Ah, interesting. I was going through the mental gymnastics of attempting to connect your comment to Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy." I am not cool enough/am too cool (you decide) to watch anime, so I completely missed the reference.
I love this piece. I have to disagree a bit however, especially when it comes to politics. In real life, I live in a world where the political dichotomy of "conservative/Republican/right" vs "liberal/Democrat/left" is strong, almost ironclad. You rarely find anyone who reminds you that while those words have correlation, they are not synonyms. (Fortunately, I've known a few libertarians in my life, so I had an inkling.) But I have discovered even through Twitter, though especially following people, like you, on Substack, that that's not so. And that's beautiful because I finally found my "tribe" if not my ideological soulmate (political orphans who want actual discussion and nuance and solutions rather than campaign slogans and platforms).
But I agree with the rest, though I think the online world has just exacerbated an already existing human tendency to categorize. And our political milieu (meaning our uniparty system that pretends to offer two options and the media that acts as its PR arm) has in recent years made that tendency not just annoying and unhealthy but toxic.
There is polling that indicates that about a quarter to a third of the country is politically engaged while the remaining majority are indifferent to politics. Depending on your social circle it's probably easy to miss out on that third of the country but it's a sizable minority.
You don't live where I live. If someone tells you they vote Democrat or Republican you can nail their answer to almost any ideological/political question down almost 100% of the time. They don't think beyond the party platform.
That is totally not my experience. I know republicans who think abortion should be mandatory. As in if you get pregnant and can’t afford the child you either abort it or go to jail.
There is actual data out there, and the data shows two things: 1) Partisans tend to follow the party platform, and 2) they follow it EVEN IF THE PLATFORM CHANGES. In other words, in these polarized days, most people place their tribal identity above their actual policy beliefs.
So I’m not sure that your anecdotal experience is all that correct.
1) The number of people who actually vote is a lot higher than a quarter.
2) Voting has become intensely partisan: split ticket voting is as low as it’s been in decades
3) Even among so-called “independents,” voting behavior tends to be quite partisan.
(Data available on request, but it’s mostly from a bunch of reading in a bunch of different sites and would take me forever to pull together, so I’d appreciate if you trusted me on this, or simply discounted the veracity of what I’m saying accordingly.)
Most importantly: I think this goes way beyond politics. We are turning into an intensely divided society of Everywheres and Somewheres, or localists and cosmopolitans, or whatever: but these are identities that extend beyond the political to describe all different kinds of belonging.
I can corroborate Lillia's experience. Where I live (NE college town), the polarization is intense and otherwise normal people cleave hard to their respective partisan programs on almost every single issue, occasionally to the point of bleak comedy, memory-holing yesterday's ardently-held position if party affiliation demands it.
For what it's worth, I think ACAB/TBL is about how police operate at the local level. Things like individuals expressing racism and over use of force are topics at the local level that nobody really applies to the FBI.
Trump being persecuted is not a local thing, but is about a politicalization of a neutral federal investigative body.
That particular topic is not as egregious a memory-holing as "the party of family values" lining up behind a man on his third wife who is publicly known for cheating and dalliances with pornstars.
Until I recently moved states a few years ago and I always thought this sort of thing was an exaggeration.
Now I know multiple people, family included, who operate completely under the "liberals vs. conservatives" model. If you happen to express one "culture war" belief of either side in passing, you will forever be stamped as holding all the beliefs of either team.
It's absurd, stupid, and utterly exhausting to be around. Unfortunately it's rapidly accelerating to what I feel is the point of no return.
I got my first taste of this on here on Substack. I've been a Trumpkin and a commie all in the same day expressing the same opinion but in two different "bubbles." It was entertaining once I got over the frustration.
I agree, and with your last point in particular. Probably my sole complaint with pieces like this is their heavy focus on characteristics of social media that probably wouldn't exist without other aspects of our social system/cultural milieu. In that way, the writing can approach “technological fetish“ territory (in the sense derived from Marx of material fetish). This is definitely not a problem confined to Freddie’s work, but it can lead to a sense of techno-determinism. Which feeds into our cultural tendencies toward resignation, despair, inertia.
I really appreciate this almost Lovecraftian reading of what is going on. I also appreciate your way of being able to step back and observe the way others have used you or the idea of you in order to carve out some measure of intelligibility for themselves, or this horribly multiple world.
To me it feels a little like NOT being engaged with the local sports scene. My little state university town is all about its football team, the whole city is highly attuned to its fortunes and misfortunes every single day. And they all use it as a sort of common dialogue that everyone can relate to and be a part of - it's very much a part of the identity of the community.
