Come Away With Me
Buckle Up.
In late December, I wrote a substack post I’ve yet to publish. I’m going to. The Good Lord literally convicted me about it, specifically after I verbalized to a loved one that the reason I wasn’t going to was lack of love. I feel it as lack of patience, investment, etc, and I know that’s lack of love. Lack of hope, lack of desire. It’s lack of love. I don’t love enough to deal with what I know I’ll have to deal with just to tell you the truth.
Be so careful, beloved, because, yes. There’s something worse than exhaustion, which can be a serious but temporary (if cyclical) state. Beyond that, we can lose the desire to love people anymore. I don’t want to. Because realize I’m not talking about not loving people diametrically opposed to my worldview in every way (and I don’t want to not love them either, even if I don’t want to be terrorized by them); I’m talking about not loving people I might anticipate community with, who I think are gobsmackingly wrongheaded about very precise things. People with the power to disappoint me, which obvious and overt villains just do not have.
Seatbelts, please. Carry-ons, stowed, and trays in their upright positions.
As someone whose early childhood took place in the 80s and who went to high school through the late 90s (you may notice my disavowal of “generation” categories, but that’s another post), I came of age as the internet did. As such, I always took umbrage with the seemingly simplistic and knee-jerk distrust of the world wide web. Understand, it was not the first “panic” I’d endured. Again, growing up in the 80s/90s, there was always something evangelical/white America identified as the mark of the beast that the mainstream media happily validated. (I know, I know, that’s its job in a white supremacist nation.) And the problem with being fanatical and obnoxious and insufferable and wildly irresponsible and hypocritical and dishonest is that pinning all ills on something that just came into existence is observably untrue. Refusing to take into account the expanding database made possible by the internet makes you look foolish. Crime and social detachment and the like was only really tracked or observed locally and people disappeared over county and state lines all the time. The ability to share information naturally exposed us all to far more evidence of inhumanity—but that doesn’t mean it caused it. People insisted, “this never happened when I was a child,” even though “I didn’t know this happened” was probably closer to the truth.
That’s the part I was focused on. The intellectual dishonesty. The satanic panic of it all. The fabricated nostalgia of a pre-internet utopia in which children paid rapt attention to their parents without need of alternate entertainment, in which adults handwrote long and lyrical letters to each other, everyone, a poet. The problem with wanting to make something great again, after all, is not being able to prove it ever was.
But we did change. That’s not an indictment, it’s an inevitability. Humans are adaptable, they’re impressionable, and—almost miraculously—contexts do impart and impact behavioral trends.
At 42, I can tell you that my language was not impacted by the internet (beyond actual jargon) in the beginning. We were in the introduction phase. We were using the internet to do the things we normally did, but faster. From greater distances. We were touching it; it hadn’t become robust enough to touch us back yet. Do you get what I mean?
It’s actually not been long since the impacting phase began, for me. (I wasn’t on forums until I was researching and commiserating about traditional publishing and querying, for one thing, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.) Even without having been on Tumblr myself, I can understand that it’s probably the point of impact/genesis, but it was Twitter for me.
I’m doing such a loose empirical recollection, y’all.
But it’s where my language changed. Where dialect happened. This might be impossible to so casually capture, but while the early internet was a sandbox where existing societal dynamics played out, by the time we get to Twitter, we’re changing cultural dynamics and introducing and fine-tuning dialect, including newer forms of communication like memes. (Again, I know Tumblr definitely got there first, but I’m talking about having a form of communication that identified members—and was able to immediately distinguish them from outsiders—by requiring them to possess a vast and ever-growing knowledge of references that would from that point on be shorthand. No explanations given).
Twitter became such a force that it had to be catered to. The media, which has always been an arm of the status quo and an agent of socialization, had to not only engage with it, but adopted its culture so as not to be left behind. Sure, a lot of that looked like appropriation of 2nd and 3rd gen AAVE, and that’s because when we say Twitter, we know we largely mean Black Twitter.
My point is: somewhere in there, we crossed the threshold. Technology transformed more than everyday tasks and life (as evolving modes of transportation had, for example); it transformed us. It moved from the inanimate category of tools to the companion category. It fully integrated into our psyche. No wonder we’re so willing to believe that there’s such a thing as AI yet, I guess. We’re not used to this kind of expansiveness. It isn’t often that a purpose endlessly evolves, let alone in a way that can mimic us. And we’re birds with a shiny surface. We are enamored of ourselves, so we’re enamored of what can appear to act like us. We anthropomorphize as compliment.
Lord, this thought process gets unwieldy fast. Back to my point: what we do now that we’re in the Social Media Age. Not what do we do, but rather: how a society (with a deeply entrenched Celebrity Culture) behaves in its Social Media Age.
(The inciting incident for this post:) An activist/advocate/someone who’s put effort and investment into observing and researching and informing makes a post. It gives a good amount of information for those unversed on the matter, and ends with suggestions of how to divest from the problematic entity. In so doing, they include a bad suggestion. Now here’s the thing: I don’t know if we ever lived in a society where this person wouldn’t have been absolutely lambasted. We already had things like Jerry Springer and Jenny Jones and other modern day nods to gleeful public executions. We are a society that glories in punishment, and until we repent and repair (Reparations Now), don’t expect to see that change. But here’s where Celebrity Culture comes in.
We celebrate and worship exceptional people. We actual insist on them being exceptional, to the point of dehumanization. They aren’t real. You had no chance of being them, which is a curse and lowkey a blessing—you’re off the hook. (Aside: Celebrity Culture is Calvinist.) But it also means, when the celebrity status is Social Media Clout and it’s based on apparent intellect/expertise/etc, there’s a shortcut. A cheat code. If you can dethrone an Authority, you don’t have to be exceptional. At least, you don’t have to prove it. You just have to one-up them. It’s a version of the 60/40 rule (which is really the 90/10 rule). They are already legitimized and if you can publicly disparage their intellect, prove them wrong in some way, you are the captain now. It’s like looting in video games. (Have I mentioned that video games are of the devil?) Thanks for hitting that dungeon; I couldn’t have done it, but I can take it from you. I still don’t have any of the expertise you have, I still haven’t done the work or the experience, but I can have the loot. The clout. And this works especially well on social media because part of the dehumanization aspect of CC means disallowing the Authority to have gaps in their knowledge. They’re either full deity or they’re nothing. Instead of recognizing that bad suggestion as evidence that this person was not a bot, did not have infinite time at their disposal, had not been exposed to that particular fact yet, it was instead an opportunity. Not to share information with them with a grace considerate of their visible care. Don’t be silly. They are vulnerable and ripe for overthrow.
That was it. That’s my explanation as to why I haven’t published the post I wrote more than a week ago. Because who wants to actually talk about something, or learn anything? Reconsidering is for peasants. We’re all future celebrities, temporarily embarrassed, as the saying goes. We are experts, even if all we do is point out the comma splice in someone else’s thesis.
Social Media culture can render me loveless, if I let it.
Which I can’t.
So I’ll see you soon.
