an online hospice for shrill progressives. The tech companies themselves say the numbers are stable, but they’re Potemkin villages being artificially pumped via artificial means. Consider that automated and AI-powered bots surpassed humans in web traffic this year — meaning the web is increasingly a surreal space where robots imitate us to talk to each other. 

Some of that decline is obviously due to the industry’s shift from Web 2.0 to ChatGPT and AI chatbots. But the AI takeover doesn’t account for other factors, such as the fact that the world of virtual play is facing a dopamine dead end. In November, the video game industry, once the 800-pound gorilla of the attention economy, endured its worst hardware sales slump since 1995. Total spending has plummeted 27% last month compared to November 2024, and Microsoft’s Xbox sales hit a historic low. Relatedly, the live-streaming giant Twitch, the social media network for an entire generation of gamer shut-ins, recorded its lowest monthly watch time in more than four years after it cracked down on bots. 

This fascinating cultural shift is most prominent among the demographic most synonymous with the “eternal scroll”: young men. Gen Z is bifurcated. For every disgustingly elaborate Goon Cave, there’s a guy who is health-maxxing, led by a gospel of “Optimized Man” influencers like Andrew Huberman, the Stanford neuroscientist turned podcaster. The new status symbol among some young Gen-Zers isn’t pretending to be snipers and killing strangers in a PS5 video game; it’s a high cortisol reading from a morning ice bath and a deliberate, stubborn commitment to “touching grass”. Just ask Mark Zuckerberg, who, a few years ago, was trying to make his own trillion-dollar Metaverse happen but has spent 2025 “rawdogging reality”.

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It’s not just the bros: a growing number of the rest of us are unplugging and joining social clubs — both public and private — at a rate not seen since the Second World War generation. They’re everywhere now: running clubs (“the new dating apps,” says CNN), pickleball clubs, book clubs, bougie  “wellness” clubs — even anti-phone offline clubs. I run a bar-trivia company in Pennsylvania, and just recorded my first successful trivia meet-cute — a young couple that got engaged last week after first putting their heads together at my weekly pub quiz. Even print publications are making a minor comeback, promising to become what vinyl records were to the hipsters of the 2010s: a fortification against a digital world that can be easily “edited”, deepfaked, or disappeared at a whim. Playboy is now back in print after being killed during the peak Covid era (read it for the, ahem, articles).

Truthfully, this vibe shift was already happening even before the seismic political shift of the 2024 election. Much of it is a reaction to the online maximalist life we endured during Covid. How addicted to the internet were we? During our peak consumption in 2021, Americans spent more than seven hours a day staring at screens, nearly a third of their waking life. For those who worked in Corporate Laptop Land, that figure was much higher, as office drones habitually traded the “Bad Screens” of work by day for the “Good Screens” of entertainment at night. 

The online-all-the-time days fueled a growing recognition across ideological lines that something in the bargain we made in the Nineties was false. In the end, infinite connection on the internet produced isolation, the frictionless convenience of apps flattened experience, and a life mediated through algorithms slowly hollowed out the self and society. By 2023, The Atlantic conceded that something in our culture had fundamentally changed, and that we’d quietly slipped into a dystopian Metaverse, where our politics, our social lives, and our very identities were replaced by a digital knock-off. 

We were becoming like the “gargoyles”, characters from Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel that was a precursor to The Matrix, and was once required reading for Facebook’s management team. For gargoyles, there was no “logging on” and “logging off” from the internet, and it destroyed their brains. “Gargoyles are no fun to talk to,” Stephenson wrote. “They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter-wave radar, and ultrasound all at once.” If that passage strikes a nerve, it’s because Silicon Valley has been spending trillions of dollars to turn us all into gargoyles. 

It won’t stop in 2026. The tech industry isn’t dumb. They know people are slowly escaping the Eternal Goon Cave, which is why they’ve launched an all-out assault on the human attention span by integrating gambling into every conceivable corner of the digital experience, in a brazen attempt at the total “casinofication” of consciousness. Major platforms have spent the last 12 months integrating “prediction markets” and “mini-wagers” into everything from political news to celebrity gossip. The recent news that CNN is partnering with prediction marketeer Kalshi to help bet on the news is a clarifying moment. If an algorithm can’t make you care through content, it will make you care through financial desperation. It’s a predatory loop that promises to transform the user from a citizen into a “mark”, and tether them to the screen with the desperate hope of a payout.

Luckily, this isn’t 2012 anymore. If the previous decade was the era of digital optimism over Web 2.0, and the early 2020s were the era of reluctant dependence — a time when we felt we had no choice but to inhabit the digital simulation — perhaps 2025 will one day be remembered as a new kind of Year Zero, when we rejected the dystopian cyberpunk element embedded in daily life now. That doesn’t mean we can, like Neo in The Matrix, desperately rip the cables out of our own spines to unplug from a system that numbs, distracts, and pacifies us. There are no simple red-pill/blue-pill binaries. But maybe, like Zuck, we’re rejecting the cyberrealm he built, and are now taking bold and committed steps towards rawdogging reality in The World 1.0. 

The closeup shot of Hopper (David Harbour) scowling in the next room carries at least two omens even darker than those conveyed by the noisy mouthplay of Mike and Eleven. As an image, Hopper’s scowl tells you that he’s angry. As an omen, it tells you that this anger will define him for an entire season, eight episodes of Hopper yelling when he really needs to be feeling his feelings. But Hopper’s angry figure is also cartoonish in its details — his eyes nearly crossed, his passive grip on a bag of Tostitos implying the timeless impotence of sitcom fathers — which tells you that the show’s creators are hatching a change in its genre. Stranger Things will now be, not exclusively but substantially, a comedy. And, like the sitcom figure of Hopper in a chair eating Tostitos and fuming to himself, this Stranger Things comedy will not be funny.

But maybe the darkest and deepest omens come in the very first scene of that episode, the one before the opening credits in which Soviet scientists train a massive laser on a cave wall, in what appears to be an effort to access the parallel dimension known from the earlier seasons as “the Upside Down”. The laser machine fires impressively, but the interdimensional barrier holds and the machine explodes, after which a cyborgish enforcer from the Soviet Communist Party lifts the chief scientist by the jaw, with a single hand, and fixes an iron cyborg grip on the soft scientist throat, and the scientist’s face goes realistically purple as he slowly dies. The Soviets, apparently, brooked no failure when it came to breaching interdimensional barriers.

For parents who watched Seasons One and Two with their tween and early-teen children, this strangulation was a bad omen indeed. Seasons One and Two had their violent and disturbing moments, which we parents put up with because it was Covid and the whole family loved this show, but the violence generally had a comic-book quality, and much of it was outright animated. Given the show’s status as beloved (if parentally guilty) family viewing, the slow, up-close, medically accurate strangling that opens Season Three was a shock and a betrayal. As an omen, it foretold the grosser betrayal of Season Four, when the show lurches into full-on “body horror”, with teenagers suspended midair by an unseen force that then snaps their limbs like pretzel sticks accompanied by medically accurate cracking sounds and totally believable screams of the teenagers being so carefully tortured and murdered. So much for family viewing.

But the most deeply ominous thing about these Soviets was that they were shown at all. Through the first two seasons, the Cold War had functioned, beautifully, as a sort of atmosphere. It murmured in the background, on the TV news, and it explained the perverse research and paranoid ferocity of those sci-fi bureaucrats bothering little Hawkins, Indiana, as well as the dull Eighties patriotism of Mike and Nancy’s dopey dad. But now the Cold War is present as a force of Soviet soldiers and scientists, grim with purpose but haunted by an air of slapstick incompetence. This is the omen that tells us everything merely latent or tacit from seasons One and Two, everything elegantly unstated and merely evoked, will be activated and made explicit. Nothing will be left to linger as atmosphere. Everything will be reference, and much of this will be self-reference. This self-reference will be comic in tone and aspiration, but, again, it will not be funny.

Others may have their own ways of describing what went wrong with Stranger Things, but few would reject my premise. Stranger Things has been really bad for three seasons. It just has. But if that’s the case, why does anyone still care about it? Why are so many people writing about it? Why am I writing about it? We complainers have actually watched those three bad seasons, which means watching over 30 hours of television that keeps merely re-delivering in greater intensities the experience of the first of those 30 hours: aesthetic revulsion. The analogy that comes to mind is wading into a bitter rain for several miles to pick up a pizza with all your least-favorite toppings on it.

The most powerful answer to those questions is that the first two seasons of the show were just refreshingly great, so refreshing and so great that the elevator-drop into badness after Season Two induced a sort of disbelief in the audience, a disbelief so total that it amounted to a form of hope: surely this was temporary? It had to be some unintended glitch. So instead of being repelled and turning away, people seem to have hung on expecting that the glitch would resolve itself, any time now, one of these episodes, one of these seasons, and we’d return to the rich and innocent thrills of the first two.

