the end of the internet
This Week In Reading:
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
Sometimes I read a book and feel like it is something I could have written. And sometimes I read a book and recognize a thought I’ve had but have never been able to fully articulate. When I read Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino, I saw a way of thinking that was kindred to my own, but taken 3 to 7 levels beyond where my own thought had ended. To say Jia Tolentino is smarter than me is a gross understatement. Jia Tolentino takes the thoughts I have had, blows them up and turns them inside out.
I go to barre class regularly and find it enjoyable and psychically bizarre— Jia goes to barre class in a similarly committed manner and argues that barre eroticizes the work of achieving an optimized female figure. The essays in Trick Mirror cover athleisure clothing, Jia’s teenage stint on a reality TV show, our culture’s obsession with complicated women, and the wedding industrial complex. The book is about trying to understand ourselves by understanding how we fit into society and about trying to understand society as refracted through the singular self. Each informs the other, and thus, they are unable to reveal anything beyond of this hall of mirrors. Which is to say, it is a book about what it means to understand anything in the modern world on the internet.
There is a Nora Ephron quote I think about a lot: “It’s a delightful letter, isn’t it? I have a pile of her letters. When I look through them, it all comes back to me— how much I’d loved the early letters, how charmed I’d been, how flattered, how much less charming they began to seem, how burdensome they became, and then, finally, how boring.
The story of love.”
That is essentially how I feel about the internet.
I’m tired of the internet, and I’m tired of people talking about how they are tired of the internet. I am still here, of course, scrolling like everyone else, still ensnared by persuasive design. I grew up online-- co-running a secret, semi-successful blog in high school, before migrating from blogspot to tumblr and from tumblr to instagram. I would spend hours on my desktop computer as a teenager-- reading blogs, flipping through Fashion Week slideshows, watching vlogs filmed on Photobooth. The internet was one of my favorite places.
And then it got bigger and slicker and you couldn’t run a blog without a DSLR, or make a YouTube video unless you had a ring light, and people got mean, or rather, meaner than they were. Anonymity runs rampant in comment sections today, but ten years ago, content creators were anonymous as well. I made an extraordinary amount of content as a teen that wasn’t tied to my name at all. I loved making things for people on the internet to consume, but was terrified by the idea of anyone from my “real life” seeing any of those things. Now the internet fits into the palm of my hand and is as real as any other part of my life.
Cynics say that instagram is only for our most aesthetic, aspirational selves. But what are we if not a bundle of aspirations? Authenticity is not limited to the present tense. Who we are now is informed by who we have been in the past, but also by who we aspire to be in the future. Our curated self is our chosen self, an amalgamation of the things we like and who we imagine ourselves to be. It is a front, but it is not any more so than the way we perform selfdom in the quote unquote real world. Every time we tell a story, get dressed, add organic spinach to our shopping carts, we are framing ourselves to other people and to ourselves, pushing our own narrative to the top.
The internet may not be real life, but real life happens on the internet. Friendships are formed, hearts are broken, arguments are had, knowledge is gained. Feelings are hurt online everyday, and those feelings are real, just as an asshole yelling at you in the line at the grocery store is real, and your mundane interactions at the break room microwave are real.
What I’m trying to say is that I loved the internet, deeply and genuinely. And yet, somehow, in the last year or so, I have grown bored. Facebook ceased to be fun several years ago, and then began to feel useless, and now feels irrelevant to the point of discomfort, like keeping a fossil of an amphibian in the produce drawer of my fridge. I feel less compelled to create content, less interested in putting together Instagram posts. I let my blog, which had staggered along sporadically for years, fully wither. The adrenaline rush from the ping of a notification doesn’t feel quite as sweet anymore.
I sense that I am not alone in this. I can see a quiet exodus from the internet beginning. Influencers and micro influencers are heading for the exit. Some have been driven off by cancel culture— twitter mobs banding together to banish them to the real world. Others announce hiatuses and social media detoxes, citing the negative effects on their mental health. And many of the original internet trailblazers are simply closing up shop, having decided that after a decade on the web it is time to move on. Rookie shut its doors last year and Design Sponge said their final farewell last month. Blogs that a decade and a half ago challenged media institutions have become media institutions themselves.
The internet has become real life, and then, the internet became boring. What was once an escape hatch from the ordinary has become the ordinary, and now we are looking for the escape hatch from the internet. Where we once powered up Internet Explorer to flee the drudgery of dishes and homework and familial squabbling, we now are trying to flee the infinite scroll and blue light that follows us all day. So we set screen limits, and go on silent meditation retreats and take pottery classes and talk about how Good it feels to Make Something With Your Hands.
The not-internet is bad: our planet is melting and our government is run by idiots and black people are getting shot in their own apartments. And as the internet-- once solely the home of musical parody videos and neon web graphics-- has become more and more all encompassing, all of those terrible things are here, too. The internet is the same as the not-internet except the people are meaner and don’t feel any need to mind their own business. The internet feels bad because it is the real world and the real world is bad, and the internet feels bad because it is boring and because we feel ashamed that we can’t seem to pry ourselves away from these glowing rectangles of misery. The internet feels bad and we want to figure out who to blame. So we blame influencer culture for making our Tupperware of leftover pasta feel inferior to their açaí bowl, and we blame big tech for monetizing our attention and selling our data, and we blame anyone who says anything anywhere. We call them out, and then we cancel them. They are deemed problematic, and their language is labeled an act of violence, and it is determined that the internet will not be safe until they forcibly ejected from it. There are infinite ways to be wrong, and no ways to be right. Self righteous rage is the only thing that can distract us from how bad we feel, and watching twitter act as internet bouncers is the only thing distracting us from the fact that this bar is actually incredibly boring.
Caroline Calloway dubbed this internet bloodletting, and the phrase is apt. We started by sacrificing the celebrities, and now we are sacrificing the influencers and internet personalities. We are trying to overthrow what we see as the ruling class of the internet, when in reality, it is more of a democracy than any nation in the world. We are destroying the figureheads right now, but when that proves unsuccessful, what comes next? Eventually we will be the only witches left to burn.
Further Reading:
Books Jia Tolentino references in Trick Mirror that I can also vouch for: Trainwreck by Sady Doyle, How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, All the Lives I Want by Alanna Massey.
Jia Tolentino has written so many good things for the New Yorker, personal favorites: "The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death", "Outdoor Voices Blurs the Line Between Working Out and Everything Else"