Roisin Kiberd

A blazingly smart, mind-bending dive into the internet with an extraordinary writer: a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the way we live today

We all live online now, but what does that mean in IRL? How do strange subcultures on reddit affect our local shopping centres, what do night gyms owe to Twitter, and where can we really go to get some decent sleep? Our every move online is watched, but can we see ourselves?

In these wide-ranging, witty essays, Roisin Kiberd offers immersive insight into the strange worlds, habits and people who have grown up with the internet, and shows the way our world is changing to fit the online fever-dream. Unsettling, clear-sighted and perversely fun, she traces the lines between Netflix and nap hotels, vaporwave music and camgirls, self-optimisation and insomnia, dating apps and a grand unified theory of Monster Energy Drinks. As well as holding up the zeitgeist for scrutiny, she turns an equally frank eye on her own life online, and asks what we have gained, what we have lost, and what we have given willingly away in exchange for this connected world.

A Personal Journey Through the Internet

The Disconnect

Nathan Johnson

Technology follows me everywhere, in the daylight, in the dark, into my dreams. Like the blooding of vampires, it cannot be undone.

I‘ve never seen a dating app founder admit that they deal in our civilisation's future, the preservation of a lonely species doomed to languish in front of screens.

Quietly, we have grown to treat others the way Silicon Valley treats us: as data subjects, as nodes in a system.

The selfie, it strikes me, is the loneliest photographic medium, and the most common; a cry to the ether for Likes, as a substitute for company.

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