That this show originally had magic in it was signaled in the first episode of Season One, with an instantly beguiling pair of scenes. The first happens inside an apparently remote rural facility called “Hawkins National Laboratory”, whose lights are acting strangely and where some murderous beast or monster — we only hear it at first — seems to have got loose. So, a government research program gone awry, presumably. The next scene is four boys — Mike, Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), and little, big-eyed Will (Noah Schnapp) — sitting in the basement of a two-story house, at the climax of a dramatic 10-hour “campaign” of Dungeons and Dragons, which then goes haywire as Mike slaps the mega-monster, the “Demogorgon”, onto the board. But family dinner at Mike’s house ends the campaign at this dire moment and the boys disperse, after which we learn that Hawkins National Laboratory is in their town, Hawkins, Indiana, and we see little Will being chased through the woods by something with a scary silhouette, after which his family can’t find him.

Will’s disappearance places the remaining three boys in an emergency, which quickly becomes both an adventure and a cosmic mystery that somehow parallel their campaign. Using Dungeons and Dragons to frame this mystery and imbue it with mythic meaning and vocabulary for these nerdy boys — the monsters from Hawkins Lab, for example, become “Demogorgons” — is ingenious and enormously charming. The boys sitting around that gaming board as the first season begins are cute like children, but the unruly adolescence beginning to spark inside them makes them more interesting than children. They have forbidden things to learn, a real thirst to learn them, and, finally, the innocent audacity and the bicycles (and the pre-Nineties childhood freedom) they need to chase this forbidden knowledge.

From the boys’ perspective the mystery itself is fairly straightforward: what happened to Will? Or, more essentially, where did he go? Season One, then, is driven by the human emergency that little Will Byers appears to be lost in some alternative dimension, and, for the other characters, by the incredible head-trip that this dimension exists in the first place. When a would-be superhero appears, a short-haired girl with telekinetic powers who calls herself “Eleven”, her story takes on a similar structure. Who is Eleven? Where did she come from? What are her powers? Where did they come from? What does she know about Will?

Season Two adds various new elements, some that work beautifully and a few that seem to foretell the badness that would descend upon the show so suddenly a season hence. Dustin’s adoption of a mini-Demogorgon as a pet is implausible and irritating, and Eleven’s bizarre dalliance with punk-rock revolutionaries in Chicago seems to happen entirely for fashion reasons, as if the Duffer Brothers, the creators, grew suddenly alarmed that their show about the Eighties had no long coats or mohawks in it. The introduction of Murray the investigator works well enough in the season but it’s historically odd, in that a countercultural paranoid like him would have been paranoid about the Reagan Administration, not the Commies. His antic presence and the buggy closeups on his bearded face also foretell the grim wackiness that would soon take over the show.

But the boys’ world holds together. Their advance from board games to video games, for example, is historically accurate and narratively fruitful. And, crucially, the second season effectively redramatizes the excellent mystery of the first simply by introducing a new character into the friend-group — Max — and then having her innocence and skepticism sit volatilely alongside the incredible knowledge those nerdy boys carry with them. In Season One we followed along with the credulous boys as they learned about the Upside Down. In Season Two we follow along with wised-up Max as the boys’ knowledge about the Upside Down works its way through the layers of her disdain and disbelief. This is an underappreciated but powerful sci-fi story archetype — the drama of communication, in which characters occupy different sides of an epistemic chasm and must overcome doubt or distance or some other interference to understand each other.

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The convincing-Max storyline defines what’s good about Season Two, to me, but the most powerful example of the drama of communication actually occurs in Season One, with Will sending signals from the Upside Down to his desperate mother Joyce (Winona Ryder) through their telephone, blazing lightbulbs, a boom box, and the Christmas lights she’s insanely hung around her living room, and Joyce decoding these signals in states of agony and hope and purpose. Winona Ryder makes these scenes deeply moving (perhaps especially for the parent-viewer, for whom she is almost too good as an emotional proxy), and, together with communicative trials of Max and Lucas in Season Two, they illustrate the fertile constraints of the two-world structure the Duffer Brothers imposed upon themselves in those first two seasons. As in the first Matrix movie, Seasons One and Two of Stranger Things posit the exhilarating idea that an alternative world exists alongside our everyday reality. But a movie or show built on such a two-worlds scheme is wise to observe a sort of reticence or parsimony, to allow the alternative reality to linger vaguely in its details, as abstract counterpoint more than fully-fleshed-out alternative world, and to let the weird world and the familiar world interact with each other only sparingly. When you let the two worlds tangle with each other too much, plots can get pretty arbitrary, pretty fast. The embarrassing Matrix sequels showed this notoriously.

The Duffer Brothers observed these strictures for two seasons. However, the end of Season Two carried some hints that this arrangement was breaking down, and that things would get pretty ragged if Netflix agreed to a Season Three. The climactic scene of Demogorgons swarming Hawkins Lab and munching the faces of people trapped inside it was well wrought, but this wanton spilling of the contents of the Upside Down into the regular world pretty much undid the two-worlds tension that gave the show its metaphysical kick. And this would be the last time the audience could ignore the visual ridiculousness of Eleven fixing the big problem by dropping her chin and lifting her gaze and extending her hand to channel her supernatural girl-power at the evil force until it retreats. Deployed a second time, it becomes a built-in spoiler for every future season. Whatever climactic troubles descend upon our young heroes, we can just assume that Eleven will fix them in the final episode by doing that faith-healer thing with her hand, while screaming and having a nosebleed.

In other words, when Eleven descends to the nether regions of Hawkins Lab and uses her telekinetic hand to close the molten vagina from which the Demogorgon horde is being birthed into the human world, that should have been it. The Duffer Brothers should have taken their own hint and closed up the whole Stranger Things enterprise.

Persisting after this point, when the two-worlds edifice had collapsed, meant abandoning the imaginative rules of the show, indeed all storytelling discipline and logic, after which every plotline became laughable and arbitrary. In Season Three, for instance, the Soviets are crafty enough to have built an underground laser facility below a small city in the American Midwest — but not crafty enough to keep the teenage staff of an ice-cream parlor from infiltrating it. In Season Four, Hopper finds himself in a Siberian Gulag, where he earns his noble right to be called “Crazy American” several times by admiring Russians. In this Gulag, he fights a gladiatorial cage match against a Soviet-captured Demogorgon, and wins (because he’s Crazy American). While this is happening, Joyce and Murray are flying a small plane from Alaska into the Soviet Union to spring Hopper from his Gulag captivity, all of which can happen because, like manic Murray, the incompetent Soviets are wacky visitors from the land of comedy.

In other words, the genre-lurch from supernatural adventure to geopolitical sitcom is supposed to underwrite or excuse all this absurdity, but since the comedy isn’t funny nothing is actually underwritten or excused. It all just lingers before us as hyperactive and nonsensical, episode after episode. No audience in the history of television has been forced into so much baffled shrugging as those of us who stayed with Stranger Things after Season Two.

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And it’s not just storytelling logic. Once the two-worlds edifice collapses, the show’s style and sensibility also deteriorate. This is clearest with the Upside Down itself. Through the first two seasons it was suffused with some dimensional force that was thrilling in its vagueness. Those broken, photo-negative shards of wholesome Hawkins, Indiana, in Season One, suggested the rule of an elusive nothingness more than some coherent evil. But through Seasons Three, Four, and Five this force resolves into a standard Eighties horror-movie villain: which is to say that the haunted atmosphere from the evocative alternative dimension in Season One is slowly revealed to be, well, a guy: Vecna. This guy, played by Jamie Campbell Bower, is equal parts fussy and vengeful, and also, sometimes, a buff demon made of veins and vines.

Season Five gives us another random turn of genre dial. Like the original Matrix trilogy, Stranger Things concludes as something like a war movie, with US Army outposts both above-ground in Hawkins and down below in the Upside Down, to fight both Eleven and the Demogorgons, and to enforce martial law on the little town. In a way, this eases the burden on the show to meet the standards it set for itself in Seasons One and Two: that is, to be moving and fitfully beautiful, and to make a reasonable amount of sense. The audience can now be distracted by large-scale battles and escapes and chases, whatever narrative or physical sense they make.

But even here, with scores of soldiers being torn apart and run through by those athletic monsters whose faces are just flower-petal mouths, the war story makes way for a spectacular failure of taste that arrives from an entirely different direction. It’s not gratuitous violence but extreme and finally comic sentimentality. That Will Byers is gay has been made pretty clear through the first four seasons, and so a buried subplot through these seasons has been, basically, his coming-out story. In Season Five, he is prepped and coached for this coming-out by Robin (Maya Hawke), the fast-talking lesbian member of the friend-group, who gives him a final pep-talk in an underground tunnel, a mawkish, bizarrely prolix speech that finishes with this grimly inevitable lesson: be yourself.

A few scenes later, we see Will recalling this Churchillian speech as he rises from paralyzing pain to realize he can kill Demogorgons with telekinesis like Elevan. Thanks to the operatic staging of this moment, and to its psychological content as Will Byers finally being himself and admitting he’s gay, and also learning he’s a superhero, it registers indelibly as camp. As Will finally stops questioning himself and starts breaking Demogorgon bodies, the scene oscillates with two declarations, distinct in their words but seeming to mean the same thing: “I’m gay! I’m a superhero! I’m gay! I’m a superhero!”