I used to feign some interest whenever it came up in my company (which was often), if only to not break the warm palaver between acquaintance and stranger alike. But nowadays I simply belch out a retort like "I couldn't care less about 'x' football"....to which I almost always get odd looks. Most assume I was one of those kids who grew up without it, maybe theatre or StuCo. But that is false, I was awash in sports (especially football) all through my youth.
Aside from the obvious marginalization from this (couldn't think of a better word, sorry!), there's a small but distinct sense of serenity and freedom that comes from it. Like I'm not a gerbil on a treadmill or something. Perhaps that is just my own brain convincing myself that refraining from this shared cult of spectatorship is a boon for my psyche, who knows.
But I have to say that, like social media, I rather enjoy not being a part of this particular crowd.
I've been off Facebook since 2016 and don't regret it. I'm technically on Twitter, but I've never Tweeted. I just use it (or used to use it) to get certain pieces of local news.
That said, there's a sense in which much online media is "social." I personally think blogs and comment threads are a type of "social media." They might be so different from Facebook or Twitter that maybe they're their own thing. But I notice some of very similar pathologies on those fora to what I saw on Facebook, etc.
While I still dabble in blog culturing and commenting (hence this comment), I'm no longer as into it as I used to be. If I find I'm getting too into it, I have to have to convince myself to withdraw. Sometimes that's hard to do.
Thanks - you’re on to something. What’s puzzled me for a while now about current discourse - basically all of it online, but apparently also spilling over into whatever parts of people aren’t owned by the internet - is the substitution of stereotyping for curiosity and dialogue. There was a time when it was explicitly discouraged, particularly by liberal / left-leaning people. That allowed a place for individuality and heterodox opinion. But individuality now is a matter of self-selected labeling, even including miserable afflictions? Bring back the old days. That’s lame as a prescription but Impossible to avoid as a feeling.
Of all the people I know in real life only 3 meet this criteria. Those 3 probably produce 80% of the social media posts, sure. But their numbers are very small compared to their apparent online presence.
You know I really get tired of all these cope posts where I say 'here's a bad thing that happens online' and people pop up to say "no one I know does this because I'm so not online! Haha! I'm not online like the rest of you losers!" Number one, you're commenting on a newsletter post a half hour after it went up. You're online. Number two, if you weren't online, you wouldn't be here to comment at all. This desperate need to be the smartest not-online person in this space is so tiresome and pointless.
First, I don't agree that being passively online is not the same as being actively online; people who obsessively read are still online. Second, there are hundreds of millions of people in the world who are too online, and some of them read my newsletter. I'm writing for them. I just don't get the utility of constantly insisting that something doesn't matter because not everyone experiences it. Not everyone experiences anything; is there therefore nothing worth writing about?
I get what you're saying, but isn't there a distinct difference between being online to read a bunch of articles and comment on a few of them, and online by being actively engaged with social media and such?
I mean the former is little different than a group of strangers reading the same article, then conducting the crude equivalent of a conference call to discuss. And we can put the phone down to go do RL stuff whenever we want.
While the latter is a massive sounding board that requires a decidedly alert and active presence across multiple platforms all day, and sort of penalizes you for trying to put the phone down for whatever reason.
Yeah they are both technically 'online', but it's sort of apples and oranges when trying to compare the two. One is short, small, and relatively intimate. The other is unending, massive, and quite impersonal (unless you have a achieved a decent follower status...which may be the goal idk).
That's a good point about anonymity. But in my case, I'm afraid it doesn't make as much of a difference as it seems it would. I've occasionally wondered about whether to blog/comment under my real name (hint: my name's no Gabriel Conroy). One reason (of many) that I don't is that I believe my commentary wouldn't change and I would (still) say things I regret.
That's just me. I do agree with your broader point that anonymity enables certain things it otherwise wouldn't.
This seems a lot like just the type of categorization problem you describe in the essay. OP didn't say the actual bad and annoying things you ascribe to them; they just said that a relatively small number of people seem to be producing the majority of this particular type of bad internet thing. But because they said this in a way that looks and smells like a common annoying thing you've encountered, it becomes hard not to categorize it that way.
But I'm talking about what I'm talking about in this post. What is the utility of saying "not everyone encounters this thing." Not everyone owns a Jeep; would you show up to Jeep maintenance message boards and say "not everyone has a Jeep! Write about something useful, you Jeep loser!" ?
But while I don't think "everyone doesn't do this; write about something different" is useful, I do think "only a few people do this, but they do it A LOT" could start useful discussion that helps people understand the phenomenon more deeply. And I think the latter is closer to what OP was saying initially.
I'm not sure I understand here. I don't think I or OP are saying that only a few people use the internet but that among those billions of users, it's a small minority that seem to perpetuate the rigid self- and other-categorization patterns that you described here.
