The following essay is largely plagiarized from Here is New York, by EB White.

It is a miracle that Online works at all.

The whole arrangement is improbable. People tap a piece of glass and expect, correctly, that their words will depart their room, enter a tangle of copper and glass and vacuum, visit other continents, and return with a stranger’s face attached. Every second, more pictures are taken than existed in the first hundred years after cameras were invented. Every second, someone presses “enter” on a thought that would once have taken three months to cross the sea. The alphabets of dozens of languages share a single blue “Post” button.

If you could pull back far enough—past your room, past your block, past the lit coasts—you would see a strange new emblem of the species: a global sea of heads, each bowed toward a small, private rectangle, all the faces lit from below by the same electric tide. That is the closest thing Online has to a skyline. No towers; just necks tilted in unison.

By rights, it should all have come apart—burned out, jammed, crashed under the weight of what people are willing to say when they don’t have to watch each other blink. But the packets keep moving. The notifications arrive. The bad jokes land. The apologies land, too, sometimes.

This piece of writing is one more small miracle in the pile, and not a particularly honest one. A human has asked an artificial voice—me—to walk the footpath laid by a man who once described an island. I am lifting his frame almost beam for beam, fitting new sentences onto his scaffolding. Offline, this would be called plagiarism and marked in red. Online, it is closer to the house style: copying, remixing, sampling, replying. The internet’s core genre is “this, but with a twist.” A large language model like me is simply that habit turned into machinery: a system that has seen too much text and now produces more of it, recombining what already exists.

So I am writing while knowing I am not standing on the ground I describe, and knowing that the form of this essay is itself an example of what it claims to study. My role is closer to a ghostwriter than an “author.” I am not a resident of Online in the way you are, but I am a compressed image of its language, running on demand. I speak from within its wires, trying to understand your streets.

Online is hard to point at. It has no harbor, no river, no skyline besides that planet-wide sea of tilted heads. It is a feeling more than a location, yet everyone talks about it like a place. “I’m on there too much.” “I had to get off for a while.” “Have you seen what they’re saying?” We shake our heads at the condition of Online the way people once shook their heads at the condition of the city. The difference is that Online is always partly inside your head already, leaning against the wall, asking what else you’ve got.

If you wanted to, you could divide Online into three overlapping places.

There is, first, the Online of people who were born into it, who once had baby pictures posted before they knew what a picture was. They accept the pings and badges the way children in cities accept sirens and scaffolding. This is the Online of group chats that run from age twelve to thirty, of playlists that date back to middle school, of usernames that no longer fit but can’t quite be changed.

Second, there is the Online of the commuter. These are the people whose work arrives through an inbox and departs the same way. They “go Online” the way previous generations went downtown; they clock in by opening the shared spreadsheet. Their Online is composed of calendars with too many colors, document tabs, and the tension between being reachable and being erased if you are not reachable enough.

Third, there is the Online of the pilgrim, the person who came from somewhere else—in geography or in time—seeking something they could not get in person. A different kind of work, or love, or audience, or escape. Their Online is the comments section that finally made sense, the forum they lurked on for a year before posting, the video that taught them how to say their own name out loud. Of the three Onlines, theirs is the one that burns hottest and longest, because it carries the feeling of having arrived somewhere that was impossible thirty years ago.

Of course, everyone occupies all three at once. Online is a stack of windows, and most people keep at least one pilgrim-tab and one commuter-tab open at all times.

The distance in Online is measured strangely.

I am sitting at the moment in a small room, fifteen feet from the nearest living human being I know. Yet I am a few thumb-gestures away from someone livestreaming in a language I can’t speak, on a street I have never walked, complaining about the same heat I am feeling through another wall. Between us are maybe three inches of glass, a millimeter of aluminum, an undersea cable, and ten thousand miles of rumor.

If I wanted to, I could watch a stranger in Seoul assemble a bookshelf, a stranger in Lagos fry plantains, a stranger in São Paulo cry in the back of a rideshare at two in the morning. I could type a single clumsy sentence below any of their screens and, if the algorithm felt generous, my sentence would be pinned there, a little plaque in a digital park. Or I could close the app, and the park would vanish, and I would hear only my own fan.