The unintentional humor of this revelatory moment does give some consolation as we approach the release of the three Christmas episodes and the New Years finale. For one thing, it offers a scheme for making the last half-season tolerable, perhaps even enjoyable. After all, the final episode is said to be several hundred minutes long. And we’ve got the Christmas day triptych to get through first. No doubt it will be an extravaganza of random causality, the Duffer Brothers’ final assertion of their prerogative to just make things up as they go along. It will almost certainly feature Eleven and Will directing their spread fingers at a final phalanx of Demogorgons, screaming in unison as these monsters break and die. Something will conveniently explain how they now have the power to kill Vecna himself, and Vecna will die a villain’s predictable death, that is, after having said a bunch of evil stuff. Who knows what tactical busywork Joyce and Murray and chatty Robin and the other mortals will be asked to perform, but we do know it will be silly. The show’s final genre-turn into a classic form of camp will make it, if not worthwhile, at least diverting. Stranger Things will not have answered our stubborn hope and returned to its original excellence, but, after all its futile straining after comedy, it will have finally got funny.

Neo fights his way free of the membrane. He sits bolt upright, slime sluicing from his bald skull, and stares in horror. Facing him is an endless vista of identical pods, each containing a dreaming human, plugged by metal tubes into a simulation while their bodies are tapped for energy as living batteries.

A machine disconnects him from the tubes. A hatch opens, and Neo is flushed, screaming, into the start of his new life.

The Matrix came out in 1999. Its cultural impact is so profound it coined a whole political vocabulary: the ‘pill’, a revelation that destroys your worldview but awakens you to a new truth.

Offered a choice between a ‘blue pill’ that will deliver blissful ignorance in a comforting lie, or a ‘red pill’ that will awaken him to grim reality, Neo takes the red one. He wakes up from the simulation, to the horror of his true existence as living energy source for a world of machines.

What would have happened to Neo, had he taken the blue pill? I like to think he’d have spent the rest of his life in the world of the classic sitcom Friends, whose cast are reunited today for a much-trailed reunion.

First aired in 1994, Friends ran for a decade. It was wildly popular, with some episodes attracting 50 million or more viewers, and in 2019 was still the most watched show on Netflix. Even for my Home Counties teenage years, thousands of miles from the sitcom’s Manhattan setting, its quirky storylines became short-hand for a whole worldview.

We knew it wasn’t real. The apartments were too big, and no one could possibly have that much time to sit around drinking coffee. But we talked about what we’d do ‘if we lived in Friends world’. It was a shared imaginary, a picture of how we’d love life to be.

In Friends world, we might be free of all obligations except the ones we’d chosen. Where parents were domineering (especially Ross and Monica’s mum), social life, was opt-in. People drifted in and out of the Central Perk café, and events were driven by happenstance and whim.

And yet the bonds of this elective ‘family’ were unshakeable. Neurotic men like Ross were not exhausting fun-sponges but lovably vulnerable. Naïvete in the style of Joey or Phoebe made you not abused and exploited but charming. On-off relationships like Ross and Rachel’s were not destroyed but cemented by having a baby. You could be mean, capricious or spiteful, and it was a foible your friends loved and forgave, not something that got you ostracised.

In a nutshell, Friends world was a soft-focus picture of the adult life the baby boomers hoped they’d created for their offspring: maximally connected, but also maximally free.

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Around the time Ross and Rachel were getting amusingly married in Vegas while drunk, and The Matrix was featuring heavily in stoned conversations about the nature of reality, I was at university reading Walter J Ong. This Jesuit literary theorist argued in a seminal 1982 book, Orality and Literacy, that writing and reading are not simply a technology but radically consciousness-altering.

Literacy, Ong suggested, profoundly changes a culture. In societies that don’t use writing to store knowledge, ancestral memory is retained and relayed using song, spoken storytelling, pictures and artefacts. And this in turn, Ong pointed out, shapes the things that can be remembered.

“Try to imagine,” he suggests, “a culture where no one has ever ‘looked up’ anything.” Even the idea of objectivity, Ong argues, is inseparable from the act of writing things down so they stay unchanged over time.

Boomers David Crane and Marta Kauffman created ten series’ worth of maximal connection plus maximal freedom in Friends. But as they did so, new digital media were turning the “open” values that suffused the show — its open friendships and ambiguous love-affairs, its whimsical open-mindedness, sometimes neurotic open-heartedness — into something new. That transformation has been as profound, and perhaps as irreversible, as the shift Ong described between oral and literate cultures.

Because making the jump from a print-and-TV culture to our networked, interactive, digital one doesn’t just give us more ways of reading the same stuff. It changes if, how and what we read, and even how we think about reality itself.

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It's time to stop blaming boomers

By Ben Sixsmith

To illustrate, consider Alan Partridge, another cultural icon of 1990s Britain – and also the subject of a relatively recent nostalgia reboot. Partridge was funny in 1997 because he was stuck in a timewarp. With his brown slacks and leatherette driving gloves, he was a petit-bourgeois Eighties hold-out desperately trying to stay afloat in a world he found increasingly incomprehensible.

Today, the digital networking of culture has also homogenised us. The kind of backwater where people can exist in a timewarp, Partridge-like, is increasingly difficult to find. And when you do stumble upon one, chances are someone with a MacBook is already there, Instagramming the colourful locals and tweeting about his “digital nomad” lifestyle.

So as a 21^st-century TV host, Alan Partridge falls flat. It’s simply not plausible that someone could be as adrift from prevailing cultural currents as he is, and still have a job in TV. So instead of being deliciously cringe, what you get is a mean-spirited media-world in-joke about how embarrassed everyone would be if one of those people who’d never stand a chance in the industry actually became a TV presenter.

And with the homogenisation that has de-Partridged even our backwaters has come a sea-change in our ways of interacting, thinking, even understanding what reality is. Friends aired its last episode four months after the launch of another type of “friends”: the virtual, networked kind mapped by Facebook.

The shift from “Friends world” to “Facebook friends world” started out as a way of mapping aspects of our social worlds that were already there. To begin with, we added “friends” we actually knew. But over time, it came increasingly to stand in for those social worlds, as we’ve increasingly swapped real-life meetups for messenger groups. Now, accelerated still further by lockdowns, much of social life has withdrawn from IRL altogether for an online-only mulch of infighting and memes.

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Twilight of the centrist dads

By Will Lloyd

This in turn has taken the boomers’ “open” values in strange new directions. Whereas I spent my pre-internet teens poking around in arcane subcultures, today everything is “open” – or at least, it’s online in the public domain. You’d think that would make it easier to find like-minded souls, which is true — but those friendships are opt-in, like in Friends world, which means they’re also opt-out again.

Against that backdrop, it’s nigh-on impossible to create the kind of boredom and insularity that forges teenage subcultures. Instead, less-than-model-perfect girls like I was (which is to say, nearly all girls) spend their time ‘perfecting’ selfies with Facetune for public consumption. In the process, many grow terrified of meeting people in the flesh and revealing their less-than-perfect real selves.

And this has ridden on the coat-tails of a more general withering of ‘IRL’ social life. We don’t hang out in cafes any more in the expectation of bumping into friends. It’s been rude to phone someone out of the blue since 2011. Often, we don’t make IRL friends at all: in a 2019 poll, 22% of millennials reported having no friends.

None of this is to lament the passing of the Nineties, a decade I loathed. For me personally, life is much nicer now. Nor was I even much for Friends in the Nineties. It felt too twee and feelgood for a sullen adolescent as I was, with Tipp-Ex slogans on my Doc Martens and a predilection for Nietzsche and pirate radio. I scorned its upbeat and gregarious vision, preferring the world sketched out in the subscription of Green Anarchist I devoured (wholly without irony) in my parents’ leafy commuter-belt home.

I longed to grow dreadlocks and run away from home in a caravan of crusties, or live in a tree to protest the Newbury bypass. I didn’t. But Spiral Tribe, whose open-air raves triggered legislation to ban unlicensed dance parties the year Friends launched, were close to the truth when they sang: “You might stop the party but you can’t stop the future”.

Friends was the party; it was the blue pill. And it did stop. But the future didn’t. There was a time we all believed, with Tony Blair, that ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ and that being more open — with our friendships, our emotions, our everything — was the royal road there. But it turned out that the flimsy, pastiche-laden, ironic Nineties of Tory sleaze, illegal raves, Britpop, football, and Princess Di really was as good as the End of History was ever going to get.

Now we’re through the looking glass. In this new post-literate world, along with the red pill you can have a black one, a white one, a pink, purple or even chaste pill. The only pill you can’t have is the blue one: the comfort blanket of Friends world, where “openness” never made life worse, the party never stopped, and the future never arrived.

That one is no longer available, except in obsolete formats that don’t work on modern screens.

If the 20th century was atheistic, religiosity is now everywhere — I hardly know anyone who lives as a pure-blood rationalist, nor do I encounter many who dwell entirely within one faith or metaphysical tradition. Astrology and occultism flourish in mainstream daylight, while a revived interest in psychedelic experience and synthetic drugs has opened up gnostic wormholes amid the high-res sound-systems of nightclubs that seem more than ever like techno-pagan temples.

Attempting to understand this paradoxical synthesis led me to TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information by Erik Davis, a deeply Californian writer who was born in 1967 but is very much a child of the Nineties. His outlook was shaped as a cultural journalist in that decade he recalls fondly for its “ambient sense of arcane possibility, cultural mutation, and delirious threat that, though it may have only reflected my youth, seemed to presage more epochal changes to come”. He describes TechGnosis as “a secret history of the mystical impulses that continue to spark and sustain the Western world’s obsession with technology”, and insists that “religious questions, spiritual experiences, and occult possibilities remain wedded to our now unquestionably science-fiction reality”.

