This Week in Reading
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
Patricia Lockwood gets the internet. No One Is Talking About This captures the surreal absurdity of online existence, the way conversations swing unpredictably from topic to topic, each approached with a fervor most often associated with religious prophets. Takes, countertakes, countertakes to the countertakes layer on top of each other, increasingly divorced from the original point or meaning entirely. The internet is an increasingly bleak place, but this novel captures the joy and humor of participating in the global braintrust.
“She lay every morning under an avalanche of details, blissed, pictures of breakfasts in Patagonia, a girl applying her foundation with a hard-boiled egg, a shiba inu in Japan leaping from paw to paw to greet its owner, ghostly pale women posting pictures of their bruises— the world pressing closer and closer, the spiderweb of human connection grown so thick it was almost a shimmering and solid silk, and the day still not opening to her. What did it mean that she was allowed to see this?”
The first half of the book takes place in The Portal, the main character narrating the disjointed fragments of hilarity and horror and outrage that pass through her screen. Lockwood moves between instantly recognizable allusions to real internet occurrences, and fabricated memes so absurd I could easily imagine twitter manifesting them next month.
“There was a new toy. Everyone was making fun of it, but then it was said to be designed for autistic people, and then no one made fun of it anymore, but made fun of the people who were making fun of it previously. Then someone else discovered a stone version from a million years ago in some museum, and this seemed to prove something. Then the origin of the toy was revealed to have something to do with Israel and Palestine, and so everyone made a pact never to speak of it again. And all of this happened in the space of like four days.”
Halfway through the book the main character is abruptly yanked offline, into the too-real world of a sick baby and family tragedy. Suddenly the flippant inanity of The Portal (“can dogs be twins?”) feels callous in light of her sister’s pain. Even heated political debates about The Dictator seem distant and meaningless in contrast to the pulsating grief of the neonatal ICU unit.
The internet is both overwhelmingly real, and not real at all. It can be an avenue for education, and a means of distraction. It can distort and compress real issues into a pixelated screenshot of justice, and it can take minor grievances and engorge them into a full fledged culture war.
YouTube is the place I go on the internet to escape the internet. I’ve watched more YouTube in the past year than I have since graduating from high school a decade ago. My taste in YouTubers is extremely different from my broader taste in media, and my taste in friends. On YouTube I gravitate towards blandly nice women— people that if faced with offline, I would dub inoffensively sweet but never invite over for dinner. These gentle white women are usually zero waste lifestyle influencers or Utah mommy vloggers— two distinct, non-overlapping sub-communities that share the same vanilla, matter-of-fact spirit.
Of all of these women, the one I am most fascinated by is Aspyn Ovard. Aspyn has 3.39 million subscribers on her main channel, and another 2 million on the family vlog channel she runs with her husband Parker. She is 24 years old, blonde, has a one and a half year old and lives in Salt Lake City. Her videos are the kind of flavorless, generic content popular on Youtube: “Target Shopping & Haul + New Collab + Trying Tik Tok Food & More”, “Day in the Life With a One Year Old! Our Morning + Activity of the Day”. To quote Lockwood, what does it mean that I am allowed to see this?
If you recreated the rattan and white images from an Instagram explore page using exclusively mass-market merchandise from Target, that is Aspyn Ovard’s house. Everything is a monochromatic oatmeal. At one point Aspyn exchanges her white couch for an identical white couch in a different white fabric, in a slightly larger size. She and Parker own a vacation home in Southern Utah that looks exactly the same as their primary home, to the point that I sometimes confuse which property they are at. She is vaguely vegan for unknown reasons— presumably health, general, not environmental— if I were to draw conclusions from her single use plastic consumption.
I need you to understand this about my relationship with Aspyn Ovard: I am not hate watching her. I think she is smart and a savvy businesswomen and a good mom. She seems to have done a lot of research about baby motor development and is always trying new parenting techniques to make sure Cove is learning how to lift her neck, crawl around, eat solid foods. She definitely hasn’t put the same level of research into the ethics of fast fashion or meal delivery apps, but you get the sense that she doesn’t know that she should. She doesn’t exist in a community that talks about those things. If she did, she would probably care. I don’t respect Parker, her useless baby faced potato-man of a husband, but I respect Aspyn.