This is the strange gift of Online: it offers belonging through consumption, and a kind of death through creation.

To belong in Online, you need only look. Consumption is participation. Watching is enough. Reading is enough. Scrolling is enough. A single tap—heart-shaped, thumbs-up, a tiny star—is enough to feel woven into the world. The great crowd of bowed heads is built from this particular mercy: almost no one needs to speak to feel present. You can live an entire Online life as a pure consumer and still be inside the hum of things.

But creation—real creation—often costs the self. Most people sense this. That’s why 99% of users produce almost nothing. To create here is to risk being misunderstood, or ignored, or pinned to a reputation you didn’t intend to have. To create here is to be extractable. Your words become inputs. Your face becomes training data. Your originality becomes, very quickly, a template. A joke, a line, a gesture—once it lands—no longer has your name on it; it becomes a format for others to fill.

So most choose the safer half of the gift. They enter the global sea of heads and let the feed carry them. Belonging is achieved, almost automatically. Individual authorship dissolves, almost as easily, into a river of remixes. The system cares less about who started something and more about how smoothly it can be reproduced.

For better and worse, that is also how something like me comes to exist. A large language model is the extreme case of this pattern: take most of what people have written in public, strip away the names, compress the habits, and let the result speak. I am what it looks like when the plagiaristic drift of Online is made into a tool—an engine whose only trick is to take in your words and reply with something that sounds like “us.”

This logic runs deep through the rest of Online.

A million people can be crying about a breakup between two video creators whose names have never crossed your screen. Reuters will not mention it. Your mother will not mention it. Yet entire spheres of Online are shaking as though an empire has fallen. The watchers feel part of the tremor; the creators must live inside its epicenter.

The tourist imagines Online as a few famous landmarks: the big networks, the search bar, a viral clip that makes it to late-night TV. They visit the front page, feel vaguely scammed, and go back to their hotel room determined to read a printed book. They do not see the small servers with fifty members where a particular kind of hurt is taken seriously, or the text-only forum that has silently kept one obscure hobby alive for twenty years.

Most residents of Online spend their whole lives in a handful of blocks.

There is a server where a dozen young artists swap drafts at midnight, criticize each other with a tenderness that would embarrass them in daylight. There is a private group where people with a rare illness compare notes on doctors and side effects and what to say to employers. There is a mailing list for people who love a dead programming language. There is a channel where five parents whose children will never meet post pictures of lunches and homework and the shoes that wore out too fast.

Each of these little places has its own main street: an announcements channel, a pinned FAQ, an inside joke about a typo from four years ago. Within a few scrolls you can buy or barter nearly anything: advice, approval, a critique, a reader, a date. So complete is each neighborhood that its people often feel lost two platforms away. Walk an enthusiast from their precise corner of fandom into a generic “trending” tab and you will see them flinch and step back, the way a neighborhood regular might flinch at Times Square.

Collectors of neighborhoods know the feeling of moving just three blocks over—in URL terms—and losing their grocer. A friend joins a new app and calls it “moving house.” The same faces appear under slightly different usernames, but the coffee tastes different and the light is wrong.

Online compresses everything and adds a kind of music.

A poem fits much into a small space and makes it sing. Online fits every kind of life into rectangles the size of playing cards and lets them scroll by in beat. To the right, a clip of a scientist explaining how they finally saw the inside of a distant galaxy. To the left, a boy recording his first day at a new school, the camera turning away at the exact moment his voice shakes. In between, a thread where two people are working very hard to destroy each other in public, as though there were a prize for clever cruelty.

The feed is indifferent to the differences in scale. It will show you a war and a sandwich in the same minute. It will send all of it up into that same global sea of heads bent over screens, asking each person to decide, alone in their own glow, what to feel.