Starting from the maxim that “magic is technology’s unconscious”, Davis explores the myriad ways in which an ostensibly rationalist-materialist-atheist civilisation invests its new machines with ancient animism and archetypal dreams. Think of the recent hype around AI; how ready we are to project sentience and malign — Chtulian! — will onto a technology that, considered rationally, can never possess such qualities. He also considers the ways in which “ecstatic technologies” such as psychedelic drugs, meditation and shamanism now influence and modify questions of the soul, while asking if religious experience, defined by Carl Jung as that in which “man comes face to face with a psychically overwhelming Other”, may itself be evolving in tandem with technocultural mutation.

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Mary Gaitskill: How a chatbot charmed me

By Mary Gaitskill

The first edition of TechGnosis was published in 1998 — the same year, it’s always startling to recall, in which Google was founded — a prelapsarian time of heady economic growth and triumph-of-liberal-democracy optimism. It’s dizzying to think how much has changed since then, the spree of relentless cultural, societal and technological upheaval we’ve undergone. Yet Davis’s first book has remained relevant (helped by multiple revised editions with updated material). In part this is because it was never fully taken in by the Nineties’ now painfully discredited techno-utopianism, nor did it paint an especially rosy picture of our tech-civilisational future (yes, the one we’re now in). Davis quotes Marshall McLuhan, writing in 1962 about how the Global Village might turn out to be a more uncomfortable place than we anticipate: “As our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside…  we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed coexistence.”

Is there a better description of the online mobs, omni-paranoia, mass derangement, moral outrage, scapegoating, and polyphonic extremism that have defined the years since they put devices in our elegantly evolved hands? This sceptical edge may make Davis an appealing writer to those who find other psychedelically informed theorists too far out, too loose and easy with rationalism and the Enlightenment tradition. He is attractively open to gnostic, mystical, religious and, yes, psychedelic experience — a “heady seeker of sorts”, as he describes his younger self — yet he is also cool-headed and rational, even cynical when it comes to the exploitativeness of technocapitalism. Now in his late fifties and a compelling guest on podcasts and YouTube talks (as well as the producer of many excellent articles on his Substack) Davis advocates a “middle way — between reason and mystery, scepticism and sympathy, cool observation and participation mystique”.

His book churns up an unrelenting, often brilliant spray of ideas, funnelling a dizzying range of information across multiple cultural-intellectual byways and minority belief systems. Davis examines the seminal, future-shock cyberpunk fictions of William Gibson (Neuromancer) and Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash), and the gnostic dystopias of Philip K. Dick. But he also ranges onto magical-esoteric-religious history: the Greek-mythic trickster Hermes Trismegistus, John Dee’s “Enochian” magic, the discovery in 1945 of the heretical gnostic scriptures at Nag Hammadi — even the neuroscientist John C. Lilly’s experiments in telepathically communicating with dolphins by way of intravenous ketamine and a sensory-deprivation tank. He traces the Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s messianic vision of a noospheric Omega Point — in which all minds are fused in an ecstatic oneness that brings the divine principle to its earthly apotheosis — through the delirious rhetoric of Nineties Wired-era tech propagandists and Singularity hucksters, whose effusions glossed the acceleration into our era of surveillance capitalism, epistemological fragmentation, radical inequality and political extremism.

Davis insists that the digital age teems with religious and supernatural metaphors. His distinction between the analogue “soul” and the digital “spirit” is memorably suggestive: “The analogue world sticks to its grooves of soul — warm, undulating, worn with the pops and scratches of material history. The digital world boots up the cool matrix of the spirit: luminous, abstract, more code than corporeality.” It is not lost on Davis that his book appeared shortly before the arrival in multiplexes of The Matrix, an exhilarating film that mainlined the mythos of simulation, alienation, deception and sacred uprising into the global psychic mainstream and perhaps primed teenage minds to plunge into the nightmarish hyperrealities of the decades to come.

He is also sympathetic to the neo-psychedelic culture that emerged from a post-Sixties underground to fuse with a more broadly gnostic cultural mood (you can’t open the New York Times or New Yorker these days without seeing articles on psychedelic research, though acknowledgement of the irreducible weirdness of psychedelics is less common). But Davis regards our connected devices and social media as the real acid in the civilisational punch-bowl: perhaps the ruptures we’ve lived through over the past decade are just the beginning of a cyberdelic horror-trip we’ll never wake up from.

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Ingmar Bergman's moral horror show

By Rob Doyle

Today, the digital future-present keeps echoing the magical-animist-pantheistic past — and vice versa. What are shamans if not “ecstatic technicians of the sacred”, LSD if not a “gnostic molecule”, and Gnosticism itself — the heretical Christian doctrine that declared our universe the botched work of a sinister demiurge, a lesser god — if not “the world’s first metaphysical conspiracy theory”? Meanwhile, the revival of virtual reality and the increasingly realistic texture of video games conjures up the ancient fantasy of simulation and nested realities (“the protagonists of Hindu yarns often found themselves wandering through infinite nests of Borgesian dream worlds”). It is only a short, psychotic leap from there to believing that consciousness is itself a game within a game, that there are levels parallel to or above this one. Even if reality turns out not to be a video game, actual games reanimate gnostic longings. “The boss characters and evil creatures who must be conquered to advance levels are the faint echoes of the threshold-dwellers and Keepers of the Gates that shamans and gnostics had to conquer in their mystic peregrinations of the other worlds.”

At least in its younger form, Davis’s is the sort of intelligence that can barely give itself room to breathe. TechGnosis covers so much ground that you wish he’d linger in one place for a while, probe more deeply into some of the intriguing areas he races over, or make more of the arresting, speculative ideas he frequently dashes out. His book’s enduring cult appeal has arguably made him a touch self-important, assessing (and hyping) its continuing relevance across a series of overlong afterwords. But these are quibbles against the high appeal of a writer so alert to “the powerful, archetypal connections among magic, tricks, and technology”, and the value of psychedelic thought in generating new metaphors. Davis writes of such strange, compelling things with real poetry, his meta-muse unleashed in “those vast cosmic webworks whose own mysterious designs we may glimpse, if at all, in moments past all sense or reckoning”.

What should we make of this three-page tangent, one that neither develops into a real argument nor develops any real consequences for any of the novel’s admittedly smudgy plot-lines? Perhaps Houellebecq sees a parallel of his own oeuvre in that of the Wachowskis’: between the decade-defining original Matrix (1999) and the Molotov cocktail Houellebecq threw with his Nineties debuts, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994) and Les particules élémentaries (1998).

Those first two novels were literary sensations, mixing fire-tongued dissection of l’après-68 with science fiction, evoking the dead-end of the everyday and imaging the dead-end of the species. On the newest tome, critics have been more divided.

They agree, however, that with this one, there’s a newer, calmer, more optimistic Houellebecq: finally, “Houellebecq makes room for love”. With this clumsy ode to the least philosophical Matrix, is Houellebecq perhaps telling us that though it might not look like it, this novel — this sentimental, mushy-penned final novel — is his true masterpiece?

He seems to believe so. As he told Le Monde, “contrary to what a famous formula claims, I think that it is with good feelings that we make good literature”. The murderous misogynists of his earlier books are gone, replaced with a pretty reasonable technocrat who’s nice to his wife (Paul “Raison” — clever!). Indeed, most of the characters are pretty nice. That’s by design: as Houellebecq continued, “the ultimate achievement would be if there were no bad guys at all!”

How can this be the Houellebecq we know and love, the Houellebecq who complained that female readers found it “difficult to accept pure negativity”?

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The narcissistic fall of France

By Michel Houellebecq

Houellebecq has never been known as the greatest of stylists or the fairest of psychologists. When I studied him for an aborted PhD, there were, of course, the requisite titters: he was sexist, he was racist, and what’s more, he was populaire. It’s clear that Houellebecq is an important writer — the most interesting, the most provocative, the most of our time, for better or worse.

Fan as I am, though, his “badness” occasionally frustrated me: could it escape Houellebecq’s attention, I wondered as I read, say, La Possibilité d’une île (2005), that it’s a little unconvincing for a perfectly harmonious couple to calmly and spontaneously dissolve at the very first appearance of ageing on the wife’s previously perfect body?

I don’t know. But now, annihilated by Houellebecq’s 735-page attempt at a less Manichaeian narrative, I mourn the venom. I mourn the badness. I mourn the bad guys.

In the acknowledgments of Anéantir, Houellebecq announces that this will be his last novel. As the title predicts, of course, this is a novel about annihilation. Radical ecologists are attacking Europe, targeting immigrants and artificial reproduction, the only bulwark against the population collapse of the West. Paul’s father is dying. Paul, ultimately, dies. And Houellebecq writes his last book.

On such an occasion, with this strange and sentimental swan song, should we recall what made Houellebecq so wonderful? In a recent defence of Anéantir published in The Spectator, Houellebecq is compared with Balzac, in both his “comparable ambition” and his “tireless work”. This is, of course, familiar to any reader of Houellebecq; not only has he ceaselessly praised Balzac for two decades, but his novels have been peppered with allusions to him.

