A few weeks ago, Lawrence Newport’s LFG (Looking for Growth) group started a trend of cleaning tube carriages, finally bringing widespread attention to how ugly our public spaces are. They are not the first to try — for example, Create Streets last year ran a great campaign on the “street scars” that disfigure British pavements — but it is the first such campaign I can remember that received widespread media attention. I was pleased, but, stuck in my London flatshare room, I realised that much of the ugliness I see everyday is not outside. It is online. And nobody seems to be doing much about it.
When we consider even our most unattractive physical spaces, they pale in comparison to some parts of the internet. Online spaces are riddled with filth, ranging from low-effort AI slop through predatory ads, often for scam products, to clickbait and corporate flat art, also known as Algeria or Corporate Memphis. The internet is aggressively ugly.
This would be fine if we could avoid it, but, much as is the case with physical public spaces, this is often impossible. Just as I cannot avoid being confronted with the smell of sewage, decomposing animal carcasses, litter scattered everywhere and grimy, graffiti-covered train carriages on my daily commute from East into Central London, I can hardly miss being flooded with ads for scams or AI-generated engagement bait whenever I visit Facebook. If you are a regular Facebook user, I am sure you are familiar with the formula — a caption like “nobody wished me a happy birthday”, accompanied by an AI-generated picture of a sad old lady and thousands of “happy birthday” comments from good-hearted but naïve people.
I could just forgo Facebook — even though forcing all my Facebook-only friends to connect with me elsewhere would be a pain — but other places are not much better. If I try looking up just about anything on Google Images, over half the results are AI-generated. Even the Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, the cleanest of all social media websites, is ugly with its flat art style, reminiscent of if an HR department was turned into an art direction. It does not help that it tries to play into the hideous lexicon of B2B communications, one that makes Rupi Kaur’s poems pleasant to read by comparison.
Perhaps the worst offender is short-form video content, or shorts. It now floods YouTube, Facebook and Instagram as well as TikTok. Nobody I know enjoys watching it, nor do they expect to enjoy it only to find themselves disappointed — everybody seems to hate it and know they hate it, and yet many of them still watch it. Many creators of shorts have perfected a formula of curating thumbnails or captions that bait you into clicking on the video and filming videos that are not enjoyable to watch yet compel the watcher to see what happens next — in other words, brainrot. The companies hosting shorts seem to know and encourage this — Jonathan Haidt revealed a few months ago that TikTok, a platform which hosts nothing but shorts, actively seeks to take away users’ time from “sleep, and eating, and moving around the room, and looking at somebody in the eyes;” all potentially beautiful things, particularly as compared to the ugly clickbait of brainrot shorts.
This is a serious problem. We spend a lot of time in online spaces — four hours and twenty minutes a day on average in the UK. We may not move through them in the way we walk down a street or climb into a train carriage, but we experience them just as we do physical spaces. Like physical spaces, they are also a place where different things compete for your attention. The experience of an otherwise beautiful tree may be scarred by a tipped-over bin lying next to it, or the experience of a beautiful building may be taken away by the presence of an ugly one where the beautiful one would have stood. In online spaces, a photo of a friend you have been missing, smiling, may compete for attention with outrage porn or AI-generated clickbait posted by a political grifter.
And, much like physical spaces, online spaces, too, have their landlords — powerful conglomerates like Google, Meta and Microsoft. It is difficult to travel through online space without encroaching on their land. In fact, the more you encroach on it, the happier they are, like mediaeval robber barons happy they can charge more tolls on passers-by. For them, the more content, the better — no matter how ugly, lazy or predatory it is.
The effect of this is not only that it makes being online unpleasant. It also desensitises us. The more filth we see, the less it bothers us and the less we seek out the beautiful. Perhaps this is why people do not really complain about the ugliness of the internet — many of us have been surrounded by ugliness for so long that it does not phase us. Yet it should phase us! Beauty, alongside goodness and truth, sits among the transcendentals, the most fundamental attributes of being. We should be as bothered about ugliness as we are about evil and falseness.
Nor is the effect of ugly internet uniform. Among the people who spend an outsize chunk of their everyday time online is the ruling class. Politicians often spend vast amounts of time on X and the financial overlords in the City spend just as much time on LinkedIn. A lot of attention has been given to how social media can be an echo chamber where it comes to views — particularly views which carry some falseness to them — but it can also be an echo chamber of filth by making us think that the grimness of those spaces is the default, and that we should not expect for our experience to be more beautiful. The ruling class will not care for beauty if all it knows is ugliness.
There is also something regressive about the ugliness of the internet. Those less well-off are more likely to live in places with unpleasant surroundings. This pushes them back into their rooms and into online spaces. In other words, they have no way to avoid ugliness.
Alas, the internet is more difficult to clean up than tube carriages. To its credit, Ofcom is now leading a push to enforce existing legislation on online content more effectively, particularly in regard to the Online Safety Act, but the Act does not even begin to touch most of the forms of online ugliness. Just as the Metropolitan Police will not even attempt to investigate a crime unless there has been physical contact between the victim and the criminal — at least according to a policeman who said so to me after my bag got stolen — the Online Safety Act does not attempt to curb AI slop or clickbait. But, much like bag thefts embolden criminals, leading to increasingly violent crime, the proliferation of internet filth means that the most obviously harmful content, like pornography or illegal scams, can conceal itself from Ofcom within a sea of slop. Consequently, Ofcom likely could not stop it even if it were asked to do so.
This is not to say that it should. I have no great confidence in Ofcom deciding what is and what is not ugly. In fact, I suspect that, were Ofcom to be tasked with doing so, it would have the whole internet look like LinkedIn.
The long-term solution must be to give people something better to do
Perhaps the feudal lords of the internet can be persuaded to act. Recently, Facebook agreed to restrict “unoriginal” content — slop, effectively — through its algorithm. I have also noticed Microsoft using flat art less, seemingly having finally realised how hideous it is. Perhaps there is space for an LFG-like movement for the internet; if you shame the big tech firms into action, like LFG did with Transport for London, they will act to protect their brand.
Alas, some of the most egregious offenders cannot be curbed. TikTok, for example, will never crack down on brainrot shorts because so much of TikTok just is brainrot shorts. The long-term solution must be to give people something better to do. If TikTok executives themselves admit that they are competing for attention with sleeping, eating and looking people in the eyes, we should make sleeping, eating and interacting with people in-person more attractive. I know I would spend a lot less time online if going to the pub was cheaper. Perhaps the way to clean up the internet is, indeed, to make physical spaces nice again.
