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Online Thumbnail Credits: National Gallery of Art, Open Access Collection

— Written by San Choudhury

Like moths to a flame, we reach for our illuminating devices. Every morning they rouse us from our lull; like moths to a flame, we come alive, dancing and fluttering about our little pockets of light.

Each morning, as the alarm goes off, my eyes resist the day, threatening to seal themselves shut again. Yet my hand reaches – almost before I am conscious of it – for the device beside my pillow – even if only to silence the alarm, to check the time, to confirm that the world still turns, that light meets me. It awakens me, lifts me out of the underworld of sleep. I can scarcely remember a time when the glow of my phone did not draw me out from the darkness beneath my pillow. Some distant childhood memory from eighteen years ago flickers into view, but I can recall little of those mornings that began without the adhesive pull of the illuminating devices that now surround us constantly.

When I turn to my partner, he is much the same. We make an effort to direct our attention toward one another – “morning sunshine” – but if we are honest, the first shine that has stirred us into consciousness is not each other’s but that of the small glowing screen.

Over morning coffee one day, I tried to explain the phenomenon slowly taking shape in my mind. Yes, yes – the little phones, the shining rectangles to which we are collectively beholden. Unable to articulate quite what I mean, “No, I’m not talking about being addicted to our phones”. In recent years, there’s been a wave of media around resisting phones, retreating instead to brick phones; demonising them for stealing our attention through manipulative design. But that was not what I was trying to convey. 

It is not the device itself that draws us. It is what pours through it: the light of the online. 

Listen, shh, listen to our conversations now, “I saw this thing online.” “I read somewhere the other day.” “Someone I follow was saying…” “I came across something on…” Again and again, the world arrives to us refracted through the glow. This is how we think about our world, how we know it, learn it, live it, experience it – online. 

We are moths to illumination: it is the light of the online, accessible through our devices, that lures us in. There is a sense that by being online, we come to see the world in a certain light; online enlightens us about the world. This – this sense that we are being illuminated about the world, society, life, by being online – what is it? I asked him. What do we call this phenomenon where we feel that by being online, by hovering in that glow, we are being enlightened in a new way? I persisted.

“And now, with the rise of the knowledge influencer – the philosopher on Instagram, the aesthetic reader on YouTube, the intellectual curator on TikTok – don’t we just flock to their glow as they shine some light about life and reality our way.” 

What is this? I asked him again. What do we call this peculiar conviction that to be online is to be illuminated?

He paused.

“On-lightenment,” he said.

*

We are entering an era of On-lightenment. 

For the most part today, “the online” has lost its shine, as intense scepticism filters through public discourse. Narratives of being “chronically online” or that “the internet is making us stupid” now frame how we understand our relationship to life online. We shudder at the thought of spending too much time there, as though it were a vortex pulling us inward. And why shouldn’t we? As awareness grows of the deliberate stickiness with which our phones, platforms, and applications are designed, there is a growing consensus that the warnings once issued by our parents — that “the internet is dangerous” — may have held more truth than we cared to admit. Except now those very parents are themselves entangled in its glow. Fathers forward memes from the School of WhatsApp; family groups circulate AI-generated news clips; algorithmically boosted outrage spreads at the speed of light. In the deluge of content engineered to hook users through shorthand emotional triggers, there is a sense that disinformation, misinformation, and algorithmic distortion are running rampant in a world that is no longer cleanly divided between online and offline.

What we are left with is a dominant story: that far from fulfilling its early promise of democratising knowledge and expanding intellectual horizons, the internet has had the opposite effect. Rather than making us more capable, more informed, more critically engaged, it has rendered us distracted, reactive, cognitively diminished. In this telling, the online is not an engine of enlightenment, but its undoing.

And yet, amidst all this abuse hurled at the online world, I find myself not entirely convinced by this narrative. There are moments – fragments of encounters, exchanges, content – that make one hesitate. Is there not also something about being online that sharpens rather than dulls? The use of reason, the critique of authority, the widening of access to information, the cultivation of a critical edge – these were among the defining features of the Enlightenment. Might we not recognise echoes of these features in certain corners of online life? In long-form video essays dissecting political theory, in independent newsletters interrogating institutions, in public philosophy threads, in creators who encourage questioning rather than obedience? This is not a misty-eyed defence of the internet, nor a thinly veiled justification of the hours I myself spend there. I am not claiming that online life is making us enlightened in the classical sense – nor am I denying the distortions and degradations that are so often on display. But neither am I persuaded that we are simply being made stupid.