Blaise Pascal, writing in Pensées:
All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
I’ve got a Safari window open behind this Craft draft (there's no great portmanteau here, though that won't prevent me from desperately searching.) The YouTube video pumping audio into my head via a pair of pink AirPods Max is a clip from Bo Burnham’s latest Netflix special, Inside. Inside is a scathing indictment of our shared connected experience—a meandering, upsetting, hilarious, catchy, delightful, frustrating, poignant, timely, creative exploration about what we inundate ourselves with all day, every day, especially in the midst of a global pandemic when much of the world is not open to us, and we've all shared in this collective misery of endlessly fluctuating undersanding around what, when, where, why, how fucking long are we're going to have to keep doing this, because even though the vaccines are miracles of science and work profoundly well, hesitation due to misinformation, malice, or willful ignorance, the logistical nightmare surrounding distribution of billions of doses around the globe, competing political and social agendas, variants rearing their heads and striking at the heart of even the most insulated communities, general apathy, exhaustion, nice weather, and myriad other reasons ensure this virus will be with us for a long, long time. So we cope in the only ways we know how: Welcome to the Internet. We've created an environment for ourselves where we're bombarded by stimulus, much of it negative, malicious, or otherwise unproductive for the healthy functioning of our brains. It's not all bad, of course, but it's hard to reconcile how to feel when one moment you're laughing at a silly video of a dog feeling guilty about tearing up a couch cushion, and the next you're witness to the agonizing murder of a black man by a police officer, the officer's knee planted firmly in the man's neck, literally squeezing every last breath from him in front of your very eyes. You just watched a murder. You just watched a murder.
Hey, you just watched a person literally get murdered. Retweet.
But it’s good to be informed! At no other point in human history have we been more connected, more aware, more capable of understanding. I thought for so long that this was a good thing, but the last few years have been especially revealing. Our emotions weaponized, our personalities commoditized, our attention milked by companies lapping up what little droplets we give them. And social media makes it easy for us to give our attention.
I recently deleted my Twitter account. My long time favorite social network, I joined back in May 2008 and had, I think, over 50,000 tweets by the time I nuked it. Much of my current perspective on the state of the Internet stems from what I saw the network evolve into over the years. While not immediate apparent, Twitter’s key selling point—short, public messages in a seemingly endless list of other short, public messages—is also its single greatest flaw. Shakespeare wrote, “Brevity is the soul of wit,” but I think it’s time we agree that he was a fucking idiot. Wading into the sea of Tweets, nothing is more apparent that there’s a lot of brevity, and very little wit. Social media has convinced us that any thought, regardless of effort taken in developing it, is worthy of publication. In fact, putting too much thought into what you post could result in you missing out entirely on the crucial activity of shared discourse. The rate at which social media’s attention slithers from topic to topic leaves anyone unwilling to knee jerk their perspective into existence likely to be unheard, wallowing in irrelevance.
Twitter wants to be the center of conversation on the Internet, but Twitter’s structure ensures that no meaningful conversation can ever truly happen there. The mere existence of a character limit means the first thing to go is nuance. When anything that requires even a modicum of consideration can be quickly dismissed with a single word and farted out to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers to inhale and regurgitate with the click of a button, is it even worth the effort in the first place? But so much of what people post about on Twitter deserves discussion, so it's particularly distressing that the platform actively discourages it.
Proportional responses do not exist on social media. One of the worst elements of current Internet culture is the insistence that every single person who has a thought must share that thought, and oftentimes they are just the same thoughts that everyone else already had and decided they just had to share. You see this in joke Tweets—dozens of replies follow, most of which are inane and poor attempts at retelling the same joke much worse than the original.
You also see this when someone messes up. Let's posit a scenario where someone makes an off-color comment (let's not consider the severity of the comment, it's irrelevant to the broader point). The reaction to the poor comment is often met with the same fervor as if that person lit a kitten on fire. Often you'll find dozens, hundreds, if not thousands of Tweets excoriating the person who made the comment. And that's if they get off lucky. It's not uncommon for Twitter to do a deep dive on someone's entire history of ephemera to seek out any evidence of prior malfeasance, completely emancipated from context, time, or commentary from the author, in an effort to reinforce prior assumptions and justify the reaction to the original comment. There's an unhealthy obsession with justice by a group of people who have no businesses distributing it.
To be clear, this is not some grand criticism on Cancel Culture. I do believe people being held accountable for their shitty actions is a good thing, and I think the Internet has enabled people to direct the spotlight onto the faces of some pretty heinous individuals. But I have to ask myself what being held accountable looks like depending on the action. Does the act of telling a tasteless joke really deserve hundreds of replies telling the author to kill themselves? How is that a proportional response?
This is all exacerbated by the fact that the current state of the Internet and social media essentially renders it an emotional outlet plugged directly into each person’s id. It rewards extreme behavior, and people crave to be a part of something bigger than themselves, so of course they get pulled into taking part in a mob of like-minded individuals who are all saying similar things. It's easy to get swept up in a sea of validation. I found myself there so many times, and only later, once the storm dissipated, did I sit back and consider the consequences of my own actions in that situation. And this doesn't apply to just negative reactions either. We have extreme positive reactions, too, where things (like, say, a meme, or the song of the moment, or a new TV show) are treated as though they've been bestowed upon us by some higher power. Remember the fervor over Tiger King?
Really? Tiger King?
I tried to defend Twitter for so long, mostly to justify my own addiction to the platform. I thought it was a net positive in my life, giving me the connection I sought, the understanding crucial to my existence in this ever-changing world, the little bursts of joy and delight I couldn’t find anywhere else. But I’ve never been in a better place, mentally-speaking, since I deleted it.
Being constantly bludgeoned by variety is destructive. It leaves no room for quiet. No space for contemplation. No opportunity for thought. When we’re constantly craving the next thing, we have no time to digest the previous thing. We have no ability to consider what something truly means to us. The pandemic provided a uniquely horrific opportunity for all of us to collectively share in that misery. We all fed into this in our own ways, mostly by feeding off of others in an effort to stave off the boredom, frustration, and despair a global catastrophe inflicted upon us. The Internet tries to be everything to everyone, and it takes its toll. What hope do we have if we can’t even sit quietly with our own thoughts?
I wasn’t expecting a one and a half hour Bo Burnham comedy special to be the perfect distillation of my feelings around the current state of Internet and social media, but here we are. By scrutinizing everything from the homogeneity of Instagram subcultures, to performative mental health, to our collective inability to shut the fuck up about any tiny little thing that pops into our heads, Inside lambasts our addiction to this miserable cesspool. It's a deliberately imperfect perspective on what goes on inside our heads when we're trapped with the endless stream of other people's id, all of us desperate to be heard and validated, an endless cycle of torment where we're all responsible for each others' happiness.
I fucking hate it.