Is the Internet making us crazy? the Internet asked us the other day.

“No,” we answered aloud to the screen.

Which is what people have always said, argues Tony Dukoupil at the Daily Beast. Traditionally, he writes, “the Internet was seen as just another medium.” (This rings a bell; we might have said as much in our manifesto.) But apparently we, and everybody else, were wrong. Here comes Dokoupil with the Dobuzzkill: “No one is arguing for some kind of Amish future. But the research is now making it clear that the Internet is not ‘just’ another delivery system. It is creating a whole new mental environment, a digital state of nature where the human mind becomes a spinning instrument panel, and few people will survive unscathed.”

He continues, “The current incarnation of the Internet … may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways.”

What if Dookie is right? What if this Internet is some cheap, bath-salty, super-addictive crazy powder and we, the editors of Wag’s Revue, are one of its many pushers? Fast forward ten years and men in suits will be scheming to keep people online longer to consume more web advertisements—advertising for advertising. The Internet: It Connects, the ads will say, convincing us, like all effective ads, of something we know is bullshit but which we wish were true. Fast forward thirty years and there’ll be congressional hearings with a blank-eyed Internet addict speaking haltingly into a thin orchid of a microphone. And in fifty, Jon Hamm will be playing the guy who wrote those The Internet: It Connects ads on a show called Mad Men, which will be miraculous, because he will be very old. (And yet still so NOM NOM NOM.)

So the Internet as a medium makes us dumber, more depressed, even psychotic. This makes sense; the web is a climate of fast, shallow interaction. Literature, on the other hand, makes you not-dumber and it encourages slowness and engagement.