I don't necessarily agree that this is true (I think most people to some extent do the things you describe when they engage with internet content); my point is just that (1) it isn't valueless to discuss and (2) OP wasn't disparaging what you wrote as not important enough to comment on.
Trying to square “this is my small perspective of how the internet works” with “here’s an analysis of how the internet tends to work” will never happen.
Making an observation about online behavior is a result of being online, so while it may be somewhat beneficial to notice who is doing what in your circles and how the internet affects them/you, it doesn’t speak to the scale of the point of the post at hand.
Look this one is a "take my word for it" piece so I don't care if people disagree, that's fine. What perpetually drives me crazy is the "this is not important enough to comment one" comments, particularly given that the people who make those comments have felt moved to comment on how the thing shouldn't be commented on.
I responded to your other comment above before I read this one. I hope my comment wasn't too....whatever it may have been.
I agree with you about Twitter, by the way. I've found that even very smart, very considerate, very good people look stupid and even mean on Twitter. The few times I read it, it makes me angry. (I also hate "Twitter essays"....but that's another rant.)
Yes! On this topic, it's very hard to encourage without sounding braggy. This feels true of all things that, in my experience, make me simply FEEL GOOD: healthy eating, exercise, etc. First of all, they're both (as it goes with such things) easily traced back to levels of flexibility and choice that not everyone shares. Secondly, it just comes across as holier than thou rather than encouraging, especially online and in random forums. Not so with my friends, who know me deeply and know that I am sharing such things from a place of "This is great! You'd love it!" -- that kind of history with individual people seems like the only weight that tips the scales over to encouragement rather than bragging/shaming. I'm just realizing now, which honestly feels like a great takeaway from this discussion.
At least since the 50s we've been conditioned to view everything through the lens of Science. The essence of science is grouping things together so we don't have to study each individual aardvark; we know it's an aardvark (and a mammal) (and a vertebrate) so we know certain things about it. As there are many, many people we want to do the same with them -- categorize them so we know things about them without actually knowing them.
I know most people aren't really comfortable talking about Heidegger (for obvious reasons)anymore, but most of this framework is extremely similar to what he laid out in Being and Time. Whatever else you want to say about him, he got to the heart of the anxieties which define modern life. All that stuff about Das Man, levelling down, inauthenticity, was all trying to capture this decades before computers were even a thing. He made a lot of disastrous, monstrous decision politically, but there's no denying the power of that work. It blew my mind, and there really isn't a coherent definition of philosophy on the 20th century which doesn't include him.
This nails it. A large part of why social justice politics overwhelmed me so much in the past 5 or so years is the nature of internet discourse. You see hundreds, thousands of screaming angry voices all at once, and you're not built to compartmentalize it. You think it represents the entire world when it's really just a tiny sliver of the world.
And everyone in these slivers is prone to identity labels and angrily shitting on the outgroup, just like you said. Had I just been less online and more outgoing, maybe it wouldn't have bothered me. But welp, social anxiety and depression were the cards I were dealt.
Right. in criminal justice you've got, "You woke moron, real people worry about crime. You live in lala-land (even though people who know what they're talking about are way more immersed in the data). And on our side, you occasionally have the assumption, "Everyone who's wants a tougher response to crime is a racist and just hates homeless people."
The homicide rate in poor black neighborhoods in Chicago right now is the worst it's even been, since the start of modern record keeping. You may have heard "Crime is bad, but it was worse thirty years ago." That is simply not true if you are black and poor.
Crime is hyperlocal. The trick is that it's the average which is marginally better than 1992. White and Hispanic homicide rates are much, much lower than that of blacks, black poverty at the national level has dropped precipitously since the 1990's and concomitant with that the percentage of black residents in Chicago has declined. But that average is masking the absolute carnage that is occurring in black neighborhoods now.
So the "real people" who have to worry about crime: I live in white suburbia and consequently I don't really worry about crime at a personal level. But I am also cognizant of the fact that for vulnerable black populations in places like Chicago or Baltimore that is definitely not the case.
I doubt Freddie wants this to turn into a crim justice debate. If you want to discuss, I'd be happy to on a different platform. DM me on Twitter or something. @tanaganeva
If you want the links I'd be happy to post them. The purpose of my post is descriptive and the differential in crime rates between different neighborhoods is largely uncontroversial I think.
I started blogging in ye olden days (2008) and it wasn't long before advertising and sponsorships became a thing. Which, fine. for some people it worked out well. But it ruined the creative bit for me, because I could never circle the square of turning my life into a brand, even a micro one. Substack has been fun for me because I get to see the same characters in comments of the few commentators I follow, and I get to write what I want and send it only to the people who are interested in reading it. It's bad enough that we relentlessly (though somewhat necessarily) categorize each other; it's worse to do it to ourselves for the sake of an online avatar.