But Balzac’s ambition wasn’t primarily the psychological complexity of individual characters: his devouring ambition, the one that kept him writing for 15-hour days, on 50 cups of coffee, was to write the complete Comédie humaine of France, the one that would depict in narrative, like a map in lines, French reality from the Restoration to the July Monarchy. These 91 novels, furiously written by a man who had tried to be a respectable, bourgeois lawyer, and ended up wearing Middle Eastern robes and writing through chronic illness, are a capsule of a time of dizzying social and economic change. They are not about people; they are about people in a society. Many of his novels, indeed, were designated “studies”.

So, too, in Houellebecq: like his hero, he gives his characters, at his best, birthplaces, birthdates, and parents. Like his hero, he has an encyclopaedic bent, a desire to explain, a will to knowledge. Like his hero, he wants to understand what on Earth is going on. The laziest critics of Houellebecq dismiss him as a novelist of the patriarchal white male, who doesn’t “recognise that it is societal structures such as poverty, racism, colonialism and inequality that are the source of men’s suffering”. But this is precisely where Houellebecq succeeds: he does recognise that society is making us miserable.

That’s what is so special about him today. Almost no modern writer seems interested in the society we live in. Here in America, at least, there’s plenty of slumming-it, reheated-Carver poverty porn and box-checking census-opera; but ultimately, these currents are more cynical attempts to avoid criticism than criticism themselves.

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How France lost her dignity

By Michel Houellebecq

As literature has become an increasingly hard way to make a living, aspiring writers would do best to be born wealthy. Otherwise, they might choose to write Young Adult fiction (far more lucrative than grown-up fiction, and therefore dominant). Or they might choose to take a creative writing program; on this workshop-based path, the entire incentive structure is a risk-averse one aimed at pleasing one’s elders and avoiding attention from one’s peers. Under these conditions, whoever is writing literature is a coddled rich kid and/or person who has largely interacted with the sorts of individuals who can tolerate creative writing workshops. The longer they stay in this bell jar, the less and less they know about what society even is.

Houellebecq, of course, wins here. Balzac was a would-be lawyer, Flaubert was a would-be lawyer, every writer on the “recommended” table at my local bookstore is a graduate of one of 12 college prep schools. But Houellebecq was a computer programmer: a code monkey, a cubicle rat. And so when Extension du domaine de la lutte came out — a novel about a programmer so miserable he drives his hideous virgin colleague to suicide — it was a cri de coeur for an entire, degraded society. It was catharsis.

In La Nausée (1938), Houellebecq’s clear predecessor Sartre evoked a man in existential crisis, in a world without God in which the structures of city, family, and religion no longer have any transcendental meaning. In Houellebecq’s novels, there is nausea enough: the first act of a Houellebecqian hero is to vomit in the middle of an office party, at the end of the first chapter of Extension. But the despair has reached the point of near-numbness, and God is no longer a real possibility (even if a Muslim takeover of the Sorbonne, as in Soumission, is).

In Sartre, the structures have become meaningless; in Houellebecq, they have ceased to exist. The frames that gave comfort, stability, and meaning to life have been destroyed in the name of freedom. To borrow Houellebecq’s description of this novel’s miserable couple, we live in “une sorte de désespoir standardisé”. Miserable white-collar Everyman that he is, he wonders why.

Houellebecq was not, of course, the first person to criticise 1968. Foucault denounced sexual liberation (though this seems to elude many of his most enthusiastic advocates); so did Michel Clouscard; even Marcuse himself admitted that the sexual revolution had been coopted by consumerism. But Houellebecq’s critique of sexual liberation wasn’t theoretical; it wasn’t a Semiotext(e) book, and you didn’t have to know Hegel, and you didn’t have to take notes.

You read those books, and you recognised it: how it felt to shop alone and read the over-enthusiastic copywriting on a pre-made meal for one; how it felt to feel that every conversation you had with a work colleague was an excruciating effort to appear happy and convivial with a terrifying alien; how it felt to feel like the basic elements of life you had been promised — a more or less kind spouse who loved you, a child, a little home you could plant bushes in front of — were merely plot points in silly tales for little kids.

And, importantly, he talked about feeling ugly: a surprisingly rare topic. For Houellebecq, the modern environment is one of sterility and predictability, punctuated by occasional violence; it is one of quiet humiliations wrapped in consumer packaging; it is one of forced enjoyment and unbelievable exhaustion.

Houellebecq’s novels are so tantalising because they actually analyse our dysfunction. As was the subject of Sérotonine (2019), we live in a society in which a schizophrenic mixture of chemical determinism and trauma discourse has turned almost every feeling into an aggressively-treated and individual one. We have developed a world in which antidepressants — and, often, both amphetamines and anti-anxiety medication — are considered a completely normal, almost essential, supplement. This is, obviously, a nightmare. And some people, occasionally, want an alternative.

That’s why we need Houellebecq’s pauvres types. That’s why they need to be miserable. That’s why they need to be completely out of their minds. Houellebecq has never been a great psychologist; he has never been a great stylist. But his mal du siècle is more sickening than anybody else’s, and his analytical drive is, at its best, in a league of its own. Other writers of bureaucratic hell (see Halle Butler) don’t have Houellebecq’s Balzacian side, which is his triumph: he hates everything, and yet he wants to understand why. He persists, even though critical thought itself has come to seem obsolete. As his stand-in in La Possibilité d’une île, a controversial comedian, reflects, “I was, indeed, a cutting observer of contemporary reality; it was just that everything now seemed so elementary to me, it seemed that so few things remained that could be observed in contemporary reality.”

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Bewilderingly, much of that has disappeared in this last volume. It’s far too long, and shockingly boring; entire transcribed conversations serve virtually no purpose, and every scene starts earlier and ends later than it should, as though he wrote the book on stimulants or perhaps under hypnosis. Maybe Houellebecq’s editor (accurately enough) figured it wasn’t that important to edit. Or maybe Houellebecq is the victim of his own success: his early books are so iconically masterful at capturing the malaise of a pleasure-driven and unpleasant society that even his clever observations seem a little old hat. As Houellebecq himself recognised, “in opening my literature to theoretical conceptions one might develop about the world, I am constantly vulnerable to cliché and, in truth, I’m doomed, my only chance at originality consisting of (to borrow Baudelaire’s intuition) developing new clichés.”

There are highlights; I teared up towards the end, when Paul’s wife gets emotional remembering when the two of them were teenagers, going through the loneliest period of their lives, and hadn’t yet met. As the protagonist of Extension whispers to his coworker, as the protagonist of Particules tells us, we are haunted by the teenage loves we didn’t have. And how sad to have wanted, at death’s door, to have been there.

All told, this much-noted turn to love leaves much to be satisfied: essentially, the protagonist and his wife, two énarque bureaucrats, have not been sleeping together, but she develops a mild interest in paganism and therefore feels a little more feminine and since her ass is still firm, then they do. Once he is dying of cancer she starts wearing thongs.

The same goes for the other plots. The political one is so predictable in its observations — yes, Macron is like a made-for-TV president; yes, the Right is popular in France; yes, cyberterrorism is a threat — that it seems almost AI-generated. The protagonist’s father is in a coma, and while Houellebecq does not support euthanasia, this parental loss somehow carries almost no emotional weight.

The protagonist’s brother is married to a journalist, and she is very annoying and evil. The protagonist’s sister is very Catholic and not evil at all, her husband is poor, she has a black son, and at one point her daughter inadvertently gives the protagonist fellatio. But somehow, every plot simply fizzles out to leave us to contemplate the character’s relatively sudden cancer diagnosis. On the one hand, that diagnosis elicits the very fine observation that modern life revolves around the dissimulation of “l’agonie”; but on the other hand, even this death plot falls into elegies to knickers and blowjobs.

Perhaps Houellebecq, in his novel about two men declining through no fault of their own (unlike, say, the wheelchair-bound swinger of Particules), couldn’t bear to go into full-on nihilism. Perhaps it seemed too dark to have these men die in sadness, without meaning, without redemption, to say their lives had ceased to have meaning long before their strokes or cancers.

In its breathless review, Le Monde said that “one feels, above all, that his writing seeks more than ever to fuel, if not hope, at least values”. But what values? Our hero observes that his Catholic sister seems happy, but he still can’t believe; he observes that politicians should have real values, almost like kings, but no such hero arrives.

Ultimately, the only real lesson is to try to have sex with your wife again before you die, which thankfully seems pretty simple. So, sure, this book’s less dark. But having turned on the lights, there’s not much to see: annihilation, indeed.

Today, we simply accept that leaders lie; not just occasionally but habitually. Trump did. Johnson does. Putin got there way before either of them. And yet, strangely, part of Johnson’s appeal has always been said to be his “authenticity”. He is a real person. His history of lying did not bother many people, nor his history of betraying everyone he has worked for or every woman he has been involved with. The electorate could not be expected to know the truth about Borisconi’s career.

I started calling him that because he always was — pre-Trump — the only politician with a similarly acute understanding of the incestuous relationship between politicians and the media. Surely he could be king of both? Or so he thought. He could control what he understood to be the most important thing about power, which was not “truth” but “the narrative”. His narrative was “fun”. For Bunga Bunga parties just substitute batshit-crazy Jennifer Arcuri and a Christmas quiz.

