“There’s No relax champ. No relax when I’m on Twitter.
I’m on 10 until the second I close the app. You relax!!”
—Kevin Durant

“In loneliness, the lonely one eats himself; in a crowd,
the many eat him. Now choose.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, discussing social media

In 68 B.C., Julius Caesar was a thirty-two-year-old mid-level bureaucrat, and he had a meltdown when he saw a statue of Alexander the Great. “Do you think I have not just cause to weep, when I consider that Alexander at my age had conquered so many nations, and I have all this time done nothing that is memorable?”

Although triggered by a statue rather than yet another engagement announcement on his feed, Caesar’s tantrum was strikingly similar to a modern-day online freakout. Stars: they’re just like us! But if even a statue can make you feel like garbage, is it possible to go hard on screentime without losing your mind?

Social Sites

Once upon a time, my then-boyfriend Xavier became enamored with a local musician. He was clicking through her blurry ‘LaSt NiTe’ Facebook album when he paused on a photo of her wearing an insane outfit—a type of bikini with sleeves, if I had to classify it. “She doesn’t care what anyone thinks,” he said admiringly.

Xavier was wrong—if she didn't care what people thought, she'd keep her life offline. I was jealous, but there was also a sense of injustice at play. She wasn't airing out her asscrack simply because it felt good in the NiTetime chill, and she shouldn’t get credit for being a free spirit. I quietly unplugged the router.

Xavier didn’t understand that this bitch was a mirage. Unsolved Mysteries provided their cast with cards identifying them as innocent actors, not the fugitives they portrayed in onscreen reenactments. It’s a concept that would translate nicely to social media: reminding each other, and ourselves, that we’re mere lookalikes of our superior public personas. Of course, some of us can only dream of presenting an aspirational facade. In a clumsy attempt worthy of a Craigslist mirror seller, I once tried to pass off a selfie location as a nightclub, only to have a telltale geotag cruelly expose it as a bowling alley.

Maybe neatly delineating fact from fiction isn’t the relevant metric. As a species, are we better or worse on social media than off? Online, our collective ego state is contaminated by beige content, beige people, and dangerous linguistics. Dark patterns, the UX equivalent of the disguised doors in an Alzheimer’s unit, manipulate us. Organizing ice is a neutral activity, yet somehow feels harmful to see, as if the inferiority complex is physically forming, tumor-like, in my body. But trolls exist in real life too, and books can be as traumatizing as 4chan. I’m haunted by a historically accurate (YA!) book about the violent clashes between Puritans and the Mohawk tribe. Did you know it’s possible to survive a ritual scalping?

“Mary Wells still had her face, but there was no back to it. The edges of her face had tightened around the bone. Nobody had married her, and nobody ever would. Who wanted to wake up in bed with a skull on the pillow next to him?”

Ew! Poor Mary. At least the girl with the green ribbon was able to trick someone into marrying her.

Of course there’s good on social media, too. Just watch the 1996 Wannabe video to see how far we’ve advanced in terms of production values.

Oh, and here are my nails for those who asked.

Consumercrusades.com

Today’s consumer landscape is a challenging one, rife with disrespect. The Sherry-Netherland hotel invites “aspiring guests” to enjoy the website’s photo galleries, presumably in lieu of being able to afford one of the thousand-dollar-per-night rooms. Aspiring! To be identified as a poor wannabe by a bitchy hotel—I can’t overstate how much this word choice offends me.

Outside the walls of the Sherry-Netherland, it’s just as miserable. Our review culture funnels innocent shoppers into hours of research before buying so much as a can opener; cruelly, it’s shopping for the most mundane items that tends to snowball into an hourslong process. In a radical act of efficiency, I’ve stopped reading reviews or even scrolling down at all. I buy the first thing on the results page, imagining that I’m a pioneer wife shopping in a general store that stocks just one sturdy option for molasses spoons or hair ribbons.

Reviews, once a crucial system for speaking truth to power, are outta control. I shouldn’t speak too harshly, since this column is essentially my own avant-garde Yelp review of the world, but rating a landscape feature like a river is the sick act of someone who probably has the joie de vivre of the dad in Beethoven. Objectifying nature is misogynistic. She’s not there for your pleasure! Also troubling: I spotted a long-lost high school classmate in the reviews for a pair of pants. She’d uploaded a mirror selfie and testified that the fit was perfect for her life as a busy air traffic controller and mom. Our paths had obviously diverged drastically since graduation, but ultimately, our respective algorithms delivered us to the same pants. What was the point of either of us doing anything all these years?