I had not heard someone articulate this concept of "multiplicity horror" before but I am certainly familiar with the feeling. I feel it sitting on a packed highway with thousands of other people in their cars, all with their own thoughts, lives, dreams, and failings and knowing I do not have enough time in my own life to even meet all of them - let alone get to know them as human beings.
We post things on the internet and they are read completely devoid of any context about what kind of people we are. What do you know about me? Nothing, except this comment in isolation. You do not know if I am a kind person, a thoughtful person, if I have odd personality quirks, or am difficult to be around. We experience a virtual firehose of other people's thoughts and opinions on things and are inherently forced into taking them without context.
I don't think we were meant to function this way. For the overwhelming majority of human history we were presented with only a small number of minds at once, and yet even here on this article are dozens of other humans and their thoughts only an hour after it was posted. We post something stupid online and it lives in perpetuity in the minds of people who do not know us as complete entities.
I think it has made us disposable. There will always be a thousand other commenters or writers or people posting the intimate details of their lives on Instagram and Twitter. I find myself even beginning to use "mental shorthand" for people where two or three unique individuals from my life start to blend into some kind of gestalt entity whose disposition, personality, and likes are consistent enough that I can treat all facets the same.
How can we even conceive of a million people, let alone multiple billions? I struggle with it. I read about cities in China with more people than the entire population of Canada and I have never even heard the name. Whole cities of people with thoughts and opinions and favourite foods and beloved pets and I don't even know they exist. I barely even know the people on my own small street because people move in and out so often.
This gets me, too. Every now and again I'll read about some busy metropolis, usually in the mid or far East, that I've never even heard of. Generations of people have lived their lives there, and they have no idea I exist in kind.
Yes. Yes. So much potential human contact — some of it spectacularly freighted with simple goodness and the epiphanies of love and courage and wisdom — that’s never realized. It just spins away. If you’ve ever spent an extended period of time in a country like Japan, you’ll have experienced the phenomenon of making brief eye contact with people on trains going the opposite direction from yours, then accelerating away, never to be seen again. And so often those looks, those blinkquick messages, have a poignance and wordless depth of meaning that stuns you and leaves you shaken. We are all so open when we are alone in the midst of millions we’ll never meet.
Does this phenomenon seem like an offshoot of nihilism? I ask because nihilism (and the topic at hand) has two distinct ways of looking at it. "Nothing matters" can be bleak and dreary, as meaning is sucked out of your life. ...Or, it can be empowering because you can make whatever decisions you want because you are free to define your own meaning, as there's no intrinsic meaning in the universe.
This concept of multiplicity horror feels the same way. I'm the second take on nihilism, and for me I have more multiplicity wonder than horror. When I'm on a packed highway, I marvel at the sheer magnitude of people around me, going about their daily lives. It impresses me with a sense of awe that so many humans are just rolling around doing what they do and I am just one teensy tiny little cog in the massive machine that is humanity.
I'm glad that I don't exist at the "10 members in a tribe" scale. Sure, I'd only have to beat out 9 other people to be the "most important" member, but that doesn't hold a lot of value to my psyche as it is now. Instead, I dearly enjoy being part of the collective people that have gone to the moon, or created the internet. That wasn't done because we're all the same or all have similar skills. It's because there's people out there who are experts in things I don't even know exist. That doesn't frighten me - it instills in me a sense of wonder in the world.
"most hunter-gatherers were nomadic" https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/hunter-gatherer-culture
These repeated attempts to foist social problems off on me to hide from them will not save you
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/who-americans-spend-the-most-time-with-by-age/
Ah, interesting. I was going through the mental gymnastics of attempting to connect your comment to Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy." I am not cool enough/am too cool (you decide) to watch anime, so I completely missed the reference.
Jesus this is good. I have nothing to add, I just needed to note that.
I love this piece. I have to disagree a bit however, especially when it comes to politics. In real life, I live in a world where the political dichotomy of "conservative/Republican/right" vs "liberal/Democrat/left" is strong, almost ironclad. You rarely find anyone who reminds you that while those words have correlation, they are not synonyms. (Fortunately, I've known a few libertarians in my life, so I had an inkling.) But I have discovered even through Twitter, though especially following people, like you, on Substack, that that's not so. And that's beautiful because I finally found my "tribe" if not my ideological soulmate (political orphans who want actual discussion and nuance and solutions rather than campaign slogans and platforms).
But I agree with the rest, though I think the online world has just exacerbated an already existing human tendency to categorize. And our political milieu (meaning our uniparty system that pretends to offer two options and the media that acts as its PR arm) has in recent years made that tendency not just annoying and unhealthy but toxic.
