this post will self-destruct yada yada

I do not think and have never thought that there was some prelapsarian age in which the Internet was good. I say that as someone who accessed online life very early (think late 80s) thanks to my father’s dial-up connection to Wesleyan’s early internet portal. I do think though that there’s been a fairly recent rise of an absolutely dominant affected way of engaging with the world, and it’s bad for everyone.

I’m talking about what I guess I’ll call the Twitter Voice, though it is rapidly colonizing the entire internet. Go on Twitter and you will find that, to an extent that’s very close to literally universal, everyone has adopted a pose of blankly sarcastic flippant verbal cruelty. (People call this “irony” even though it has almost nothing to do with actual irony, but that’s a conversation for a different time.) There are very few exceptions, and essentially no exceptions among Twitter’s taste-making elites, high-follower accounts that are likely verified. Everybody is above everything. Everyone thinks everything is funny, and that taking anything seriously is worthy of mockery. Everyone already knows everything there is to know; no one is ever surprised by anything, unless it’s a showy kind of shock that anyone could be so stupid or so embarrassing. No ideas are challenging, only presorted into categories of Right and Wrong, and there are no hard political questions that don’t have easy binary answers.  The idea of values that go deeper than the desire to make other people laugh is inherently ridiculous. To knowingly pursue depth and beauty in your life is presumed to be hilarious to others. The Twitter Voice is the voice of someone who wants to do harm but wants you to know they cannot themselves be harmed.

I very rarely miss social media, though I’d be lying if I said it never happens. The Twitter Voice is one of the biggest reasons my disconnection has been a blessing. Unfortunately, as I said, it has metastasized; almost every corner of the Takes Internet has been taken over. The degree to which our media class has become slave to a very idiosyncratic kind of performance of personality boggles my mind. It’s like when you get hired in content creation you get fitted with a computer chip that suppresses conventional human emotion. And what’s frightening to me is that they never talk about it, at all. It’s the most obvious thing in the world; everyone is calibrating their behavior online now so as to avoid being “owned” by people employing the Twitter Voice. Everybody knows the cost of not participating in this bizarre social ritual. But there’s no self-examination, and no self-criticism. Nobody wants to be the one to point out to the herd that this set of socially-regulated behaviors has become unavoidable.

Of course, were I still in a position to be putting my thoughts out into mainstream publications for public review, the responses to those thoughts would all exemplify the tendencies I’m talking about. In a response to a critique of this toxic set of behaviors people would merely dig deeper into them.

The truly bizarre thing is that, while there are of course innumerable influences on social cultures, this strange development can more or less be traced to a single place: the Fuck You and Die board of the Something Awful forums. This obscure, relatively tiny community has seen their method of engagement, their affect, spill out and start to spread through the internet like a contagion, from the forums to Weird Twitter to regular Twitter to the brains of our entire media caste to, increasingly, our professional political class as well. It’s a sociological oddity worthy of a dissertation.

The problems with all of this are legion but I’ll spare you. (For one thing, part of the reason so many regular people distrust the media is because the media class seems to do nothing but make fun of people all day, every day.) The biggest issue is simply this: it’s all fake. None of those people, not one, is actually at all like the caricature they perform online. They aren’t above everything. They don’t think everything’s funny. They aren’t disaffected. They don’t proceed through life unconcerned with the major tragedies and petty indignities that affect us all. They don’t actually find themselves to be inherently superior to those around them and they don’t live or want to live they way they’re behaving. In my experience those who act this way are deeply sad, deeply scared people. You show me the most jaded irony boy in the world and I promise you there is someone consumed by loneliness inside. Some people are really good at keeping kayfabe. But they don’t fool me.

John Updike said that celebrity is a mask that eats the face. I can’t decide which would be worse: if the people who adopt this profoundly disordered way of engaging with the world never actually become that way, and find their internal life at perpetual war with a role they feel obligated to perform; or if they actually become the way they act, and live lives that have programmed away depth, connection, intensity, and meaning.