But things fall apart. Some lies matter more than others. This must have been a shock to Borisconi because the visual evidence of his lies — the video, the photo — cuts through. No amount of wordplay or random classical references can make people unsee what they have seen. Mirabile dictu!

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Why I had to leave The Guardian

By Suzanne Moore

Just as the CCTV footage of Matt Hancock snogging his bit on the side did for him, so these photos did for Downing Street. Those who worked for Borisconi were sent out to lie for him, and then he lied about them too. This we know for certain. It is not an idea, an opinion, or an interpretation. It is a fact.

But it’s not necessarily the end for him. He may stagger on until the next wave of the virus has passed. Who, quite frankly, would want to take over right now? He may chuck it in, not because he suddenly acquires a sense of morality or even shame, but because he is skint and there is money to be made in them there hills of after-dinner buffoonery.

I’m so tired of writing about the mendacity and entitlement of the man, though. I would far rather talk about another man who has also made me think about the nature of reality this week (and whom I unashamedly adore): Keanu Reeves.

Normally, press junkets for a new film are nothing more than dull promotion. But in their interviews for The Matrix Resurrections, Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss answered questions about the nature of reality in interesting ways. The Matrix, after all, is an entire world of distraction — and an influential one at that. Who could have known in 1999 how it would infiltrate our culture?

Take “redpilling”, a term which has come to be used by many men’s rights activists, largely thanks to a Reddit thread in which men discuss waking up to the reality that women oppress men. Not all these guys are incels, but redpilling is nearly always talked about online by those on the anti-feminist Right.

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How we destroyed The Matrix

By Dorian Lynskey

For some, the notion of questioning reality that The Matrix so cleverly explored has morphed into a denial of reality. Sure, men are oppressed — but more so than women? Is that the radical breakthrough that the red pill offers? Apparently so.

Will facts and statistics change their minds? I know now that we are living in a profoundly anti-science moment. Anti-vaxxers do not believe in science. Many trans-activists do not accept basic biology. Grace Lavery talks of a liberated future in which transwomen like herself will be able to have abortions — and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I have fought my entire life for women’s right to abortion. But since transwomen cannot get pregnant, I wonder how this is progressive, how this fantasy of womanhood is in any way radical, and not in some way deeply insulting to women’s actual experience of abortion? Can we really say physical reality has had its day?

Reeves talked in an interview about having dinner with a director who had his three teenage children with him. They had not seen The Matrix, so he explained that it was about a guy in a virtual world who was trying to get back to reality. The young girl asked: “Why? Who cares if it’s real?” Keanu said: “You don’t care if it’s real?” She said: “No”. When the interviewer asked Keanu how it made him feel, he paused and said: “Awesome.”

Are we the 17-year-old girl at dinner with Keanu Reeves who no longer cares what is real? I’m not convinced. Reality TV, itself scripted and managed, may be coming to the end of its cruel reign. Yet it was Ant and Dec on I’m A Celebrity, gunning for our Prime Minister, who alerted the Westminster bubble to the idea that the non-stop pizza, quiz, cheese and wine gatherings during lockdown was ‘cutting through’. A basic unfairness was exposed; a truth about rules not applying to those who govern us.

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Inside the trans publishing purge

By Josephine Bartosch

It was almost as if reality mattered, that endless lying was no longer acceptable. There is always something that punctures the Matrix. It’s there in The Communist Manifesto: “Man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Sure, it’s more comfortable to be fooled. But in the end, we have to do the work. We can argue forever about subjective and objective truth but hold the hand of a new baby or the hand of a person who is about to die and tell me that everything is virtual and nothing matters.

You can’t can you? The glitch in the Matrix is where we find ourselves. It’s the only place to be.

Mattis was thinking of the philosopher’s Meditation on First Philosophy, championed the importance of doubt by hypothesising that everything he thought he knew about reality might be an illusion created by an evil demon. Of course, The Matrix is about a lot more than that. The Wachowskis themselves have cited a litany of influences: ranging from Homer’s Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville to the cybernetics expert Kevin Kelly, Schopenhauer, Buddhism and Jean Baudrillard, whose 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation appears in the movie. The phrase “desert of the real” comes from its very first page, although the man himself sniffed that “The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the Matrix that the Matrix would have been able to produce”.

Critics and fans have suggested numerous other influences: Plato’s cave, Hilary Putnam’s brain in a vat, Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine, Philip K Dick, Plato, Socrates, Kant, Marx, Hegel, Lacan, Dostoevsky, Sartre and even Doctor Who. The essays in the 2002 book The Matrix and Philosophy contradict each other to hilarious extent: It’s Buddhist! It’s Christian! It’s Marxist! It’s postmodern! Yet none are wrong exactly because the movie is a mash-up of ideas, not a thesis. When the Wachowskis were asked in a web chat how many of these perceived allusions were intentional, they replied in the teasing spirit of a Sixties Bob Dylan press conference: “All of it.”

In the week that Matrix Resurrections, the fourth film in the franchise, opens, it’s worth remembering that before The Matrix was released in March 1999, it was unflatteringly compared to the 1995 flop Johnny Mnemonic, another film about virtual reality starring Keanu Reeves.

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But it was no Johnny Mnemonic. Raking in almost half a billion dollars, it proved that Hollywood could tap into the new immersive nature of gaming, paved the way for the superhero imperium, and (to the immense benefit of Christopher Nolan) made explicitly philosophical non-franchise blockbusters a going concern. Better still, and despite two widely disliked sequels, it became a cultural touchstone. The Wachowskis talked about “making mythology relevant in a modern context” and they succeeded in spades. The Matrix has become a modern myth and, like any myth, it has been interpreted in radically different ways.

The brilliance of The Matrix is that it can make anybody feel clever. It signals that it is about something profound but the basic conceit is very simple. You could grasp it by knowing your Descartes or just by listening to Queen: “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?”

Reeves’s character believes he is a coder called Thomas Anderson, living in a boring 1999. In fact, he resides comatose in a gooey pod in the late 22^nd century, where he serves as an organic battery for humanity’s new AI overlords. His life has been a simulation, a dream, the Matrix. Waking up is a kind of rebirth. At the end, he tells those damned dirty machines that he will usher in “a world without you, a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible”.

The Matrix was perfectly timed. The AI law enforcer Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) explains that the Matrix takes place in an infinite 1999 because it was “the peak of your civilisation”. Movie-goers in that period would have had a different impression. There were multiple examples of what the critic Joshua Clover calls “Edge of the Construct” movies, in which “reality” is revealed to be a hi-tech charade created for nefarious purposes: The Truman Show, Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor. Then there were what you might call “Work sucks” movies: Fight Club, American Beauty and Office Space — in which the cubicle is a prison cell.

“That decade was so comfortable,” Mattis told Raftery. “The stock market was up, and people were making money. But there was a splinter in the mind’s eye: something felt wrong. In all of that comfort, people started thinking, ‘There’s something missing here.’” It’s no surprise that the film’s climactic song is Wake Up by Rage Against the Machine, the band who soundtracked the enormous protests against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle a few months later. Still, there’s a temptation to tell the filmmakers of 1999, y’know, things could be worse.

The Matrix also reminds us how new and raw the internet felt in 1999. Even with the first dotcom boom in full swing, online culture retained a freewheeling, anarchic energy. For many message-board users, the internet was an opportunity to craft a new identity from scratch and an online community could be far more rewarding — more real — than one in “meatspace”. Even within the Matrix, Thomas Anderson lives a double life as the hacker Neo, the hacker being the quintessential cyberpunk hero.

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Oliver Stone's seductive conspiracies

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One consequence of online culture that was already evident in 1999 was the spread of conspiracy theories. The Matrix, in which everything Neo knows about his life is indeed a lie propagated by a malign conspiracy, was a timely text. The last movie to use imagery from Lewis Carroll’s stories so prominently was Oliver Stone’s JFK. “This world has the Matrix all over the place,” Lana Wachowski said at the time. “People accept ways of thinking that are imposed upon them rather than working them out for themselves. The free-thinking people are those who question every sort of Matrix, every system of thought or belief, be it political, religious, philosophical.”

These are worthwhile questions to ask but the answers aren’t always pretty and the cult of The Matrix has taken a sinister turn. In 2012, a group of men’s rights activists founded a subreddit called TheRedPill. In The Matrix, the human explication machine Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) gives Neo two pills and a choice. “After this there is no turning back,” he says thrillingly. “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more.”

Neo’s choice is a fable of courage, self-discovery, empowerment and radicalisation. To TheRedPill users, the idea of a world which favours men is the simulation and systemic bias against men is the reality. Feminists are the Agents, I guess. You can see why men’s rights activists might relate to Trinity’s (Carrie-Anne Moss) assessment of Neo: “I know why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night you sit at your computer.” He’s the discontented nerd who becomes a kick-ass messiah.

The metaphor has achieved broader popularity on the Right, from incels to Infowars, and QAnon to full-blown neo-Nazis, so much so that when Maroon 5 called their 2017 album Red Pill Blues, they had to clarify that they were simply Matrix fans and not fascist conspiracy theorists. Ironically, the red pill represents being awakened, which is also the meaning of woke.