“ I live in a world where the political dichotomy of "conservative/Republican/right" vs "liberal/Democrat/left" is strong, almost ironclad.”
Interesting - I don’t know anyone like that in real life. Tons of online personas are like that. But no real people. YMMV
There is polling that indicates that about a quarter to a third of the country is politically engaged while the remaining majority are indifferent to politics. Depending on your social circle it's probably easy to miss out on that third of the country but it's a sizable minority.
You don't live where I live. If someone tells you they vote Democrat or Republican you can nail their answer to almost any ideological/political question down almost 100% of the time. They don't think beyond the party platform.
That is totally not my experience. I know republicans who think abortion should be mandatory. As in if you get pregnant and can’t afford the child you either abort it or go to jail.
I've lived in red/purple states all my life and I have never met a Republican like that.
There is actual data out there, and the data shows two things: 1) Partisans tend to follow the party platform, and 2) they follow it EVEN IF THE PLATFORM CHANGES. In other words, in these polarized days, most people place their tribal identity above their actual policy beliefs.
So I’m not sure that your anecdotal experience is all that correct.
“most people”
Is that possible when only 1/4 to 1/3 of people are politically engaged to any significant degree?
Apparently! We all have a team we like to be on.
1) The number of people who actually vote is a lot higher than a quarter.
2) Voting has become intensely partisan: split ticket voting is as low as it’s been in decades
3) Even among so-called “independents,” voting behavior tends to be quite partisan.
(Data available on request, but it’s mostly from a bunch of reading in a bunch of different sites and would take me forever to pull together, so I’d appreciate if you trusted me on this, or simply discounted the veracity of what I’m saying accordingly.)
Most importantly: I think this goes way beyond politics. We are turning into an intensely divided society of Everywheres and Somewheres, or localists and cosmopolitans, or whatever: but these are identities that extend beyond the political to describe all different kinds of belonging.
I can corroborate Lillia's experience. Where I live (NE college town), the polarization is intense and otherwise normal people cleave hard to their respective partisan programs on almost every single issue, occasionally to the point of bleak comedy, memory-holing yesterday's ardently-held position if party affiliation demands it.
Yes, the inconsistency is hilarious. Sometimes you just have to shake your head and sigh.
ACAB! Unless the cops are going after Trump, then it is righteous.
Thin Blue Line, man! Unless the cops are going after Trump, then it is a travesty.
For what it's worth, I think ACAB/TBL is about how police operate at the local level. Things like individuals expressing racism and over use of force are topics at the local level that nobody really applies to the FBI.
Trump being persecuted is not a local thing, but is about a politicalization of a neutral federal investigative body.
That particular topic is not as egregious a memory-holing as "the party of family values" lining up behind a man on his third wife who is publicly known for cheating and dalliances with pornstars.
Until I recently moved states a few years ago and I always thought this sort of thing was an exaggeration.
Now I know multiple people, family included, who operate completely under the "liberals vs. conservatives" model. If you happen to express one "culture war" belief of either side in passing, you will forever be stamped as holding all the beliefs of either team.
It's absurd, stupid, and utterly exhausting to be around. Unfortunately it's rapidly accelerating to what I feel is the point of no return.
I got my first taste of this on here on Substack. I've been a Trumpkin and a commie all in the same day expressing the same opinion but in two different "bubbles." It was entertaining once I got over the frustration.
I agree, and with your last point in particular. Probably my sole complaint with pieces like this is their heavy focus on characteristics of social media that probably wouldn't exist without other aspects of our social system/cultural milieu. In that way, the writing can approach “technological fetish“ territory (in the sense derived from Marx of material fetish). This is definitely not a problem confined to Freddie’s work, but it can lead to a sense of techno-determinism. Which feeds into our cultural tendencies toward resignation, despair, inertia.
I really appreciate this almost Lovecraftian reading of what is going on. I also appreciate your way of being able to step back and observe the way others have used you or the idea of you in order to carve out some measure of intelligibility for themselves, or this horribly multiple world.
I have been without social media for maybe 5 years now and I have not regretted it.
It's maybe a little bit of hiding my head in the sand and ignoring the reality of other people but I'm much less miserable right now.
A decade or so for me now, no regrets either.
To me it feels a little like NOT being engaged with the local sports scene. My little state university town is all about its football team, the whole city is highly attuned to its fortunes and misfortunes every single day. And they all use it as a sort of common dialogue that everyone can relate to and be a part of - it's very much a part of the identity of the community.
