“Progress”

The following tables are my (opinionated, minimally researched) answers to questions about a curated version of Wikipedia’s list of most-visited websites (see Notes for details). I invite you to follow along, issue your own snap judgments, and come to your own conclusions. My answers are quite negative, but considering the patterns I have observed in my behavior when I am happy and healthy versus when I am not, I feel negativity is warranted.

If a frequent visitor to this site stopped using it entirely, their mental health would be:

Also consider flipping the question to “If a new visitor of this website became a regular visitor, their mental health would be:” and see if your answer flips as well.

• WhatsApp: I’m assuming that most people use WhatsApp to communicate with their family and friends.

• Microsoft Office: the majority of Office usage is probably for the workplace, but I’m considering voluntary/non-work usage for the purposes of these charts.

If the visitors to this site are demonstrating addictive, unhealthy behavior towards the site, the site makes:

All of the websites in the right column have a financial incentive to encourage addictive behavior.

• WhatsApp: I admit I don’t fully understand how WhatsApp makes money and what addictive behavior would look like.

• Netflix: it’s is an interesting case because their business model does not explicitly encourage promoting addictive behavior, which is great. However, addicts are less likely to cancel or pause their subscriptions.

Imagine that every year, each visitor to this website is asked “During the past year, do you feel that the time you spent on this site was time well-spent?” The website only receives the money they made from that visitor during that year if the visitor answers “yes”. This website would be:

This one is of course wildly speculative, but it’s worth mentioning that for many of these websites, much of their income comes from the least happy of their users. Based on my experience, happy YouTube users watch a lot fewer ads than the unhappy ones by virtue of watching a lot less in general.

I think in some weird, wacky world where this scenario happened, many of the sites I marked “insolvent” could survive in some form, but they’d have to make significant cuts and would no longer be the juggernauts they are today.

• Microsoft Office: note that again I am considering only non-work usage of Office (likely for a personal project).

• LinkedIn: I really don’t have a good sense of LinkedIn; maybe it has enough doomscrollers to be marked as “insolvent”, too.

• Netflix: I may be too optimistic about Netflix here. In my mind there are a lot of people who have a subscription but only use it when there’s something they really do want to watch, or they have guests over and want to watch a movie.

Closing Thoughts

Maybe this is too harsh, but I don’t think so. When people discuss their roads to happiness, the words “block”, “uninstall”, and “delete” occur with alarming frequency. Besides, I’ve spent too long clawing back my self-determination from unending streams of digital sludge to believe that everything is fine.

So—

Why is it that so much of modern happiness is found by uninstalling all of the “progress” society has made?

What does it mean that so much of our modern infrastructure, our collective knowledge, and our social connective tissue are tangled up in systems that cannot survive without exploitative behavior?

Can we create systems that earn the most when their users are happy, healthy, and fulfilled? Can we do better than building world-spanning digital combines that churn through hours of strangers’ lives for pennies?

Notes:

I excluded Google Search, Baidu, Yahoo, Yandex, Live (Bing), Yahoo JP, Docomo, and Zen News. Each of the excluded sites is either a search engine (I was more interested in Internet “destinations” than starting points) or something I have little to no context about.

I redacted adult website names because I don’t want algorithms to make assumptions about the nature of this website.