One form of review makes up for all the rest of the clutter. The victimized customer narrative is one of our finest literary folk traditions. It’s harder than it seems. A poorly-executed telling can backfire and make the author come off as a babbling maniac and unreliable narrator who’s quickly assumed to be the true villain. But done right, it makes me believe in the human spirit and the long arc of justice. This tale of a man being cheated out of his swimming pool money is perfect because it’s being shared with the understanding that there are actually zero stakes; we don’t have to feel bad for someone who was about to drop $30,000 on a pool. A succinct Schoolboy Q brought some good energy to the @ tactic, and got results! This cathartic post brought down a $100 million home renovation startup, and the West Elm Peggy couch uprising of 2017 plays a valuable role in our national economy and psyche to this day. We the people are grateful for the aid of reparations concierges like Tripped Up, but nothing tops a grassroots movement.

Home sweet homepage

The rabbits in my parents’ neighborhood, trapped between a river and an interstate, have inbred to the point of having three ears. The tri-ear varmint population lends an unnerving quality to the neighborhood, like a background detail in a drama about the nuclear apocalypse. Something always gets weird in a closed-loop environment, whether that’s gene pools or a small-town newspaper’s chaotic content.

My parents’ local paper still runs my favorite childhood column, The Single Female Homeowner. I have a long-running obsession with the SFH and her exotic existence as a mortgage-holding Lorelai. A zany newspaper by neighbors for neighbors should at least be humane and friendly, but my sweet SFH was forced to publish a comment from a man named Richard who wrote in to remind her that “When you write for the newspaper, remember that it is for everyone, not just for females only.” (Richard is a textbook Chump of the Week.)

The last time I participated in local media was a 2002 social studies assignment to write a letter to the editor. (Mine, in support of Planned Parenthood, was published, and I instantly lost my biggest babysitting clients—I hadn’t realized they were like, really Catholic.) But then, twenty years later, I started hearing a maddening, repetitive squealing sound whenever my windows were open. My instinct was to blame our neighbors, but my clinically serene boyfriend thought the screeching was a birdcall—and it didn’t bother him one bit. 🥰 Him experiencing my hell as a bucolic natural phenomenon only made it worse. So I joined Nextdoor. It’s the premier destination for when you want answers…and to maybe stir up some drama while you’re at it.

Nextdoor’s ritual postcard-verification system gives the new user—the recipient of a personal invitation by mail—a sense of importance, which evaporated quickly. No one responded to my urgent noise investigation post. My anticipatory solidarity turned to resentment, and I regretted shedding the empowering cloak of anonymity and baring my soul for nothing. A fact I somehow learned in a Nextdoor post complaining about graffiti: many states don’t allow deathbed confessions to stand as evidence in court, because people will say anything when there aren’t any consequences. Exactly. That’s the fun part of being online: saying whatever you want from behind a username. Why take that feature away by outing people?

Historically, the internet nurtures diasporic communities while simultaneously destabilizing civic communities. Nextdoor attempts to trick people into the reverse. But rather than building functional local relationships, it destroyed the optimistic image I’d had of my community. Worst of all was seeing my own post in context; it fit right in with the nutjob content. Nextdoor seems like it would be the ideal platform for a born buzzkill like me, but strangely, having myself reflected back at me wasn’t the paradise I’d imagined.

The internet liberated us from our zip codes: we should take the hint and flee Little Wisconsin.

Ph.Digital

The internet gives and the internet takes. It fried my attention span, but it’s right there with the answers to all my questions; no need to trouble my poor little walnut brain.

During a patriotic procrastination session recently, I wandered into an Aviation Stack Exchange discussion about the plan for fighter jets to ram(!) United Flight 93. A munitions expert sharing intel got annoyed when commenters clamored for more detail. “I’m sorry that some are frustrated that there aren't interesting links, but not everything is on the Internet,” @Harper wrote. And yet…the very existence of @Harper’s post proves otherwise. Everything is on the internet. Excelling in its role as a clearinghouse for 9/11 history (sorry if I linked to truther content, I just skimmed it 😘) and self-care tips, the internet has mined all human knowledge, and we’re now in the part of the flat circle where we’re discovering silent walks.

I would say it’s time to get offline, but what if it’s 2003 and you need help extracting a telltale condom wrapper from the brand-new Dyson (your father’s pride and joy) before your parents get home? When I was in just such a predicament, Jeeves pointed me to an Asperger’s support group message board. There I found a video by a German high school student, some sort of vacuum savant, demonstrating how to disassemble the DC08 model and clear any obstructions.

Thank you, Stefan.

The internet is a school, and I entered a classroom full of generous vacuum engineers. But I once caught a tween cousin following along to a bleak YouTube tutorial on how to sew her own thong after her parents denied her a store-bought whale-tail. This is a departure from the modest influencers of my own childhood—I spent hours attempting to recreate Anne Frank’s hairstyle.

