Before the Internet, We Managed Just Fine: So What Changed?
We talk a lot about convenience these days. The one-click life. Groceries at the doorstep, banking without the queue, a world delivered rather than encountered. But Tim Fletcher isn’t convinced that this shiny, streamlined existence is the progress we pretend it is.
His contribution to the Poetry Project 52 for 26 turns its gaze toward the hollowing-out of our daily interactions, and the creeping strangeness of a society slowly erasing its own face.
Because while the internet has made everything effortless, it’s also made everything remote. Shops close, banks disappear from the high street, and the simple act of stepping outside feels increasingly optional. Tim remembers a time before all this, before notifications replaced greetings, and he wonders how we managed then. Some would say: perfectly well!
And yet the digital age has brought with it new shadows. The dark web, that near-mythical underworld whispered about in films and crime reports, stands as the stark counterpoint to our glossy online habits.
In this poem, Tim flips the coin again, pushing us to consider another unsettling extreme: keyboards tapped by hands that have no face behind them. It’s a surreal image, but uncomfortably close to the truth of how we now communicate: disembodied, detached; identities blurred into usernames and pixels…
Fletcher has always written from a place of feeling. Since his teenage years, poetry has been his way of translating emotion; his own, and the emotional static he picks up from the world around him. He’s a devoted observer of those who walk off-beat: the bold, the odd, the dreamers carving out their own path.
Sometimes his attention is so fixed on people that he bumps into lamp posts, a small price to pay for witnessing life as it really is.
In this piece, he turns that same attentive eye toward the faceless frontier of modern living, asking us what we sacrifice when the world becomes easier, but less human.
THE DARK SIDE OF WEB
The world wide web
Mysteries and lies
International scandals
Intrigue and spies
Buy a Kalashnikov rifle
At a discounted price
Any kind of sex
Whatever the vice
No regulation
Connections of all kinds
www. Hyperlinks
Allowing cyber crimes
On the outside of reason
Lies a mysterious place
Interactive keyboards
With hands
But no face
TIM FLETCHER
