The Performance of Personality
Kendall Jenner, Joan Didion, and an Eclectic grandpa walk into a bar…
This article is a response to the recent NPR Fresh Air episode Do Algorithms Flatten Culture? Unsurprisingly my answer is: Yeeeaaaahhhhh.
For someone who makes a living on the internet, I am deeply afraid of it. Weak to it. Subservient.
Sometimes people ask me, “Do you have a positive relationship? With the whole online thing?”
The answer is “About as healthy as that relationship can be.”
I have a habit of underspeaking. Keeping things to myself. It used to drive my old roommate insane. “I always say exactly what I’m thinking.” She told me once.
“I know.” I replied. Which in its own way left a lot unsaid.
The true and full response to “do you have a positive relationship with the online thing” is “of course not.” Does anyone have a positive relationship with a thing that triggers an instant orgasmic dopamine dump?
“Do you have a healthy relationship… with the whole… heroin thing?”
“Yes of course! I shoot it in between my toes. See! No track marks.”
“Excellent! You seem to have it all figured out, then.”
Social media is a drug. The fact that anyone denies that fact, citing the fact that it’s not tangible, is trying to cope with something. These services are invented and unkept by the leading experts in gambling addictions. Not curing them, mind you. Causing them.
Every once in a while I get the yips. Do you know about the yips? It’s a thing baseball players get. They get in their own head and grip the bat too hard. Then for a few months they can’t swing right. They’d be lucky to hit the red side of a barn. That happens to me too. I can’t post. My own face feels amorphous and slippery when reflected back at me. Ghoulish. Massive, glittering teeth desperately trying to form some kind of coherent sentence. During those times, I find myself deleting a video halfway through and setting down my phone. God the apartment is quiet. I’ll think. It’s really quite quiet when I’m not talking to myself.
The average person meets 10,000 people in their life. So how am I to cope when my average video, at least on instagram, gets 800,000 views? Can I reasonably and confidently stand by every piece of content especially when it’s being broadcast to eighty times as many people as I’ll meet in my life? Sometimes I find the answer to be no. For great stretches of time I find the answer to be no. But during those periods of doubt, at least I can scroll. At least I can go searching for water in the well that has no bottom.
My profession brings with it a quite deadly justification, that whispers in my ear most mornings, sounding not unlike a defense attorney.
This is your job.
Yes. It’s my job.
You’re not wasting time when you’re scrolling.
No, of course not.
It’s market research.
If anything I’m on the clock.
I wasn’t always a content goblin. I used to read like a convicted librarian. I set the county record for “most books consumed by a tween human” in the 5th grade. Reading to me was effortless, pages slipped between my fingers like river water, flowing downstream, towards the epilogue. Reading was simpler to me than having to live as a human teenager. It was the latter part that I always struggled with. I remember in middle school mentioning off handedly to a well-liked person that I was unpopular. “No one knows anything about you.” She said in the quasi-disgusted tone that teenage girls excel in. “All you do is read.”
This was the first time that my social estrangement became clear to me. Definable. Fixable. Still, I picked the books.
Tik Tok took that from me. Reading now feels too slow. I thumb pages awkwardly, shaking through withdrawal. Where’s the instant colorful dopamine rush that I know so well? The one I wake up next to every morning? Say what you will about literature but I’ve never had a book try to sell me anything, or make me hate the shape of my head. And yet the phone wins most days. The machine clobbers me with its infinite stamina and sugary thrall. Truly, it asks, are you missing anything? Why read The Alchemist when you could just search “the Alchemist summarized” and have the secrets it holds delivered to you instantly through the mouth of a gorgeous talking head? I’ll keep you up to date. This is the culture. I am the culture.