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Reluctantly Monitoring the Situation—This Week on VICE: Members Only

Words you’re too old to use and bars that shouldn’t exist: an intervention for the terminally online.

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It is a source of great personal shame that I know who Clavicular is. I’m 36 years of age. I should be blissfully unaware of Clavicular. I should be phasing the last band T-shirts out of my daily wardrobe and panicking about my eggs. Unfortunately, I was raised to love being online, and the online world I was born into—a clandestine paradise free from advertising and the average adult—is now dead. In its place: a surveillance hellscape that constantly asks for my biodata, that I am forced to share with 16-year-olds tending to their investment portfolios and boomers getting misty-eyed over an AI-generated image of a dog fireman lifting a small Chinese girl out of a flood. 

As a result, instead of any useful or enriching information, my head is now full of tid-bits about streamers and influencers born after 9/11. For at least 20 minutes every evening I sit on my couch—one of the few things in life that I actually own outright—holding my phone over my face, watching a lad called Gymskin try to stop traffic with his aura. I don’t feel good about this and, if this scene is........

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