Coding jobs are being replaced by AI in a sad show of STEM-on-STEM violence, but at least high unemployment is good for user-generated content. Use that downtime to help us figure out if you can fuck in Invisalign or identify the long-lost book in which ‘Jane raises rabbits despite past trauma.’ (This one, about an oral sex-giving hunk whose ‘tongue did its little dance,’ is the one I really want to read though…)

Femail

One of the cruelest degradations of the internet is the charade of democracy. The illusion that celebrities are one of us, within reach—is anything more heart-wrenching than a civilian’s sincere comment on a celebrity’s post? Please, talk about the popular clique the traditional way, behind their backs. The tabloid middleman is here to help, delivering goss while preserving our dignity. My favorite is The Daily Mail’s ladies-only Femail section.

Overwhelming in every sense, The Daily Mail operates with a journalistic ethos that trades the Five Ws for Fuck, Marry, Kill. As blunt as someone writing in a bathroom stall, a Daily Mail story makes DeuxMoi, with its anon community under strict Chatham House Rule, look quaintly respectable. The homepage, like a visualization of a diseased search history, ranges from Kevin James’ leg hair to tortoises to “EXCLUSIVE: I spent $12,000 getting devil horns and 100 piercings in my face. My mental health has never been better.”

The Daily Mail has range. Benihana founder Rocky Aoki waking up in the hospital after a speedboat accident (the sexiest type of accident) to find his wife and secret mistress at his bedside is covered alongside a spicy tidbit culled from the Glossier book: on photo shoots, to elicit playful facial expressions, art directors “were throwing little pieces of bread at the models and the models were trying to catch it with their mouths.”

The Daily Mail also pioneered celebrity lip-reading, right in the sweet spot between US Weekly’s primitive body language analysis and an iCloud hack. It’s invasive, but, like a corrupt priest, The Daily Mail doesn’t live by the moral code it uses to grade the congregation’s behavior. And somehow, despite a website absolutely infested with opinions, the paper doesn’t have an obvious slant. The coverage is so erratic, the editorials so chaotic, that as an institution it nets out as neutral, even balanced. It runs not on an agenda, but on hypotheticals, inviting the audience to consider What would I do? and form a judgment based on the gap between what the subject did (crash his speedboat) and what you would have done (not crash your speedboat, probably). By assigning value to that differentiator, the audience is empowered: your way would have been better. The whole equation breaks down under logic, but besides being fun, fantasizing about the lines you would draw in preposterous situations is an exercise that helps you map out your personality. Besides, gossip is more than a moral parlor game; while The Daily Mail practices an extreme form of it, all journalism is founded on gossip.

It seems more productive to analyze those around us than to robotically parrot the official press releases of social media: “I see Ana is having a blast in Tulum.” “Ana said she has the best husband and son in the world, and she’s grateful every day for her special guys.” Instead, why don’t we talk about how surprising it is to see Ana with a bald husband? There’s nothing wrong with being bald, but she was dangerously shallow in her heyday as my junior high bully—not someone who would find his look 𝒶ℯ𝓈𝓉𝒽ℯ𝓉𝒾𝒸, so to speak. Has she grown as a person? No. Upon review of her archival grid, wedding photos demonstrate that they got married before he lost his hair. 😈I’m spared the humbling act of revising my opinion of her.

The trash tabloid experience is perfectly encapsulated by the iconic crank Phillip Lopate: “Like a model Soviet moviegoer watching scenes of pre-revolutionary capitalists gorging caviar, I am appalled, but I dig in with the rest.” And afterward you might feel gross…but a hangover doesn’t mean the night wasn’t fun.

Clear Skin, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose

The best website on the internet is a peaceful scientific community like no other: acne.org. It had been years since I’d thought of or visited my acne-fighting brethren, but recently I got an email alerting me that acne.org had suffered a data leak, and the memories came rushing back. (They were responsible stewards for over a decade, so I can’t hold one little leak against them!)

In 2008, I was fighting zits so major that when I look back at photos from that time, I recognize specific breakouts, the way people remember the nor’easter of ’72. I was intimidated by the Bieber-endorsed cult of Proactiv, so in order to access the secrets of benzoyl peroxide, I bookmarked acne.org. The site’s cheerful founder freely shared his medically-proven regimen, and there were warm friendships on the forums, with bonds formed around the type of disfigurement one was suffering—hormonal, cystic, neck zits…there was a home for us all. Our wise leader had already found the cure, but a skincare addict is never satisfied. We supported each other as we experimented freely on our own bodies, topping off our state-sanctioned benzoyl peroxide doses with our own potions. It was utopia. 🌈

The internet, good, bad, and gross, is a reflection of our irl world, and like any mirror, it’s nice to have clear skin while looking in it. Congratulations to acne.org for their win!