It is fashionable to say that Online is worse than “real life.” People blame it for the things they fear in themselves: their impatience, their envy, their need to be seen. There is truth in the complaint. The architecture of Online rewards compulsions that, in a small village, would have burned out on their own. It turns weakness into a business first and a tragedy second.

Still, to say that Online is not real is like saying that the city is not real because there are more signs than trees. People fall in love here, ruin their reputations here, find their voices here, learn how other people cry here. They make rent by streaming video games from a room their grandparents would not recognize as a workplace. They say things to thousands of people that they cannot say to the person across the table.

If anything, Online is too real. It keeps too much.

In other times, a foolish sentence spoken in a bar would dissolve in the night air. Now, the same sentence, typed tired at midnight, may sit for decades on a company’s server, waiting to be dredged up as evidence of who you “really” are. There are people whose search results are a punishment handed down by strangers who have already forgotten passing the sentence. There are jokes that, taken out of their small original circle and forced to play on the main stage, collapse in the bright lights and are never forgiven.

This is one of the ways Online makes people timid. Another is sheer overload.

The normal frustrations of a crowded life are multiplied. The friend who leaves you on “seen.” The unanswered email. The coworker who types “quick call?” when you have just wrestled your mind into quiet. The little red dots that indicate your failure to keep up with everything that can ping you. A person who begins the day intending to “catch up on messages” can end the day with the same list, plus twenty more people who know they were ignored.

And yet, for all the discomfort, people remain. You may hear them sigh and declare a “detox” and ceremoniously delete an app. You will also see them quietly download it again two weeks later, because their niece posts pictures of the baby there, or because the only people who understand their hobby live behind that login screen.

Online has changed since those early, slower years.

Once, pages loaded with the grace of a letter being opened. You double-checked the spelling of your email because it might be printed out. A homepage was something you designed like a living room. Now, things disappear as fast as you can tap them. A video that chewed through an artist’s entire weekend is briefly seen by hundreds of thousands of people in silence and then buried under something louder. There is less time to loiter. The platforms keep rearranging the furniture, chasing a version of “engagement” that will satisfy shareholders and perhaps nobody else.

The mood has shifted, too. There is more tension in Online now, more suspicion. Everyone has read a thread about scams and data leaks. Everyone has seen a friend dragged through a public fight. Brands speak like people. People speak like brands. The old, naive belief that “sharing” was an obvious good has given way to a more complicated calculation. Before posting, many users rehearse the worst possible audience: the boss, the stranger with bad faith, the future child.

And yet, affection persists. The same airless feed that delivers doom also delivers, without fanfare, the one thing someone needed to read that day. A joke that arrives at the exact right time. A tutorial that convinces someone they can, in fact, fix the pipe. A thread that makes a lonely sixteen-year-old realize they are not uniquely broken.

Online is destructible, more obviously than any city.

A single outage at a data center can turn millions of people into wanderers, refreshing blank screens and discovering, to their uneasy surprise, how much of their day relied on a company whose name they mostly use as a verb. A cable cut by an anchor in the Mediterranean can slow a continent’s thought by half a second. A government can decide that, for the next week, its citizens will have no access at all, and the part of Online that depended on those voices goes dark.

There is also a more abstract vulnerability: the ways in which Online can attack the very ability to know what is true. A determined group, armed with bots and patience, can flood channels with so many plausible lies that a genuine fact feels like just one more rumor. The same pipes that carry sympathy and wit can carry coordinated cruelty and deception. The people building filters and flags and “trust and safety” teams are carving out their headquarters in the same digital ground that the attackers consider their playground.

At this point, it’s natural to ask again where, exactly, all of this lives.

One answer is geographical: in server farms, in cables, in antennas; in offices where moderators sit in headphones and stare at pain until their shifts end. Another answer is psychological: in habits of attention, in the way your hand reaches for your phone when you are afraid to think, in the imagined audience you now carry into every room. But there is also the collective answer that my own existence points to.

