Time-traveling Slate essayist Katie Roiphe is back from 2005 with another crazy article about "the information superhighway." This one—a real scorcher!—is about how she will never get off the internet, ever, no matter how many of her friends beg her.

Yes, Katie Roiphe's friends are desperate to get her off the internet: "Yet another friend recently recommended that I try Freedom, the popular program that "locks" you off the Internet," she writes. Why do they want her to stop? Many people might think that her friends would like her to get off the internet because she seems intent on using it to unearth ancient slights and opine on the cutting-edge phenomenon "angry internet commenters."

Katie Roiphe does not think this: Katie Roiphe knows that the real reason her friends want her off the internet is because "[f]reedom from distraction may in fact be the new, sought after bourgeois luxury" and because the man who programmed Freedom is a "sweet looking, bearded, former information and library science graduate student, whose picture of himself on his website has him carrying a baby in a Baby Björn." (If you are asking why the fact that he is carrying a baby is relevant to the topic, you do not understand Katie Roiphe: it means he is a weak modern man and would not properly sexually harass her.)

Katie Roiphe is having none of this. The internet is the strong, masculine lover that poor Dave Eggers can never be: "We don't use the Internet; it uses us." Katie Roiphe understands the internet: "The advent of our online lives is so transforming, so absorbing, so passionate that daily life beforehand is literally unimaginable." Katie Roiphe loves the internet. Katie Roiphe will never leave the internet, ever.

[Slate]