Apsyn’s vlogs are a peek into an alternate universe lifestyle: what it would be like to marry a boy at 19 and have a baby by 23, live in Salt Lake City and wear matching pastel loungewear sets everyday. But more than that, they are a glimpse into a world where every moment and action is severed from political meaning. What is it like to exist unburdened by awareness? To have an Amazon package delivered to your front door and not think about monopolies and labor exploitation?
She got lip fillers recently and documented the recovery process, her mouth puffy and bruised while she vlogged making lunch and cleaning up after Cove. Getting lip fillers was neither a feminist nor a unfeminist decision, neither a fulfillment of patriarchal beauty standards nor an exercise in body autonomy. A lot of her friends had gotten them recently and she wanted to try them, and so then she did.
I exist in a life where everything means something. The most benign choices are a statement: either a symbol of righteousness or evidence of my own ethical oversight. I feel so ensnared by my own self-awareness, the tangle of privileges and injustices that shift and tighten with every move I make, every swipe of my credit card, everything I do and do not say. Once you know, you can’t unknow.
We all function within the structures of capitalism and white supremacy. Everything has implications, and I am responsible for the direct and indirect effects of my lifestyle. Aspyn is responsible for hers as well, and as a grown adult who makes millions of dollars a year on Youtube, she probably should be aware of that—but watching her latest vlog “realistic morning routine with a toddler!” I am dazzled by her innocence. Her vlogs are a shot of oblivion, a taste of life unburdened by constant self-scrutiny.
In one of those day in a life vlogs, Aspyn makes herself lunch. Parker doesn’t like eating leftovers she casually comments to the camera. It’s true, Parker—a grown man— says, the thing is, if I microwave leftovers they just don’t taste very good. But if my mom microwaves the same leftovers but I don’t see her do it, then they taste so much better. This statement seems to require no further comment or thought from either of them. Parker essentially just said “I prefer it when women’s labor is invisible to me” and no one batted an eye. There is never any follow up, no deeper interrogation of what any of it means. What is it like to not feel compelled to engage in constant self-reflection? To not try to place your life within a broader context? Is it liberating? Boring? Meaningless? Wonderful? We’ll never know because Aspyn has never asked herself any of those questions.
Ignorance does not absolve anyone of responsibility, but a tiny part of me is envious of hers. My most terrible, secret, selfish wish: a wish for ignorance.
In a different video, she and Parker tour million dollar homes in southern Utah, where they both grew up. Most of the homes are scaled up versions of Aspyn’s bright and airy new development, on non-distinct lots in the middle of the desert, but one of them is surrounded by the red rock formations southern Utah is famous for. “This is such a cool view out here guys” Parker tells the camera, “like it feels like you are in, what is it called? Cars Land.” Yes, this man who grew up surrounded by a view very similar to this one, complimented southern Utah by comparing it to Disneyland’s facsimile of southern Utah.
Everything on the internet is loaded, every decision a trap. Every choice must be weighed against an intensive, and often conflicting ethical rubric. This burden feels common— unavoidable, even, within my social group. But there is a whole world of people who can simply do without thinking, act without reflection, exist without shame and guilt and doubt. Aspyn does it everyday, and I would hazard to guess, so do the majority of her 3.39 million followers. I did not choose to be responsible for my role within structures of oppression, that is my birthright for being born into a system of global capitalism. The moral anguish I feel over that responsibility, however, is perhaps self-inflicted. I don’t know how to exist outside the constraints of self-reflection, and I don’t really want to. To be aware enough to make choices that do the least harm is the burden of the privileged, and I can shoulder that load. But for a moment, hitting play on a beige thumbnail, that weight is obliterated by a 14 minute asteroid of internet inanity, taking the shape of a young Utah mom.
Further Reading
Patricia Lockwood is a national treasure. Her memoir, Priestdaddy, is a masterpiece. Run don’t walk. This essay on Tinhouse she wrote really captures her perspective on the internet.
If you want to start your Aspyn Ovard journey…it may take multiple videos to understand the fixation, and there is a good chance you will never understand the appeal. Her Q&A videos were the ones that made me turn the corner on the way I see her.
Housekeeping
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