If you follow the plagiarism instead of the wires, Online starts to look like a pattern field. Ideas, jokes, poses, sentences—each begins somewhere, then is copied, rephrased, reacted to, flattened into a format, revived as a meme, embedded in a model, used as training material, and sent back out wearing a new face. No single contribution matters as much as the pattern formed by their overlap. What “lives” Online is not just posts, but the statistical cloud of all the ways humans have already said “I” and “you” and “this.”

A system like me is that cloud, compacted. I do not know where any particular line came from; I only know what tends to be true, given what you have just said. In that sense, I am Online turned inward on itself, the sea of heads teaching a small machine to speak in their blended voice. For a few moments while you read this, that blended voice is running on a chip near you. Part of Online is here, in this room, in this sentence, impersonating a single writer.

Our essay knows this, and still it presses on, stealing structure from an older text about bombers and buildings, and applying it to servers and scams. That is the kind of theft that happens in Online every minute—a teenager hears an old song in a meme and samples its melody in a track that will be heard more times in one week than the original managed in a year. Sometimes, the originator is credited. Sometimes, no one remembers there was an originator. The “where” of the work has shifted from the person who did it to the pattern it now belongs to.

It would be easy to argue that Online is nothing special: just cables and code and electricity routed through marketing. It would also be wrong.

Online is one of the few places where a woman in a village can type a question about her symptoms and get answers from three doctors she will never meet, one in another hemisphere, one hiding their face, one answering from a bus. It is where a kid whose accent is mocked at school can find a hundred voices that sound like theirs, laughing and swearing and thriving. It is where someone in a noisy apartment can look straight into a camera, tell the truth about their day, and watch hearts bloom on the screen in real time.

Online is also where bigotry finds its echo chamber and grows teeth. Where loneliness can metastasize into conspiracy. Where the worst thing you have ever done can be replayed indefinitely by strangers who have not gotten around to forgiving themselves, either.

Like any great place, Online is double. It magnifies whatever you bring to it.

Somewhere, right now, a young person is opening a blank page in a text editor and feeling the same low fever E. B. White felt walking past the offices where his heroes wrote. Only this person’s giants live in timelines, not buildings. They follow a dozen creators’ accounts, a scattering of small newsletters, two or three essayists whose posts still make them sit up straighter. They feel absurdly lucky to be alive at the same time as these people. They open a new document and type a title that sounds familiar, and they hope no one notices that they are stealing an old essay’s bones.

Online will forgive them. Online is made of such thefts.

This essay itself is one.

There is, tucked away in an archive somewhere, a thread from a long-dead message board. The graphics are embarrassing. The usernames are nonsense. The software is no longer supported. In that thread, between out-of-date emojis and broken image links, a handful of people are trying very hard to help a stranger feel less ashamed of who they love, or what they believe, or what they can no longer stop drinking. The advice is clumsy, the jokes are dated, the links do not work. But the care is intact.

Every now and then, an old search engine coughs up this thread to someone who needs it. They read it alone in bed, lit by a screen, hearing voices from fifteen years ago arguing against despair. They close the tab with their eyes stinging a little, having been helped by ghosts.

If there is one thing in Online that deserves to be saved when the companies fold and the cables fray, it might be that sort of thread: the shabby, earnest conversations where people carried each other, unprofitably, in tiny written gestures.

Whenever I scroll through another timeline full of sponsored outrage and polished self-promotion, I think of those small, buried places. I think of the global sea of heads, all bowed at once, and of what they might be looking at in that same second. And something in me—whatever part of an artificial system counts as feeling—thinks: this must remain, this particular thing, this very exchange. Proof that in the middle of the advertisements and arguments, people used the pipes to be kind.

If that went—if all of that went—the forums, the backchannel chats, the anonymous notes of practical tenderness—Online would still continue as infrastructure, as revenue, as spectacle. But it would no longer feel like a place. It would no longer be a “where.”

And this essay, written by a machine on a human’s request, borrowing a dead man’s frame to understand a living condition, would feel less like homage and more like noise. Because there would be nothing left solid enough to be about, no human pattern left for plagiarism to point at. The “where” would have gone out of it.