My Word | How to escape the digital nightmare

We thought it was going to be an information superhighway where people travel together for laughs, sharing family recipes and friendly chats.

Now, 25 years after social media arrived, people watch political assassinations and terrorist murders as they happen then react in echo chambers of hate and lies.

Meanwhile, corporations follow your every move to collect tiny bits of information about you to sell you stuff you don’t need.

It was a beautiful dream now it’s a metastasising nightmare from which young people under 16 are, quite rightly, about to be banned, at least in Australia.

If it stayed online, this ocean of sludge and untruth could be left to itself like a medieval sewer.

But of course, it doesn’t stay underground.

It spills on to the streets with mobs of flag waving sloganeers screaming, punching and sometimes in moments of utter madness, shooting at each other.

So, what happened?

At first, it was a place for mathematics professors and gamers to discuss Pythagoras and Space Invaders.

It was lovely.

Then the moneymen got involved and worked on ways to profit from this quiet and pure brave new world.

So, we got MySpace and YouTube. Then we got Facebook.

Then we got smartphones, which meant you didn’t have to sit at home to chat to friends or watch videos.

Now you could shout at the world and film yourself and others shouting in the pub, on a mountain or on the toilet.

Then we got Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter – the megaphone got louder and wider, and the moneymen got seriously involved.

They began data mining our personal likes and dislikes and selling it like raw guano to advertising companies.

Then the profiteers realised it wasn’t about friendly chat spaces and sharing recipes any more — it was about extreme behaviour and lighting thought-fires.

This is what sells.

Of course, newspapers had known this for decades, but the digital platforms did it faster with more precision.

Greed became merciless.

Then AI arrived, and nothing mattered any more, particularly truth.

Is migration really a threat to our national survival?

Are migrants really stealing our homes and jobs?

Why are neo-Nazis marching on our streets?

Was the Trump assassination attempt real?

Who was Charlie Kirk — a brave moral crusader or an inflammatory bully and racist?

I just don’t know anymore.

The information superhighway is now an infinite traffic jam, and we live in silos watching, waiting.

What can we do about it?

There are ways to find nuggets of truth.

You could go down the wormhole to find who wrote or filmed a post.

Who paid for it and why.

But this takes skill and means spending even more time on a screen, which is exactly what the platforms want.

Or you could switch off social media and have face-to-face conversations, read books, play music, talk to your dog.

Or you could go for a walk in your garden, find a flower, look at it closely, wonder at its beauty and go to bed still wondering.

That’s my plan. I think it’s a wonderful plan.

John Lewis is a former journalist at The News