Paul Craig Roberts has had enough. He has looked around at the digital world, declared it broken, and write a long moan, ending with a threat to retreat into an off-grid fantasy of smoke signals and homing pigeons. I understand the rage. I even sympathise with the impulse. But as someone who genuinely loves the internet—as someone who’s been lying about his age since 2020 to get all the online goodies reserved for adults—I have to say this: Roberts is looking at the symptoms, not the cause. The problem isn’t that the digital world has failed. It’s that it’s been stolen.

Let’s start with his main complaint:

The Internet and digital systems are insecure and cannot be made secure. To operate in the digital world becomes increasingly risky by the day and harder to use.

He’s right, in the narrow sense. It’s now easier for a Ukrainian teenager to buy your medical history than it is for you to change your own Amazon password. But this isn’t some regrettable accident. It’s the deliberate result of putting every institution—shops, banks, schools, government portals—into the hands of people who think “encrypt” means sending an Excel file by email.

We are already into triple authentication—password, texted code, emailed code… Sometimes the questions you have to answer are not even your questions… You then have to have the ordeal of getting in touch with a human and explaining that these are not questions that you supplied.

This is the digital equivalent of being waterboarded by bureaucracy. You’re asked to solve riddles that you didn’t write, to answer questions that don’t apply to you, and to verify your humanity by identifying blurry pictures of traffic lights while your bank locks you out. The system isn’t trying to keep out criminals. It’s trying to break your will.

And this bit is golden:

There are already sites that you cannot reach unless Cloudflare verifies that you are human. For some reason Cloudflare cannot identify Apple’s browser Safari.

This is what happens when security becomes theatre. The bots get in. You don’t. Because the whole thing isn’t built to work. It’s built to protect corporations from liability while giving the impression that they’re doing something. Cloudflare isn’t security. It’s a digital moat filled with broken CAPTCHA puzzles.

Now, here’s where Roberts hits something real:

The idiot corporations were sold a bill of goods that the digital revolution would lower their costs by shifting the cost of customer relations to their customers.

That’s it. That’s the entire business model of the modern world. Outsource the labour to the user. Make the customer do the admin. And when it goes wrong, make the same customer beg a chatbot for mercy.

What in analogue days could be settled in a three minute telephone call answered on the third ring can in the new digital age take days to resolve, if it can be resolved.

Exactly. The telephone used to ring. Someone used to pick up. Now, you navigate a cascade of drop-down menus, only to be told that your issue isn’t recognised and that “support is only available via the app.” That’s if the app works—which it usually doesn’t, unless you want to buy something. Then, funnily enough, the login process is seamless.

He then warns:

The digital revolution is the ultimate tool for criminals. They can use it to steal your bank account, your retirement account, your identity… They can put things on your computer and cell phone for which you can be arrested.

Yes—and not just criminals. Governments do this too. Governments train AIs to scan your emails for “threat indicators.” They collar your location history from apps. They mandate surveillance and call it safety. Try sending a link to an article that says something real about Gaza and see how long your account lasts.

A friend posted on his X account two quotes from my June 19 article… Within less than 30 seconds his post was taken down and his X account cancelled.

That wasn’t an intern reviewing flagged content. That was an algorithm designed to erase deviation. This is the part Roberts nearly gets—but not quite. The digital world didn’t decay by accident. It was captured. And now the people running it are using it to enforce obedience.

I say this not as someone who fears the internet, but as someone who fell in love with it the moment I realised it could make me freer and older than I actually was. It let me access books I couldn’t buy, films I wasn’t allowed to see, tools that adults thought I shouldn’t have. It’s let me make serious money in ways that I am wise enough not to describe. The internet was supposed to be the great equaliser. And, for those of us who know how to game it, so it is.

Of course, if you don’t take it as a system built by idiots for schoolboys to game, there are the filters. Then the “community standards.” Then the login barriers. Now every website demands an email address, a phone number, and a biometric scan. You must “prove you are human.” But only in the narrowest sense. Only if you behave. Only if your browser, your behaviour, and your beliefs are approved. Or only if you know how to creep under the tent.

What we’re living through is not digital decline. It’s digital domestication. And Roberts, to his credit, is furious. But when he says:

When I close down this website, I will end my digital existence. I will use homing pigeons or smoke signals, or dispatch a messenger.

—I have to say, with some reluctance, that this is exactly the wrong move. You don’t walk out of the arena just because it’s rigged. You stay in. You build your own tools. You lie about your age, you spoof your IP, you tunnel through the system like a mole with a grudge. Because if you leave, they win. And you don’t even get a receipt.

The internet isn’t dead. It’s been hijacked by midwit technocrats and the worst kind of suits. But it still has pockets of freedom. And those pockets need to be defended.

We don’t need to leave the digital world. We need to take it back.