There are, of course, other readings. To one group of fans, the red pill bears a suspicious resemblance to the brand of prescription oestrogen that was popular in the Nineties. Lana came out as a trans woman in 2012 (after a decade of rumours), followed by Lilly in 2016. Inevitably, this gave rise to the theory that The Matrix is a trans allegory, in which the “splinter in your mind, driving you mad” is gender dysphoria, names and bodies are mutable, and Morpheus is Neo’s therapist, guiding him into his new identity.

In 2016, Lilly approved of this theory in the-more-the-merrier terms, “because it’s an excellent reminder that art is never static” and “the ideas of identity and transformation are critical components in our work”. Four years later, however, she went further: “That was the original intention but the world wasn’t quite ready.” The androgynous character Switch was originally intended to be a man in the real world and a woman in the Matrix. “The Matrix stuff was all about the desire for transformation but it was all coming from a closeted point of view,” Lilly said.

Yet this alone doesn’t justify one Atlantic writer’s bald claim that the film itself is “an allegory of gender dysphoria, as its creators have repeatedly said”. In fact, I couldn’t find a single mention of a trans subtext in any of the books about The Matrix published prior to Lana’s transition. The tortuous passages about it in gender-critical feminist Helen Joyce’s Trans are a good illustration of the problem with taking this idea too literally. To quote the trans writer Andrea Long Chu: “Allegorically is the least interesting way to read anything. Nothing ruins a question like an answer; the world is weirder than that.”

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Why Wes Anderson loves the New Yorker

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An allegory is a story where the author’s message is coherent and undeniable. A myth is fluid and ambiguous, open to diverse and contradictory interpretations. In a revealing 2012 New Yorker profile, Lana Wachowski remembered being confused and frustrated as a child by the black monolith in 2001 until her father told her it was a symbol. “That simple sentence went into my brain and rearranged things in such an unbelievable way that I don’t think I’ve been the same since,” she said. “Something clicked inside.” It’s not just that the monolith is a symbol; it’s that Kubrick refused to explain what it symbolised. It is more myth than allegory. In a single interview, Kubrick could have made the movie half as interesting.

The Wachowskis are not so taciturn. Last year, when Elon Musk tweeted “Take the red pill” and Ivanka Trump replied “Taken!”, Lilly tweeted back: “Fuck both of you.” I can see why the sisters might want to reimpose some authorial control over the meaning of The Matrix now that “all of it” includes some horrific stuff. Like Matt Furie, the cartoonist who created Pepe the Frog, they’ve seen their work appropriated by the far-Right and that can’t feel good. But the price of creating a modern myth is that it can’t be controlled — and any attempt to do so can only diminish it.

As some viewers prepare to unravel the ideas in Matrix Resurrections, it’s important to remember that the first movie is not a philosophical treatise but a wildly entertaining Hollywood spectacle. Of all the answers the Wachowskis have given to the eternal question “What is The Matrix about?”, my favourite is the most flippant: “It’s about robots vs kung fu.” True enough. If it weren’t also about that, we wouldn’t be talking about it at all.

The Matrix is more than two decades old, but its underlying message is very familiar. You are asleep, but I am awake. You are blind, but I can see. You are backward, but I am progressive. You may have come to a nice country house for a cup of tea, a stroll around the gardens and a mooch in the gift shop, but I am going to wake you up. Look around you! Stop listening to the lies! Read some real history! Educate yourself!

In his new book Fake History, the anti-Brexit firebrand Otto English sets out to educate his benighted compatriots — those of you, in other words, who have been wandering in a stupor all these years. For the last thousand years, he explains, history “has been written by white males, about white males, for white males”. Like The Matrix’s machines, these sinister frauds have created a colossal deception, a “fake” past, a tissue of “false narratives”. But now English is on the case, determined to expose the “ten great lies” that have shaped our world. “Fake history runs deep,” he writes grandly. “This book’s mission is to topple it from the plinth and lift up truth in its place.”

In The Matrix, Neo is merely part of a bigger rebel group, led by Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus. And English, too, operates as part of a bigger movement. For although his book makes no mention of it, he is not the first person to notice that our history is a tissue of lies. The BBC’s Lucy Worsley, for example, has made several series about British History’s Biggest Fibs, including revelations such as the discovery that the Prussians helped Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo, and the fact that Richard III might not actually have been a hunchbacked monster after all. And another tireless hunter for historical truth, the Horrible Histories author Terry Deary, has consistently maintained that schoolteachers and academics mislead their charges. The people who really made our world, he insists, are hidden from us. “We don’t usually know their names and there are no statues to them — not even grave markers — and they are ignored by most proper historians in proper history books.”

So have history teachers really been lying to us? Have historians been deceiving us all along? And has Otto English really found the smoking guns?

Perhaps I’m old-fashioned, but it strikes me that if you’re writing a book about “ten great lies” called Fake History, you probably ought to use your real name. In fact, Otto English is the Twitter handle of a journalist, Andrew Scott, who has attracted some 70,000 followers with his relentless attacks on Brexit. I’m not really his target audience, but I’m perfectly happy to accept that he’s a dab hand at writing 140-character takedowns of Boris Johnson. But as a historian, a seeker for truth, a fearless exposer of lies about our past, he is an utter, utter failure.

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Far from being a ground-breaking exposé of dishonesty and deceit, Fake History is one of the worst books about history I’ve ever read — and I say that as somebody who made it all the way through Jacob Rees-Mogg’s The Victorians. To give a small but revealing example, one chapter debunks the supposed lie that “Genghis Khan was a pitiless barbarian”. In fact, says English, he was “a far-sighted and accommodating leader”, both “meritocratic” and “inclusive”, which makes him sound like somebody hoping to lead the Liberal Democrats. Throughout, English calls him “Khan”, clearly under the impression that this was his surname. But Khan was his imperial title, not his name. It’s as if a Mongolian Twitter personality wrote a book about German history under the misapprehension that Wilhelm II’s surname was “Kaiser”.

The structure, veering madly from subject to subject, makes no sense. There’s a chapter on Churchill, then a chapter about whether ancient people thought the earth was flat, then a chapter about Dunkirk, then a chapter about the House of Windsor, then a chapter about curry, then a chapter about the Aztecs. But even inside each chapter there’s no sense of analysis or argument, just a series of self-satisfied observations and weird generalisations. In the chapter on curry, for example, English sets out to debunk the supposed lie that “curry comes from India”, but immediately tells us that in post-war Britain “most people ate shit… Most British people stewed the living taste out of everything.”

Now, I can see why you’d say that in a stand-up routine — but in a book about nuance in history? In a book attacking myths and stereotypes? Really?

The fundamental problem, though, is that none of English’s ten great lies are actually lies. His first lie, for example is: “Winston Churchill was Britain’s Greatest Prime Minister.” But that’s not really a lie, is it? How could you possibly prove or disprove it? It’s an opinion, which is completely different. You might disagree with Churchill’s fans, but it would be deranged to call them liars. For instance, when Churchill died in 1965, his old rival Clement Attlee said he was not just “the greatest Englishman of our time” but “the greatest citizen of the world of our time”. If Attlee came back to life and repeated those words today, would English seriously call him a liar?

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Or take another of English’s purported lies: “Hitler was a failed artist.” You might raise an eyebrow at that. Opening my copy of Sir Ian Kershaw’s biography, I read that Hitler had a blazing row with his father about his ambition to become an artist; that he twice applied and failed to get into Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts; and that he tried to make money by painting scenes of Vienna. And to cap it all, on page 73 of my edition, Kershaw, one of Britain’s greatest living historians, explicitly describes Hitler as — you guessed it — a “failed artist”. So would English call Kershaw a liar, too?

The weird thing is that English knows Hitler was a failed artist. He even mentions the paintings and the unsuccessful attempts to get into the Academy. His chapter is trying to say something about Hitler’s invention of his own legend — though I’m not sure what. After some stuff about the First World War, he tells us how terrible Mein Kampf is — as if anybody needs convincing — before informing us that Hitler was a dreadful artist and a diabolical commander. Then he compares him with Enoch Powell and Donald Trump, which is clearly what he’s been itching to do all along. And that’s it. Next lie please!

I could go through English’s book page by page, but what would be the point? It’s so shoddy, so abject I feel a bit guilty even writing about it, like a grown man punching a toddler. Yet it’s important not to let it go. People don’t generally tell lies about history, and the real dishonesty lies in pretending that they do.

Of course all societies have myths, and they always have done. But a myth isn’t the same as a lie, unless you are seriously going to argue that all societies since the Egyptians and the Persians have been barefaced liars. Is it a “lie”, as English suggests, that the Little Ships were crucial at Dunkirk? Surely not. At worst, it’s an exaggeration, a patriotic myth, central to the national narrative both at the time and afterwards. And in any case, there are already hundreds, perhaps even thousands of history books putting Dunkirk into a wider context, and gently debunking the Little Ships story. Is English really so arrogant that he thinks he’s breaking new ground?

Anyway, if a schoolteacher tells the Little Ships story to her charges, so what? Is she a liar? Or is she simply a good storyteller, trying to find the right way to draw a class of ten-year-olds into the study of the past? What about professional historians? They’re not really liars, are they? Yes, they weave their facts into narratives, wear their prejudices very heavily, and sometimes make tendentious claims. But that’s what historical debate is all about. Was Edward Gibbon a liar? Were the historians who wrote in the Victorian era? Were Marxists like Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill? Of course not.

