Back in the summer of 2013, I had this idea: What if the internet could make Jewish prayer better? Specifically: What if a website could serve as place for public ritual confession?
Similar websites, of course, already existed. PostSecret, the most well-known at the time, was founded in 2004. My idea was that such a site could be tied in to Jewish prayer — specifically, the vidui litany that is repeated five times over the course of Yom Kippur.
The purpose of the vidui is to have the entire community atone for its collective sins; you’re repenting not just for your own shortcomings, but for the shortcomings of the person sitting next to you. This is a fine idea, but the actual litany leaves much to be desired: Specifically, it’s vague and a little too committed to the gimmick of being in alphabetical order. It never resonated with me emotionally.
But what if you just asked people what they wanted to atone for this year — and then treated their answers as a form of liturgy?
This was the core idea behind AtoneNet. I created a simple Tumblr site that accepted only anonymous submissions to the prompt “What do you want to ask forgiveness for?” Then, once a year, I would compile the content of the website into a booklet suitable for use in synagogue. Many people, myself included, used this ad-hoc text as a supplement or a replacement for the prayerbook’s vidui service. Over the years the site was covered in a few different media outlets. Through the magic of the anonymous internet, it seemed possible to make a substantial improvement to an iconic Jewish prayer.
I never wanted to make a big deal out of running the site. I suspected that people would feel more comfortable using it if it felt like it was run by nobody. Still, there was a quiet joy in managing it, and it was interesting to see confessional “trends”; after the Black Lives Matter protests, for example, many people wanted to atone for racial prejudice or failing to act in the face of injustice. I expected to maintain AtoneNet indefinitely. That’s what the website promises.
But I changed my mind. I plan to freeze the site in its current state, and it may eventually go down. I want to tell you why.
Want to read a paragraph that feels simultaneously very quaint and very current?
Picture it: A lonely Jew in Iceland with a laptop computer consults with a Lubavitcher rabbi on the latest Torah reading. A researcher in California printed out a study of Australian Jewish intermarriage from a Jerusalem computer in 10 minutes — for the price of a local telephone call. A campus Hillel in New York State asks other Hillels around the country what to do about an upcoming Nation of Islam rally, and gets a dozen responses,
This is how the Forward described the internet back in 1994. The World Wide Web promised to connect a Jewish community that was numerically tiny and geographically dispersed. In fact, this is exactly what it did! Today Jewish knowledge is more accessible than ever before and Jews have the ability to connect to each other in unprecedented ways.
It was this mindset of a connective internet that brought AtoneNet to life. Like the bulletin boards of the ’90s, or the listservs of the ’00s, or Facebook, it used virtual space to do what would have been cumbersome in the real world. Actually, not just cumbersome, but literally impossible. The internet’s famous ability to grant anonymity (the “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” cartoon was published in 1993) allowed people to reveal parts of themselves that you might never see in real life. In this sense the internet was better than physical reality. The internet created the conditions for truth.
But of course, Jews don’t live on the internet, even if we do spend a lot of time here. In the decade since AtoneNet began the internet has grown in new and distressing ways. It remains as vital as ever, but it is clearly no longer “just” a way to connect with others. As I have tried to understand its transformations, AtoneNet has felt increasingly like a project for a different time.
The two forces driving this change are algorithmically driven content and artificial intelligence. The first means that we are inundated with content that is anonymous (in the sense that it’s from people whose identities are meaningless to us) and yet selected to produce some kind of desired effect, like urging us to stay on the app/site or buy products. We all know that we’re being manipulated in this way. This doesn’t mean we can do anything about it, but it does make us jaded towards data streams, even ones like AtoneNet, which are not driven by any algorithm.
AI is a bigger concern. The blessing of anonymity that the internet once bestowed on users has now been bestowed on massive amounts of AI-generated content, as well. This content can be generated with ease; it’s easy to see that it will take up an ever-larger percentage of online content over time. We’ve come to accept this as the price of doing business online, but it’s a huge downer. We fell in love with the internet because it connected people to each other; now, the geography of the internet encourages those connections to happen in smaller, gated communities (WhatsApp groups, some Discord servers) where anonymity is viewed with suspicion. Without realizing it, we’ve adapted our online habits to avoid the fatigue that comes from constantly batting away lies. (Worse: We fall for the lies).
What this means, ultimately, is that the value of anonymous online content has plummeted. Most people devote time every day to brushing increasingly realistic-sounding spam out of our inboxes. Forums dedicated to debate about real-life questions — like Reddit’s r/AmITheAsshole — are perpetually haunted by questions of authenticity. This rot has already set in at the level of text, and advances in AI-generated graphics, audio and video mean that it’s only a matter of time before we need to apply a similarly cynical filter to everything we see on the internet.
For AtoneNet, the shift means that the site loses a lot of its emotional power. I’ve done almost no moderation on the site, but when new submissions come in it’s no longer possible for me to tell whether they correspond with real human confessions. Users of the site, too, can now justifiably read the site’s anonymity policy as a reason not to trust what they see there.
Now, I suppose I could circumvent this problem by developing some kind of authentication system. Maybe there’s a Web3 version of AtoneNet. I’m not going to do this. If you’re reading this and inspired to try your hand at it, you have my blessing to take the idea and run with it. For me, it’s not about the technical problems. The main issue is that a major feature of the internet has now become a major bug.
There’s a solution to this, but it’s not a better website. It’s interactions with real people in the real world.
You can imagine how I, as a millennial who is very socially awkward, feel about coming to this realization, but it’s the truth. The internet is still marvelous, but it’s full of nonsense. There’s nonsense in the real world, too, but most of what you see in physical space is really there. All the people you meet in the real world are real people, a sentence that I didn’t think I’d ever need to write. Yes, physical design definitely tries to manipulate your attention — the layout of grocery stores, for example, has been carefully optimized — but the level of optimization and bullshit is nowhere near what you’ll experience on a popular website these days.
Importantly, it is harder and harder to see the internet as a place where spirituality happens. It is quite notable that fully virtual prayer spaces, despite their beauty and creative freedom, have not really flourished. (I’m working on a story about this for Belief in the Future, stay tuned.) The people who want to go to shul/church/mosque mostly want to go to a physical shul/church/mosque. Virtual spaces can supplement all that, but I suspect that shared physical space is going to emerge as a new religious value.
So, what do you do if you want a vidui that really does represent your community? My honest recommendation is that you find time to talk to your community about the year that they’ve had. Maybe you can anonymize the process — or maybe you can create the conditions where you don’t need anonymity to trust one another.
A version of this article appeared on Substack.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.