For the second time, a friend I've never met recently unfriended me. It bothers me - not because I'm not relieved to be done with his drama; what bothers me is that I went to semi-ridiculous lengths to do right by him, and in the end it didn't matter at all. He was just as ultra-sensitive as I should have figured a person of his peculiarity was from the beginning, and someone as obsequious and sycophantic as he was would inevitably overreact when he finds faults.
He constantly yo-yo'd back and forth, trying to get my friendship with some of the most servile flattery I've ever experienced in my life, and at the same time taking offense at the slightest provocations. He would passive aggressively let me know he'd noticed that I hadn't liked many of his posts. He defriended me once before and, worrying I did something truly wrong by him, when I asked him why, it was because I liked a comment he took exception to. I have no idea if that was the real reason he defriended or not, but if that was the real reason, my god why did I even try to remedy it?
He repeatedly told me he and his partner were thinking about moving to Baltimore and kept trying to get my address, ostensibly to mail me something, but he also jokingly said 'so I can move in next door.' I didn't give it to him - certainly not because I ever presumed him remotely any kind of creep at all, that was self-evidently a joke and I took it as one, and besides it should be easy enough to find my address online. I didn't give it because A. I hope to be buying a condo soon. B. I still hold out an ever-so-slight hope that I'll move to a city elsewhere. C. Why the fuck should I give my address to a person who is clearly a bit invasive? When I got into an online fight with some musician he knew, he was at the ready, trying to insert himself as the broker between the two of us, with the presumption that I had any desire at all to involve myself further in a skirmish that was already complete ridiculousness.
That's all the comment that situation deserves.
--------------
It might surprise you, dear reader, to learn that the internet attracts lonely people. It not only attracts lonely people, it attracts people who want to live vicariously as a different person from their reality.
In the real world, nobody gives a shit what I think. I wanted journalism jobs so desperately, I tried so hard to write the best and most thoughtful possible posts on my blog for years to build a portfolio, and nobody ever gave a shit. But on social media, I'm a kind of Prince of Monaco. There seem to be a few dozen people who care what I have to say very much, mostly because of intellectual bombs I would deliberately throw on facebook more than five years ago. When I only published on evantucker.blogspot.com, nobody ever gave a shit. When I invaded other people's space in a facebook newsfeed with 'fuck Baltimore hipsters' 'Bernie Sanders sucks' 'everything you love is terrible'; literally hundreds of people would write in to defend the honor of their chosen faiths.
One would think I'd be the most hated person in Baltimore, but in a way, quite the opposite happened. I suddenly found myself a bizarre sort of celebrity among acquaintances who've met me twice. Everybody around hipster Baltimore seemed to have an opinion about 'Evan Tucker,' especially those who unfollowed me. I tried to tell myself that I wasn't deliberately doing it, but who was I kidding? I constantly told hundreds of people to go fuck themselves and it generated a perverse sort of love. It was an ideal arrangement. Doing it gained me entry with the very people I kinda hated because they wanted my friendship to convince me that they're not so bad, and the truth is, the reason I've always inveighed so heavily against them is because I longed for their approval too, and knew I'd never get it. And thus have I been bonded with most people I know in my city in a decade long frenemyship whose cycle neither side has yet broken in spite of dozens of moments when it came close on both sides.
We all want to feel attractive and accepted by attractive and fashionable people, particularly those of us who were never accepted by them while growing up. I'm short, fat, ugly, incompetent, and crazy. Being an online asshole gained me social entry into groups of attractive people who would never have given me a second thought if they didn't feel they knew me already because I inveighed against everything they believed. If I didn't intimidate people with my tongue, people would make a point of not remembering who I am.
The price though for my deliberate obnoxiousness is that after 10 years in Baltimore, I still don't have good friends to regularly hang out with that supplement the friendships of my DC years. My life is a collection of music, magazine articles, reading books I don't finish, and writing books I barely start as I instant message i with good friends a thousand miles away whom I haven't seen in years.