I used to feign some interest whenever it came up in my company (which was often), if only to not break the warm palaver between acquaintance and stranger alike. But nowadays I simply belch out a retort like "I couldn't care less about 'x' football"....to which I almost always get odd looks. Most assume I was one of those kids who grew up without it, maybe theatre or StuCo. But that is false, I was awash in sports (especially football) all through my youth.
Aside from the obvious marginalization from this (couldn't think of a better word, sorry!), there's a small but distinct sense of serenity and freedom that comes from it. Like I'm not a gerbil on a treadmill or something. Perhaps that is just my own brain convincing myself that refraining from this shared cult of spectatorship is a boon for my psyche, who knows.
But I have to say that, like social media, I rather enjoy not being a part of this particular crowd.
I've been off Facebook since 2016 and don't regret it. I'm technically on Twitter, but I've never Tweeted. I just use it (or used to use it) to get certain pieces of local news.
That said, there's a sense in which much online media is "social." I personally think blogs and comment threads are a type of "social media." They might be so different from Facebook or Twitter that maybe they're their own thing. But I notice some of very similar pathologies on those fora to what I saw on Facebook, etc.
While I still dabble in blog culturing and commenting (hence this comment), I'm no longer as into it as I used to be. If I find I'm getting too into it, I have to have to convince myself to withdraw. Sometimes that's hard to do.
Very interesting ideas. I may have to read it again for it to sink in.
Thanks - you’re on to something. What’s puzzled me for a while now about current discourse - basically all of it online, but apparently also spilling over into whatever parts of people aren’t owned by the internet - is the substitution of stereotyping for curiosity and dialogue. There was a time when it was explicitly discouraged, particularly by liberal / left-leaning people. That allowed a place for individuality and heterodox opinion. But individuality now is a matter of self-selected labeling, even including miserable afflictions? Bring back the old days. That’s lame as a prescription but Impossible to avoid as a feeling.
Of all the people I know in real life only 3 meet this criteria. Those 3 probably produce 80% of the social media posts, sure. But their numbers are very small compared to their apparent online presence.
You know I really get tired of all these cope posts where I say 'here's a bad thing that happens online' and people pop up to say "no one I know does this because I'm so not online! Haha! I'm not online like the rest of you losers!" Number one, you're commenting on a newsletter post a half hour after it went up. You're online. Number two, if you weren't online, you wouldn't be here to comment at all. This desperate need to be the smartest not-online person in this space is so tiresome and pointless.
“ no one I know does this because I'm so not online! ”
I am online and as a result I’ve noticed a huge difference between online and real life.
First, I don't agree that being passively online is not the same as being actively online; people who obsessively read are still online. Second, there are hundreds of millions of people in the world who are too online, and some of them read my newsletter. I'm writing for them. I just don't get the utility of constantly insisting that something doesn't matter because not everyone experiences it. Not everyone experiences anything; is there therefore nothing worth writing about?
It’s not that it doesn’t matter. It’s about perspective.
If some issue results in an online mob of _______ activist it’s important to know if it’s really only 5 people with too much time on their hands.
Many millions of people spend all day online, and I'm writing for them. If this piece is therefore not useful to you, feel free not to engage with it.
I get what you're saying, but isn't there a distinct difference between being online to read a bunch of articles and comment on a few of them, and online by being actively engaged with social media and such?
I mean the former is little different than a group of strangers reading the same article, then conducting the crude equivalent of a conference call to discuss. And we can put the phone down to go do RL stuff whenever we want.
While the latter is a massive sounding board that requires a decidedly alert and active presence across multiple platforms all day, and sort of penalizes you for trying to put the phone down for whatever reason.
Yeah they are both technically 'online', but it's sort of apples and oranges when trying to compare the two. One is short, small, and relatively intimate. The other is unending, massive, and quite impersonal (unless you have a achieved a decent follower status...which may be the goal idk).
I agee with all this. Anonymity is also a key difference.
That's a good point about anonymity. But in my case, I'm afraid it doesn't make as much of a difference as it seems it would. I've occasionally wondered about whether to blog/comment under my real name (hint: my name's no Gabriel Conroy). One reason (of many) that I don't is that I believe my commentary wouldn't change and I would (still) say things I regret.
That's just me. I do agree with your broader point that anonymity enables certain things it otherwise wouldn't.
This seems a lot like just the type of categorization problem you describe in the essay. OP didn't say the actual bad and annoying things you ascribe to them; they just said that a relatively small number of people seem to be producing the majority of this particular type of bad internet thing. But because they said this in a way that looks and smells like a common annoying thing you've encountered, it becomes hard not to categorize it that way.
But I'm talking about what I'm talking about in this post. What is the utility of saying "not everyone encounters this thing." Not everyone owns a Jeep; would you show up to Jeep maintenance message boards and say "not everyone has a Jeep! Write about something useful, you Jeep loser!" ?
