MAKE THE INTERNET SHIT AGAIN

Not broken. Not dial-up. Not a return to a time when downloading a photograph required making everyone in the house agree not to use the telephone. We're proposing a different sort of shit: the sort where things take a tiny bit of effort, because the effort is how you discover whether you actually want to do them.

Once, if you thought of something interesting while watching television, you either made a note or did without knowing the answer until later. It is now possible to find out the name of an actor in six seconds, discover that he owns a restaurant, read fifteen reviews of the restaurant, look at photographs of the restaurant, then emerge from the screen forty minutes later having missed the ending of the television programme. The internet hasn't answered a question. It's kidnapped an evening.

The great selling point of modern digital life is frictionlessness. Everything anticipates, prompts, recommends, completes and reminds. You never have to be bored, lost, curious for long, or indeed entirely alone with a thought. The tiny obstacle between an impulse and its satisfaction is treated as a design failure.

We'd like to put some of those obstacles back. Turn off notifications. Have a computer in another room. Buy a record that doesn't immediately play something similar when it finishes. Write something down. Use a map that cannot tell advertisers where you are. Go somewhere without checking whether it's good enough first. Let a question sit unanswered through dinner.

This doesn't need to become one of those hideous wellness regimes where a man with expensive teeth explains how he takes cold showers and refuses to look at a screen until he's consumed fourteen grams of lion's mane. It's simpler than that. Do a few things deliberately. The inconvenience is the point.

Minor friction restores intention. And intention, unlike another forty-five minutes of algorithmic slop, is something we may actually miss when it's gone.

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