We the dissatisfied become avatars to achieve connections we cannot achieve in three dimensions. People who find the pain of rejection unendurable in reality become that much more devoted to the pursuit of online connections without thinking if the connection we demand from an ersatz world is wise.
The expert consensus is that 70% of communication is non-verbal. The online world flattens everything within it into 1s and 0s, so every statement comes to its recipient as a flat declaration with no nuance to leaven it. If you know the other person deeply in the real world, it's much easier to catch the nuances. If you don't, there are certain nuances it will be impossible to catch unless you understand social media. And NONE of us understand social media.
Social media uses us far more than we use it. The flatness has altered our neural pathways in ways we cannot begin to imagine. However much our consciousness craved constant stimulation from TV and movies, social media increases that craving to the n. Even 300 channels of cable cannot compete with the potential stimulation of a personally curated rabbithole sailing through an infinity of links.
And meanwhile, social media observes everything we click on, everything that interests us, everything we worry about, everything we love and everything we hate. The internet knows us much better than we know ourselves.
How do we know that? Because our personalities have increasingly come to resemble our avatars. Everything we do has become a public performance, and an inward personality that preserves a core of self-esteem nobody can rattle becomes increasingly impossible when the wrong thing said at the wrong time can earn the disapproval of 50,000 and half a dozen death threats.
At the heart of social media lies an extraordinary paradox. The more we present a false image of ourselves, more beautiful, more intelligent, more capable, the more that image falls away. The distance between what we think and what we say publicly has grown so small that there are no new thoughts along the way to broadcast. Instinct triumphs over caution, fury over vanity. The mask of how we want to be seen slips off, and in place of our best most curated image; the worst, roughest, most aggressive part of us explodes from out the screen. And alongside our coiffed selves comes the unshowered stinking image of our human id - choking on its self-aggrieved rage, ready to incinerate our entire selves in a battle royale with people over the dumbest disagreements whom we've often never met.
The internet has already made so many glorious things possible. It has enabled so many people of alternate sexuality and gender to live their true selves publicly; it has enabled people to speak openly of trauma and abuse; it has enabled the world to catch sight of all manner of talented people who would never have earned an audience had the internet not made the world flat.
But every action has its equal and opposite. With every new picture of a person coming out, there is a new picture of a Trump supporter with an AK-47. For every new story of trauma, there is a person on the web boasting about inflicting trauma. For every hole of loneliness filled, there is a new hole of loneliness opened.
Social media thrives most when every moment seems like an existential crisis, and when every moment seems like an existential crisis, nobody can figure out which crises are truly existential, and the existential crises grow, and grow, and grow, without anyone remembering which crisis they are.
The chaos of the internet has a paradoxical effect. All the world's knowledge is online, and we could all spend our time looking at the length and breath of the world's deepest thoughts. But amid that intellectual chaos, the world gravitates to two diametrically opposite points of view - one view may be righter than the other, but both are narrow, limited, predictable, incurious about the world, and so obsessive that they suck up every bit of oxygen the brain uses for anything beyond basic biological function. Millions of people on either side think both points of view are so incontrovertibly right that they are worth dying and killing for.
The more we become our identities, the more we resemble everyone else who shares our identity, and the less original personality we have. We think the internet's made us more ourselves, but our personalities have become our identities. We swear our allegiance to one side or the other, and if the time ever comes to go to war, we prepare to renounce the most basic facet of our identity: existence itself.
It's so far from the first time this happened in human history. Plato saw all this coming in The Republic 2500 years ago, and history is littered with societies who reached exactly this polarization in the moments before their collapse.
No Goebbels or Shepilov could ever figure out propaganda as effective as a meme self-generated by an ideology's followers, which seems to its followers to sum up the absolute truth with a logic so airtight that no point could ever get through.
And meanwhile, there are people out there who have collected all our broadcasted thoughts, and with a simple algorithm, know exactly which people would be suitable to promote to best extend their reach for still more power, and which people it would be expedient to silence.
