Billie Eilish and the oppressiveness of Too Much Internet
On Eilish's award-winning "What Was I Made For?"
I have a new piece in World Magazine on Billie Eilish, her Grammy- and Oscar-winning song “What Was I Made For?” from the Barbie movie, and how Eilish serves as a canary in the online coal mines in which we’ve dug ourselves. I use the phrase “zeitgeist bingo card.” I reference Flannery O’Connor. I make fun of Taylor Swift. Yes—deal with it, Swifties! I am so grateful to Tim at World for bringing this to life. You can read it online here, and the printed version should be arriving this week or next. (If you want to support a news publication doing unique work in the American media landscape, I highly encourage you to subscribe.)
I’ll share an excerpt, and then the rest of this email will serve as a kind of syllabus—a deeper dive into the music and technology that I discuss in the piece.
Eilish’s young career is remarkable. She’s only 22 and has nine Grammys. And there’s depth and edge to her dreamy, synth-heavy pop that’s missing from Swift’s repertoire. For instance, take the following lines from Eilish’s single “TV,” off her 2022 EP Guitar Songs:
“I put on Survivor just to watch somebody suffer / Maybe I should get some sleep / Sinking in the sofa while they all betray each other / What’s the point of anything?”
Such lines capture Eilish’s voice, a singularly apocalyptic one among today’s pop superstars. Her music reveals dark truths about life in the internet age in large and startling ways, as Flannery O’Connor might have put it.
Eilish is a canary in the online coal mine. The quieter she gets, you might say, the worse the cultural air quality. It’s not that Eilish is all that loud to begin with. Her voice is a contradiction in terms, at once powerful and ethereal, and she wields the power selectively. Still, when she’s breathlessly quiet, as she is on the somber, piano-forward “What Was I Made For?,” it means everything is not alright.
“What Was I Made For?” builds on the themes Eilish has developed in much of her previous work. Namely, that the internet is a terrible place to search for existential certainty around questions of fame, identity, purpose, and love. That maybe this experiment in rootless, distracted ways of inhabiting the world is leaving entire generations wondering why they’re here at all.
Again, you can read the whole thing here.
To the syllabus!
The technology
My piece on Eilish is as much about the oppressiveness of Too Much Internet as it is her music (and how the two go together), so let’s start with the technological side of things.
In the conclusion of my piece, I quote from Andy Crouch’s The Life We’re Looking For. In most ways, it’s a follow-up to his previous book, The Tech-Wise Family. Tech-Wise Family influenced me and my approach to technology and parenting (and also my personal tech habits) in major ways. It’s immensely practical, which can’t necessarily be said for The Life We’re Looking For. But where Life lacks in clear and abundant practicality, it makes up for in the way it gives the reader a hunger for embodied and more rooted ways of living. It does so while peeling back the insidious assumptions about the good life made by our digital technologies and tech overlords. Get both books—especially if you still have kids living under your roof.
One of the other major sources that has shaped my understanding of technology (broadly speaking) and digital technologies (in particular) is
and his newsletter, . His writing, and the way he curates the writing and thinking of philosophers and social critics from ages past, is like striking gold in said online coal mine. Two quotes from such thinkers—which I came across thanks to Sacasas’s newsletter—were swirling in the back of my mind while I wrote the Eilish piece:“As the power of machines increases, the role of persons more and more decreases to that of mere consumers.” – Ivan Illich
“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” – Wendell Berry
For a good entryway into The Convivial Society, I suggest starting with one of his most-recent posts:
I have an entire Evernote folder stuffed with resources, articles, and quotes about the misery we’ve created for ourselves with Too Much Internet. So I could go on, though I think this will suffice for now. However, if you’d like a reminder about what life was like with Just Enough Internet, you can’t do much better than
’s ode to 1999 in the New York Times. (His 2017 essay on resisting the internet has aged better than a single pot still of Irish whiskey.)The music
Perhaps more than any other pop megastar today, Eilish’s oeuvre is shaped and defined by (or against) Too Much Internet. Her entire career can be attributed, in a sense, to Too Much Internet. She came out of nowhere as a 14-year-old with her debut single, “Ocean Eyes.” The song, first uploaded on Soundcloud, was an overnight viral hit.
