"I spend so much time on the screen when I am writing, the last thing you want to do is spend more time on the Internet looking at a screen. That's what I hate about all this technology"
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Welsh is doing that very Welsh thing: taking a blunt, almost workmanlike complaint and letting it double as a cultural diagnosis. On the surface, it’s a writer’s grievance about occupational hazard. Writing has migrated from pen and paper to a glowing rectangle, so “screen time” isn’t leisure anymore; it’s labor. The bite comes from the reversal of a common assumption: that the internet is where culture happens. For him, it’s where attention goes to be strip-mined after you’ve already spent the day mining your own.
The subtext is less Luddite than boundary-setting. Welsh isn’t condemning technology’s existence so much as its colonizing tendency. The line “the last thing you want to do” frames the internet not as temptation but as depletion; it turns digital life into an energy budget problem. That matters because Welsh’s work has always been about appetite and compulsion - the little systems that hijack choice. Here, “all this technology” reads like another addictive infrastructure, one that disguises itself as convenience while demanding constant presence.
Context helps: Welsh came up as an author when transgression felt tactile, tied to bodies in rooms, not profiles in feeds. His resistance is a defense of the off-screen conditions that make novels possible: boredom, silence, long attention, the slow burn of noticing. In a culture that treats connectivity as virtue, he’s insisting on a heresy: the most productive relationship to the internet might be abstinence after hours.
The subtext is less Luddite than boundary-setting. Welsh isn’t condemning technology’s existence so much as its colonizing tendency. The line “the last thing you want to do” frames the internet not as temptation but as depletion; it turns digital life into an energy budget problem. That matters because Welsh’s work has always been about appetite and compulsion - the little systems that hijack choice. Here, “all this technology” reads like another addictive infrastructure, one that disguises itself as convenience while demanding constant presence.
Context helps: Welsh came up as an author when transgression felt tactile, tied to bodies in rooms, not profiles in feeds. His resistance is a defense of the off-screen conditions that make novels possible: boredom, silence, long attention, the slow burn of noticing. In a culture that treats connectivity as virtue, he’s insisting on a heresy: the most productive relationship to the internet might be abstinence after hours.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
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