---------------------------
The generation born into social media has just turned of age to come onto facebook. Until now, no one on facebook has spoken social media with the fluency of a mother tongue. But understanding a technology, truly understanding it, requires a generation who never knew a world without it. If a war is coming, we will start it, but they will have to end it. They may be forced by circumstances much more existential than any we've yet known to find solutions to problems with this technology that conquered every facet of our lives within a few years of its invention. They will be the first to really and truly 'get it,' and we're all just waiting for them to get old enough to notice all kinds of facets about its potential use we never have.
We just had our first online school year. It was a kind of hell as all first years are. But everything which destroys creates too. As the world outside our homes grows increasingly unstable, the future of education is online, the future of work is online, the future of .... is most certainly online, and the future of friendship is online too. As technology's understanding of us grows total, there will come a time when our understanding of it will catch up - though god alone knoweth how many casualties it will take to get there... and people will have a whole world of proper connections with distant people whose corporeal presence they will never truly encounter. They will not be a small box at the bottom right of a screen, but face to face, person to person in all but crude reality - the outward manifestation matching the inward person. At such a time, connection with people much more suitable for your life than anyone in your immediate vicinity becomes possible.
------------------------
For two hundred years alongside the Bible, the most printed book was the Malleus Maleficarum. The "Hammer of Witches," a manual for how to identify witches and how to protect against their evil. It detailed reasons why witch hunts must be prosecuted vigilantly, why witches must be tortured to extract their confessions, and why they must be executed. The frequency of witchcraft prosecution was tied at the umbilical chord to the invention of the printing press and the mass distribution of books.
The early centuries of mass literacy were a kind of human wasteland. It began with Martin Luther and salvation by faith, which seemed like such an advance in human rights at the time, but led to more than a hundred years of war between Protestants and Catholics, culminating in the Thirty Years War - which in the early 17th century claimed at least 8 million lives.
But after the first hundred years, mass literacy brought us Shakespeare. People sat down in a theater and came out different people than they went in. The realization began to dawn that human beings were more than just an instrument of divine will. And then it brought us Don Quixote, and the world began to realize that laughter and human connection was more important than honor. What it meant to be human entered an entirely new phase as we began to understand the inner workings of human personality. Two hundred years after that came a hundred-year golden age of reading: Dickens, Flaubert, Pushkin, George Eliot, Twain, Melville, Austen, Turgenev, Kafka, Joyce, etc... because the new middle-class which read novels was the first social group for whom the pursuit of happiness on earth was more important than whether they went to heaven or hell. The best friendships of people's lives were built on discussing the fiction they read, and lovers would fall in love by reading each other the poetry of Keats, Byron, Coleridge, Browning, Burns, and Shelley.
And that was just the dessert after the meal: mass literacy would be how billions figured out how to escape poverty, it would be how we began to understand the world's physical workings, it would be how we grew to understand the importance of rights and wrongs - not in celestial realms but here where we find our happiness or not at all: human rights, the rights of people to live a decent life even if there is no promise of a better one to come.
In less than a generation, we've accumulated human history's greatest assemblage of data by an unfathomable exponent. The potential uses and abuses of it are as unfathomable as God, but we can be sure that our future is no different than our past. We have no idea the darkness of human future, and we have no idea the light which comes from getting through it. Whether now or in a hundred years, the internet or a like technology will help to claim billions of lives, and it will bring us seasons of happiness and beauty so far past anything of which we've ever thought humans capable. It will be the solution to the problems it causes, and it will be with us until an entirely new technology emerges, as unfathomable yet to the human mind as books to monkeys.
Every action brings a reaction, everything which creates destroys, every darkness produces light as sure as every light produces darkness. The internet is here, social media is here, social media friendship is here as surely as social media enmity is too. There will be a lot of irritating people we meet along the way, but we can be relatively sure that irritants are irritating because they mean oh so well. The people we most have to mistrust are the people online who make us feel as though our bonds to them are most secure. The people who like our most obnoxious comments, and the people whose obnoxious comments we most like, are the ones who make us into versions of ourselves we didn't recognize until five seconds ago.
This impersonal mechanism looks to be the greatest inflamer of passion in human history. Proceed accordingly.
No comments:
Post a Comment