It’s pretty much all there. The ethereal dreaminess of her vocals. The lusciously hazy atmosphere architected by her brother, Finneas. The undeniable ear-worminess of it all. But there is a brightness to “Ocean Eyes” that she mostly leaves behind for darker territory in her later work.
Fast forward a handful of years—past her major record debut, 2019’s WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? (you know, the one with “bad guy”)—to her sophomore album, Happier Than Ever (2021). I give a considerable amount of attention to this album in my World piece, as it’s where the presence of Too Much Internet seeps through every line, every chord, every nook and cranny of the soundscape. (I highly recommend Rob Harvilla’s review of Happier Than Ever at The Ringer.)
The album peaks—musically, emotionally, canary-ly—in the title track. Ostensibly about a dysfunctional relationship that has come to a brutal end, “Happier Than Ever” could just as easily be read as a breakup song with the most destructive aspects of the internet. Through the first half of the song, her voice is delicate, coal-mine quiet over a jazzy guitar.
Then the key change hits. The song takes on a decidedly emo quality. (I’m all for emo qualities, btw.) Eilish is hurt, alienated, and disenfranchised—painfully aware of how she’s been manipulated. The canary is angry. The decibels are rising. The shafts are caving in. Get out now:
The emotional catharsis hits like few songs have in the last decade. And, yeah, I admit that “Happier Than Ever” breaks the canary analogy. Things got bad, and she got loud.
But that’s okay, because her 2022 EP, Guitar Songs, holds to the canary analogy all the way through.
Only two songs, but holy smokes, these two songs carry an entire album’s worth of canary energy down into the depths of your soul. I will go ahead and tell you now that you are not prepared for what will hit you at the 2:42 mark of “The 30th.”
(If you need a minute to recover, that’s 100 percent understandable.)
But the way she sings “And so am I” there at the end? Goodness. It’s a whisper, an almost-silent prayer of beautiful vulnerability.
“What Was I Made For?” graces the cage of your soul with a similar kind of existential vulnerability. Eilish’s falsetto gives the song this kind of brittle emotional quality. There is an airy-ness to it, a desire for light-ness, but it is not bright. Eilish described her vocal delivery as singing after having just finished crying.
One thing I find interesting is that for Eilish, “What Was I Made For?” took on an autobiographical sense only after she and her brother finished writing it. Here’s how she explained it to Entertainment Weekly:
It was a dark, slow period of time. I was also in a weird place mentally in my life. We were in the studio and did come up with stuff, but nothing felt right. I don’t think I was able to be vulnerable and self-aware about my life and surroundings. That makes it hard to write sometimes. When we had this new thing to write about that wasn’t [about] my life, it was almost relieving. I didn’t have to worry about how I felt. I could just write from the perspective of this character. What was amazing is immediately after, I realized it was absolutely about me and my life. I didn’t even mean to do that.
What’s heartbreaking is that Eilish thinks she’s made for happiness—pursuing and enjoying happiness. Or, as she sings on the opening track of Happier Than Ever, her aim in life is “To keep myself together and prioritize my pleasure.” But happiness is a fish we can never catch when we’re baiting the hooks of our hearts for that specific of a prize.
Think I forgot how to be happy
Something I'm not, but something I can be
Something I wait for
Something I'm made for
Something I'm made for
This is the spirit of our distracted age, though. My prayer is that our neighbors, of various generations, who are caught up in the lie that they can author their own happiness, tire of seeking answers to the Big Question that Eilish asks so achingly and earnestly without considering their Maker—the one who died and rose again to give us something far more valuable than happiness.
Thanks for reading.