How the web became a wasteland

Also this week: inside the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, and the joy of audiobooks.

Illustration by Marie Montocchio / Ikon Images

When I first got a smartphone, I remember thinking: “I’ll never be bored again.” How wrong that was. The internet now leaves me cold. My daily browsing has shrunk to a few websites – the Atlantic, Reddit, BBC News – and I have replaced social media with newsletters, including the New Statesman’s excellent Saturday Read.

The open web has been degrading for years and is now a wasteland of ugly adverts, intrusive marketing, hallucinated sources and plausible deepfakes. This is tragic. I’m old enough to remember a time when Google results were useful. Then they were gamed by SEO wizards, who found tricks to juice their website’s rankings at the expense of useful information. Next, Google pumped the first page full of adverts: never try searching for a named hotel, all you’ll see are its competitors. And now, the top link slot has been usurped by AI summaries. These can be badly wrong – in one famous example, Google recommended putting glue on pizza instead of cheese – but they are nevertheless destroying web traffic to newspapers and magazines. And at that point, what will be left for Google’s AI to summarise?

The big Epstein stink

The decline of the internet has had one positive result, however, as I’ve turned back to an older technology: books. When the Jeffrey Epstein case became news again earlier this summer, I bought a copy of Julie Brown’s Perversion of Justice. Brown, a reporter at the Miami Herald, tells the story of Epstein’s offending, which was relentless and repetitive. A teenage girl would hear from a schoolfriend that she could make a few hundred dollars by “giving an older guy a massage”. She would be taken to Epstein’s house, where the massage would culminate in her sexual assault. Full of shame, she wouldn’t tell her parents but would instead be groomed by Epstein, with money and gifts and other support, to recruit more girls. Like many sex offenders, Epstein was obsessive: he liked white, blonde 14-year-olds, and would sometimes have three different girls visit him in a single day.

In the late 2000s, the local Florida cops were sure they had enough evidence to prosecute Epstein for rape, but the prosecutors offered him an extremely lenient plea deal instead, with minimal jail time. Brown makes a good case that Epstein even had teenagers visit him at his office when he was on “work release” from prison. He hired private investigators to intimidate both his victims and anyone who represented them. The passport details of guests flown to his private island are held by the US government (Donald Trump said on 28 July that he never had the “privilege” of visiting Little Saint James), but have never been released. The whole thing stinks.

The price of a scoop

Brown is also admirably honest about how her type of investigative journalism – which led to Epstein’s re-arrest in 2019 – is a dying art. At one point, she takes a 15 per cent pay cut to stay at the Miami Herald. She sometimes paid her own expenses when travelling to interview victims. She had to work hard to convince her reluctant editors to take on the story in the first place, and then to spend the newsroom’s money on getting important court documents unsealed. Her reward is to have the story turned into a cash cow by Maga influencers like “DC Draino”, who arrived at the White House in the spring to receive “the Epstein files”, which turned out to be ring binders of heavily redacted information.

I’d like to support Brown by buying more copies of her book, but it’s not exactly the kind of thing you can give someone for Christmas.

Reading by ear

Talking of books, I published my second one, The Genius Myth, this summer – just as everyone was declaring that no one reads any more. The prime suspect in this crisis, it will not shock you to discover, is social media. You might be tempted to dismiss this as yet another moral panic – medieval scholars once fretted that literacy would corrode our memories. But I have a compelling data point: when my friends have told me they liked the book, most of them have said they’ve been “listening to it”. And these are people who, largely, work in print journalism. My theory is that phones can replace reading time, but it’s hard to scroll while doing chores, walking the dog or driving a car. (OK, the last one is actively illegal.) And so phones might beat hardbacks, but audiobooks are still better than the terrible possibility of being alone with your thoughts for 20 minutes.

Helen Lewis is a staff writer at the Atlantic and the author of “The Genius Myth” (Vintage)

[See also: It’s time for angry left populism]