Haha ya, I get you.
But while I don't think "everyone doesn't do this; write about something different" is useful, I do think "only a few people do this, but they do it A LOT" could start useful discussion that helps people understand the phenomenon more deeply. And I think the latter is closer to what OP was saying initially.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage
I'm not sure I understand here. I don't think I or OP are saying that only a few people use the internet but that among those billions of users, it's a small minority that seem to perpetuate the rigid self- and other-categorization patterns that you described here.
I don't necessarily agree that this is true (I think most people to some extent do the things you describe when they engage with internet content); my point is just that (1) it isn't valueless to discuss and (2) OP wasn't disparaging what you wrote as not important enough to comment on.
Trying to square “this is my small perspective of how the internet works” with “here’s an analysis of how the internet tends to work” will never happen.
Making an observation about online behavior is a result of being online, so while it may be somewhat beneficial to notice who is doing what in your circles and how the internet affects them/you, it doesn’t speak to the scale of the point of the post at hand.
Look this one is a "take my word for it" piece so I don't care if people disagree, that's fine. What perpetually drives me crazy is the "this is not important enough to comment one" comments, particularly given that the people who make those comments have felt moved to comment on how the thing shouldn't be commented on.
I hope my previous comment doesn't fall into this category. My post about abandoning social media was less bragging than an attempt at encouragement.
Facebook and Twitter were making me miserable - it seems like everything I saw there made me less happy.
Obviously, I haven't forsaken the internet, though I feel like I'm happier now that I avoid the most damaging (for me) parts of it.
Every time I look at Twitter, I feel like I am punching my hope/optimism in the face.
I responded to your other comment above before I read this one. I hope my comment wasn't too....whatever it may have been.
I agree with you about Twitter, by the way. I've found that even very smart, very considerate, very good people look stupid and even mean on Twitter. The few times I read it, it makes me angry. (I also hate "Twitter essays"....but that's another rant.)
Yes! On this topic, it's very hard to encourage without sounding braggy. This feels true of all things that, in my experience, make me simply FEEL GOOD: healthy eating, exercise, etc. First of all, they're both (as it goes with such things) easily traced back to levels of flexibility and choice that not everyone shares. Secondly, it just comes across as holier than thou rather than encouraging, especially online and in random forums. Not so with my friends, who know me deeply and know that I am sharing such things from a place of "This is great! You'd love it!" -- that kind of history with individual people seems like the only weight that tips the scales over to encouragement rather than bragging/shaming. I'm just realizing now, which honestly feels like a great takeaway from this discussion.
There are 360 million people in the country. With all due respect the personal social circle of any one individual is meaningless. It's anecdata.
At least since the 50s we've been conditioned to view everything through the lens of Science. The essence of science is grouping things together so we don't have to study each individual aardvark; we know it's an aardvark (and a mammal) (and a vertebrate) so we know certain things about it. As there are many, many people we want to do the same with them -- categorize them so we know things about them without actually knowing them.
I know most people aren't really comfortable talking about Heidegger (for obvious reasons)anymore, but most of this framework is extremely similar to what he laid out in Being and Time. Whatever else you want to say about him, he got to the heart of the anxieties which define modern life. All that stuff about Das Man, levelling down, inauthenticity, was all trying to capture this decades before computers were even a thing. He made a lot of disastrous, monstrous decision politically, but there's no denying the power of that work. It blew my mind, and there really isn't a coherent definition of philosophy on the 20th century which doesn't include him.
This nails it. A large part of why social justice politics overwhelmed me so much in the past 5 or so years is the nature of internet discourse. You see hundreds, thousands of screaming angry voices all at once, and you're not built to compartmentalize it. You think it represents the entire world when it's really just a tiny sliver of the world.
And everyone in these slivers is prone to identity labels and angrily shitting on the outgroup, just like you said. Had I just been less online and more outgoing, maybe it wouldn't have bothered me. But welp, social anxiety and depression were the cards I were dealt.
Right. in criminal justice you've got, "You woke moron, real people worry about crime. You live in lala-land (even though people who know what they're talking about are way more immersed in the data). And on our side, you occasionally have the assumption, "Everyone who's wants a tougher response to crime is a racist and just hates homeless people."
The homicide rate in poor black neighborhoods in Chicago right now is the worst it's even been, since the start of modern record keeping. You may have heard "Crime is bad, but it was worse thirty years ago." That is simply not true if you are black and poor.
Crime is hyperlocal. The trick is that it's the average which is marginally better than 1992. White and Hispanic homicide rates are much, much lower than that of blacks, black poverty at the national level has dropped precipitously since the 1990's and concomitant with that the percentage of black residents in Chicago has declined. But that average is masking the absolute carnage that is occurring in black neighborhoods now.