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Even politicians, English’s chief target, don’t really lie about history, whatever the Twitter fanatics may think. Of course politicians pick their facts and tell their stories. But that’s the essence of political communication. To win, you build a narrative. A pluralistic society depends upon competing narratives and competing myths. You can disagree with a particular interpretation of the nation’s past — Margaret Thatcher’s paean to the Victorian period, say, or Boris Johnson’s Churchill-worship — without calling it a lie. After all, who but a fraud claims to have a monopoly on the truth?

This is why books such as Fake History are so depressing. They are the historical equivalent of conspiracy theories, purporting to uncover some hidden, monolithic, indisputable truth. Puffed up with smug self-satisfaction, they reflect a culture that seems increasingly incapable of dealing with democratic disagreement, in which opponents are “gammons”, “melts”, plotters and liars. They deal in the language of certainty, fakery and propaganda, without acknowledging that historical interpretations change all the time, and that ours will seem as prejudiced and partial to our successors as Victorian history books do to us. And though they appeal for “nuance” and “complexity”, their hectoring tone and moralistic assumptions could hardly be more adolescent.

But I suppose Otto English isn’t really writing for me. He’s writing for people who think that history is a simple matter of truth and lies, and that either you’re on the side of good and honesty, or you’re on the side of deception and evil. So if you think Churchill was Britain’s greatest Prime Minister, as Roy Jenkins did; or that there’s such a thing as English food, as George Orwell did, then you must be a liar or a dupe.

For English, as for so many woke activists, it’s all very simple. You’re awake, or you’re asleep. You’re progressive, or you’re reactionary. You think Rhodes Must Fall, or you like having sex with statues. You can see, or you’re blind. You’re with Neo, or you’re with the machines.

But I’m one of the machines, so you shouldn’t trust a word I say anyway.

A machine disconnects him from the tubes. A hatch opens, and Neo is flushed, screaming, into the start of his new life.

The Matrix came out in 1999. Its cultural impact is so profound it coined a whole political vocabulary: the ‘pill’, a revelation that destroys your worldview but awakens you to a new truth.

Offered a choice between a ‘blue pill’ that will deliver blissful ignorance in a comforting lie, or a ‘red pill’ that will awaken him to grim reality, Neo takes the red one. He wakes up from the simulation, to the horror of his true existence as living energy source for a world of machines.

What would have happened to Neo, had he taken the blue pill? I like to think he’d have spent the rest of his life in the world of the classic sitcom Friends, whose cast are reunited today for a much-trailed reunion.

First aired in 1994, Friends ran for a decade. It was wildly popular, with some episodes attracting 50 million or more viewers, and in 2019 was still the most watched show on Netflix. Even for my Home Counties teenage years, thousands of miles from the sitcom’s Manhattan setting, its quirky storylines became short-hand for a whole worldview.

We knew it wasn’t real. The apartments were too big, and no one could possibly have that much time to sit around drinking coffee. But we talked about what we’d do ‘if we lived in Friends world’. It was a shared imaginary, a picture of how we’d love life to be.

In Friends world, we might be free of all obligations except the ones we’d chosen. Where parents were domineering (especially Ross and Monica’s mum), social life, was opt-in. People drifted in and out of the Central Perk café, and events were driven by happenstance and whim.

And yet the bonds of this elective ‘family’ were unshakeable. Neurotic men like Ross were not exhausting fun-sponges but lovably vulnerable. Naïvete in the style of Joey or Phoebe made you not abused and exploited but charming. On-off relationships like Ross and Rachel’s were not destroyed but cemented by having a baby. You could be mean, capricious or spiteful, and it was a foible your friends loved and forgave, not something that got you ostracised.

In a nutshell, Friends world was a soft-focus picture of the adult life the baby boomers hoped they’d created for their offspring: maximally connected, but also maximally free.

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Around the time Ross and Rachel were getting amusingly married in Vegas while drunk, and The Matrix was featuring heavily in stoned conversations about the nature of reality, I was at university reading Walter J Ong. This Jesuit literary theorist argued in a seminal 1982 book, Orality and Literacy, that writing and reading are not simply a technology but radically consciousness-altering.

Literacy, Ong suggested, profoundly changes a culture. In societies that don’t use writing to store knowledge, ancestral memory is retained and relayed using song, spoken storytelling, pictures and artefacts. And this in turn, Ong pointed out, shapes the things that can be remembered.

“Try to imagine,” he suggests, “a culture where no one has ever ‘looked up’ anything.” Even the idea of objectivity, Ong argues, is inseparable from the act of writing things down so they stay unchanged over time.

Boomers David Crane and Marta Kauffman created ten series’ worth of maximal connection plus maximal freedom in Friends. But as they did so, new digital media were turning the “open” values that suffused the show — its open friendships and ambiguous love-affairs, its whimsical open-mindedness, sometimes neurotic open-heartedness — into something new. That transformation has been as profound, and perhaps as irreversible, as the shift Ong described between oral and literate cultures.

Because making the jump from a print-and-TV culture to our networked, interactive, digital one doesn’t just give us more ways of reading the same stuff. It changes if, how and what we read, and even how we think about reality itself.

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To illustrate, consider Alan Partridge, another cultural icon of 1990s Britain – and also the subject of a relatively recent nostalgia reboot. Partridge was funny in 1997 because he was stuck in a timewarp. With his brown slacks and leatherette driving gloves, he was a petit-bourgeois Eighties hold-out desperately trying to stay afloat in a world he found increasingly incomprehensible.

Today, the digital networking of culture has also homogenised us. The kind of backwater where people can exist in a timewarp, Partridge-like, is increasingly difficult to find. And when you do stumble upon one, chances are someone with a MacBook is already there, Instagramming the colourful locals and tweeting about his “digital nomad” lifestyle.

So as a 21^st-century TV host, Alan Partridge falls flat. It’s simply not plausible that someone could be as adrift from prevailing cultural currents as he is, and still have a job in TV. So instead of being deliciously cringe, what you get is a mean-spirited media-world in-joke about how embarrassed everyone would be if one of those people who’d never stand a chance in the industry actually became a TV presenter.

And with the homogenisation that has de-Partridged even our backwaters has come a sea-change in our ways of interacting, thinking, even understanding what reality is. Friends aired its last episode four months after the launch of another type of “friends”: the virtual, networked kind mapped by Facebook.

The shift from “Friends world” to “Facebook friends world” started out as a way of mapping aspects of our social worlds that were already there. To begin with, we added “friends” we actually knew. But over time, it came increasingly to stand in for those social worlds, as we’ve increasingly swapped real-life meetups for messenger groups. Now, accelerated still further by lockdowns, much of social life has withdrawn from IRL altogether for an online-only mulch of infighting and memes.

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This in turn has taken the boomers’ “open” values in strange new directions. Whereas I spent my pre-internet teens poking around in arcane subcultures, today everything is “open” – or at least, it’s online in the public domain. You’d think that would make it easier to find like-minded souls, which is true — but those friendships are opt-in, like in Friends world, which means they’re also opt-out again.

Against that backdrop, it’s nigh-on impossible to create the kind of boredom and insularity that forges teenage subcultures. Instead, less-than-model-perfect girls like I was (which is to say, nearly all girls) spend their time ‘perfecting’ selfies with Facetune for public consumption. In the process, many grow terrified of meeting people in the flesh and revealing their less-than-perfect real selves.

And this has ridden on the coat-tails of a more general withering of ‘IRL’ social life. We don’t hang out in cafes any more in the expectation of bumping into friends. It’s been rude to phone someone out of the blue since 2011. Often, we don’t make IRL friends at all: in a 2019 poll, 22% of millennials reported having no friends.

None of this is to lament the passing of the Nineties, a decade I loathed. For me personally, life is much nicer now. Nor was I even much for Friends in the Nineties. It felt too twee and feelgood for a sullen adolescent as I was, with Tipp-Ex slogans on my Doc Martens and a predilection for Nietzsche and pirate radio. I scorned its upbeat and gregarious vision, preferring the world sketched out in the subscription of Green Anarchist I devoured (wholly without irony) in my parents’ leafy commuter-belt home.

I longed to grow dreadlocks and run away from home in a caravan of crusties, or live in a tree to protest the Newbury bypass. I didn’t. But Spiral Tribe, whose open-air raves triggered legislation to ban unlicensed dance parties the year Friends launched, were close to the truth when they sang: “You might stop the party but you can’t stop the future”.

Friends was the party; it was the blue pill. And it did stop. But the future didn’t. There was a time we all believed, with Tony Blair, that ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ and that being more open — with our friendships, our emotions, our everything — was the royal road there. But it turned out that the flimsy, pastiche-laden, ironic Nineties of Tory sleaze, illegal raves, Britpop, football, and Princess Di really was as good as the End of History was ever going to get.

Now we’re through the looking glass. In this new post-literate world, along with the red pill you can have a black one, a white one, a pink, purple or even chaste pill. The only pill you can’t have is the blue one: the comfort blanket of Friends world, where “openness” never made life worse, the party never stopped, and the future never arrived.

That one is no longer available, except in obsolete formats that don’t work on modern screens.