I’ve found a cure for the internet – and I think I might have overdosed

It’s 10pm Au Café de Paris and I’m at a Broadway open-mic night. There’s a gin and tonic fizzing on the table and an electric thrill in the air because the whole room is packed with adult theatre kids who can name every niche musical ever.

I haven’t touched my phone in hours. I’m not chasing dopamine down some infinite scroll. There is no boredom skulking in the corners of my Netflix-rotted brain, no algorithm whispering “are you still watching?” Algorithm, I am not still watching. I am here. I’m alive. I’m getting emotional about a song from a musical I’ve never heard of. Maybe – nay – definitely, there will be another G&T.

I wonder, is this the remedy? The antidote to that addictive, rage-marinated, attention-strip-mining disease that is the internet? Because in this restless street, in this unassuming bar, with a battered piano and a roomful of strangers, I seem to have accidentally overdosed on the cure.

The protocol is simple, if mildly terrifying. You arrive early, put your name down, and wait your turn. First-timers are gently talked out of singing, and for good reason: this is not your average open-mic night, where the expectation is set at “can carry a tune while carrying a beer”, and a man in cargo shorts assassinates Coldplay with his eyes closed, feeling every word, while everyone claps out of pity. The level here is demi-professional. These people have warmed up. These people have sheet music. One of them has brought a binder. A binder, at a bar.

A girl gets up, mousy long hair that hasn’t decided whether it’s brown or blonde, the sleeves of her sweater pulled down over her hands. She takes a second to plug a show she’s in at some obscure theatre in Bastille, asks if there are any drummers in the house who might want to join her rock band. Then she opens her mouth and belts. Andrew Lloyd Webber, but the deep cut, the one even the theatre kids have to think about for a second.

After a week of consuming content generated by nothing – beauty tutorial, beauty tutorial, Uncle Roger versus Jamie Oliver (round 20), an AI voice narrating someone else’s trauma over a satisfying-slime compilation – here is a woman with a real, human chance of blanking on the second verse. (She doesn’t. She’s damn brilliant.)

Not one arm goes up to film her. The people in here understand that a song is a thing you do for a room. It happens once, to us, and then it’s gone. The internet would have wanted a clip. The internet wants everything clipped, chopped into six-second TikToks and forced into your nervous system until you die or the battery does. But this open mic runs two hours. No skipping, no swiping. Between numbers, the hosts keep up a patter so quick and so puckish that I forget the concept of a next thing. There is no next thing. There is only this thing, and it is enough. When was the last time anything on a screen was enough?

Consider the receipts. Here in France, my adopted home, people spend an average of four hours a day in front of a screen, a quarter of their waking lives. Back in Australia, my birthplace, the numbers are worse: according to DataReportal’s Digital 2026:Australia report, the average Australian burns through six hours online a day, and if you’re 16 to 24, it’s more than seven. That’s a full-time job with no super. Which is why, in the past 18 months, both countries have started passing laws against phones, targeted at some of the most vulnerable among us, the youth. In September 2025, France began rolling out a “pause numerique” in schools, requiring phones be physically locked away at the gate. Australia became the first country on Earth to entirely ban under 16s from social media. Two governments on opposite sides of the planet, conceding the same thing: the internet is something we need protecting from.

Yet in this bar, nobody needs saving. We simply put the phone in the bag, and the bag under the chair, and get on with the far older business of showing off to strangers in person. There’s courage in it. To stand up with no screen to hide behind, no comments to disable, and simply be seen trying.

For the performers who are ever so slightly less good, the audience is gentle. A benevolent conspiracy runs between us. There is not a single person named “TruthBeard_1978” jonesing to inform a nervous soprano that she has butchered Sondheim and owes his estate a written apology. In here, the word “troll” still means a character that lives under a bridge in some magic fairytale universe.

Freed from the fear of getting it wrong, the room gives itself over completely. The piano sparkles. The scores sparkle. Everyone is singing a little bit for Barbra, and Dolly’s ghost lingers near the bar, rhinestones and mercy. The music gets into my chest; the smile stretches so far across my face it starts to ache.

I think about my phone once, briefly, out of a reflex that already feels like someone else’s. And then the woman with the undecided hair takes her bow, the place erupts, and I let the thought go. The night stretches on, sublimely analogue, in no hurry to end.

So that’s how I found the cure for the internet. Turns out it’s spangled and splendid, and it lives at the bottom of my third gin and tonic in a crazy little cafe in Paris.

Symonne Torpy is a Paris-based writer.

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