So the "real people" who have to worry about crime: I live in white suburbia and consequently I don't really worry about crime at a personal level. But I am also cognizant of the fact that for vulnerable black populations in places like Chicago or Baltimore that is definitely not the case.
I doubt Freddie wants this to turn into a crim justice debate. If you want to discuss, I'd be happy to on a different platform. DM me on Twitter or something. @tanaganeva
I'm not on Twitter. Good God.
If you want the links I'd be happy to post them. The purpose of my post is descriptive and the differential in crime rates between different neighborhoods is largely uncontroversial I think.
Damn, best post in a while. Thanks!
I started blogging in ye olden days (2008) and it wasn't long before advertising and sponsorships became a thing. Which, fine. for some people it worked out well. But it ruined the creative bit for me, because I could never circle the square of turning my life into a brand, even a micro one. Substack has been fun for me because I get to see the same characters in comments of the few commentators I follow, and I get to write what I want and send it only to the people who are interested in reading it. It's bad enough that we relentlessly (though somewhat necessarily) categorize each other; it's worse to do it to ourselves for the sake of an online avatar.
I had not heard someone articulate this concept of "multiplicity horror" before but I am certainly familiar with the feeling. I feel it sitting on a packed highway with thousands of other people in their cars, all with their own thoughts, lives, dreams, and failings and knowing I do not have enough time in my own life to even meet all of them - let alone get to know them as human beings.
We post things on the internet and they are read completely devoid of any context about what kind of people we are. What do you know about me? Nothing, except this comment in isolation. You do not know if I am a kind person, a thoughtful person, if I have odd personality quirks, or am difficult to be around. We experience a virtual firehose of other people's thoughts and opinions on things and are inherently forced into taking them without context.
I don't think we were meant to function this way. For the overwhelming majority of human history we were presented with only a small number of minds at once, and yet even here on this article are dozens of other humans and their thoughts only an hour after it was posted. We post something stupid online and it lives in perpetuity in the minds of people who do not know us as complete entities.
I think it has made us disposable. There will always be a thousand other commenters or writers or people posting the intimate details of their lives on Instagram and Twitter. I find myself even beginning to use "mental shorthand" for people where two or three unique individuals from my life start to blend into some kind of gestalt entity whose disposition, personality, and likes are consistent enough that I can treat all facets the same.
How can we even conceive of a million people, let alone multiple billions? I struggle with it. I read about cities in China with more people than the entire population of Canada and I have never even heard the name. Whole cities of people with thoughts and opinions and favourite foods and beloved pets and I don't even know they exist. I barely even know the people on my own small street because people move in and out so often.
How are we supposed to function like this?
This gets me, too. Every now and again I'll read about some busy metropolis, usually in the mid or far East, that I've never even heard of. Generations of people have lived their lives there, and they have no idea I exist in kind.
Yes. Yes. So much potential human contact — some of it spectacularly freighted with simple goodness and the epiphanies of love and courage and wisdom — that’s never realized. It just spins away. If you’ve ever spent an extended period of time in a country like Japan, you’ll have experienced the phenomenon of making brief eye contact with people on trains going the opposite direction from yours, then accelerating away, never to be seen again. And so often those looks, those blinkquick messages, have a poignance and wordless depth of meaning that stuns you and leaves you shaken. We are all so open when we are alone in the midst of millions we’ll never meet.
Does this phenomenon seem like an offshoot of nihilism? I ask because nihilism (and the topic at hand) has two distinct ways of looking at it. "Nothing matters" can be bleak and dreary, as meaning is sucked out of your life. ...Or, it can be empowering because you can make whatever decisions you want because you are free to define your own meaning, as there's no intrinsic meaning in the universe.
This concept of multiplicity horror feels the same way. I'm the second take on nihilism, and for me I have more multiplicity wonder than horror. When I'm on a packed highway, I marvel at the sheer magnitude of people around me, going about their daily lives. It impresses me with a sense of awe that so many humans are just rolling around doing what they do and I am just one teensy tiny little cog in the massive machine that is humanity.
I'm glad that I don't exist at the "10 members in a tribe" scale. Sure, I'd only have to beat out 9 other people to be the "most important" member, but that doesn't hold a lot of value to my psyche as it is now. Instead, I dearly enjoy being part of the collective people that have gone to the moon, or created the internet. That wasn't done because we're all the same or all have similar skills. It's because there's people out there who are experts in things I don't even know exist. That doesn't frighten me - it instills in me a sense of wonder in the world.
I feel like together, humanity can do anything.
That’s a very Buddhist conception. I’m not sure if nihilism is the best descriptor but I can’t think of another right now.