When I started this project, I underestimated how much it changes a diary to make it public. Maybe so much that it’s hardly ‘a diary’ at all anymore. I’ve been reading David Wojnarowicz’s Tape Journals and beginning to understand the long history of public journals as a medium. This one is different though because I’m not ready to share with you my real journals and I live in the 21st century of immediacy and voyeurs, so instead I settle for the pseudo-intimacy of Substack. So it goes.
Tired, scattered, and weighed down by the Vegas-style illusion of infinite possibilities that I feel constantly inundated with; do you feel this too? I’m stuck in the Times Square of my mind. The advertisement is the media, the slide shows of information and images follow me onto the train, home, and into my bed. There is no respite from being a vessel for information to pass through. My senses are completely overwhelmed by horror and chaos and beauty and hope and anger and- and— If you aren’t getting what you want out of life it’s because, you’re on your phone while I’m at the club; you’re at the club while I’m at spin class; you’re not doing enough; you’re doing too much; you are cringe; to be cringe is to be free; you’re too curated; you’re crashing out; everything is your fault, personally; you’re probably just thinking about yourself too much.
I want to write about this current moment, how it feels to live through, but what even is it? As I’m revising this intro, the white house just released a video of an AI-generated “Trump Gaza”, complete with AI Elon Musk eating hummus and Netanyahu reclining in a lawn chair. And although I hope to publish this soon, I’m fairly certain that will already be old news by the time I do. If I were to give this era a name I’d call it the age of bullshit/stupidity/slop/word-soup/garbage/forward slash/fhjgdksjhjkdf (the whole thing, all at once). An explosion of so many people, agencies, and entire governments crashing out to such extreme levels and with such frequency that it is both completely unimaginable and entirely predictable, even inevitable.
Is this normal or is it the end of the world? Every generation thinks it’s uniquely positioned at the end of history. That’s what I tell myself to lessen the fear that this time we actually are. I can’t write about everything I feel at the same time and for the last couple of weeks this draft has become increasingly rambling in my compulsion to do so. I have to hone in on something, anything, god please let me follow a train of thought to completion. What happened to my brain?
Stockholm syndrome; the love story between you and your phone.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If you make something and no one is there to look at it for <10 seconds on a micro-screen smudged with their fingerprints and then comment “so cool”, did you make it at all?
Escapism, the attention economy, the loneliness epidemic, etc etc. I can hardly bring myself to read another think piece about how isolated the internet has made us, much less write and share one. We all get it, the internet didn’t live up to its potential for greatness. We aren’t running hand in hand through the meadows of democratized information and increased connectedness. Somewhere along the way it became accepted that most of us are going to give literal years of our life away to consuming rage-bait, ‘satisfying' videos, anxiety inducing social stimuli, and producing free content for platforms that make nerds filthy rich. Platforms that are so widely accepted to be intentionally addictive and distressing that it’s gauche to even talk about it anymore. The nerd revenge fantasy agenda, if I can’t feel good, no one can!!!
Despite often announced social media breaks, deleting apps, and the rise of app blockers, it’s very rarely true that someone can leave every social media app for good. And for the last couple of years, the conversation has been shifting to a sort of “deep dark cultural nihilism which says, society is fucked and therefore so is my life and I wish I were too dumb to notice.” We are sick of being chastised for a behavior that was bred into us.
For the past couple of years, I’ve been struggling to push myself to share work on the internet, but not sharing my work and life online feels like giving up, or even worse, disappearing. The less I post online, the less I feel like I even exist. Although, in reality, many of the times in my life I have been posting the least are times that I am far more socially and artistically active. It doesn’t change the fact that I was raised in the panopticon of social media. It got to me too young and formed how my brain views my place in the world; as an object to be given value through being seen. In terms of social media, that value is very easily quantifiable, numerical, stiff, and unforgiving.
I just read The Lonely City by Olivia Laing and maybe someday I will write about my loving experience with the whole thing further. In chapter 5 she turns the conversation away from understanding loneliness through art to the internet and its promise of a remedy. After describing a period she often found herself mindlessly scrolling on Twitter (‘X’ is not real they can’t make me call it that), she asks herself, “What did I want? What was I looking for?” And answers:
“I wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to be stimulated. I wanted to be in contact and retain my privacy, my private space. I wanted to click and click and click until my synapses exploded… I wanted to hypnotize myself with data…to become vacant, to overwhelm any creeping anxious sense of who I actually was, to annihilate my feelings. At the same time I wanted to wake up, to be politically and socially engaged. And then again I wanted to declare my presence, to list interests and objections, to notify the world that I was still there, thinking with my fingers even if I had lost the art of speech. I wanted to look and be seen and somehow it was easier to do both via the mediating screen.”
And here we are.
This chapter is, on a broader scale, about Josh Harris, his project We Live In Public as a dark foreshadowing to social media, and his similarity to Warhol in that they both were obsessed with the idea of stardom and fame and its ability to supplant intimacy. We Live in Public was something of a social experiment, two actually, both illustrating the allure of being watched at any cost. How having a validated identity, when such a promise can be offered, can quickly prevail over any sense of material wellness or contentment. As Ondi Timoneer put it while discussing this project at the MoMA,
“…in our society, celebrity has become the golden lamb… if I can get that, I won’t feel alone and I will always be loved.”
Warhol understood very early on, that technology was going to make it much easier for many more people to experience the high of being watched. He was obsessed with recording and documenting the mundane, creating characters out of his circle of friends. Having spent his life feeling uninteresting and lacking, to him, anything that created an identity was worth something. The mere act of itemizing and cataloguing a personality denoted some level of importance. After all, they say “attention is the most basic form of love". (And by they I mean John Tarrant, a new-age white yogi living in Santa Rosa. I guess I always thought that sentiment at least had its roots in some attachment theory adjacent pop science.)
I can feel the eye rolls from people who are sick of hearing reasons why “phone bad” and don’t give a flying fuck what Andy Warhol thought about anything, and okay, I hear you. That’s okay. It’s not important that you like Warhol or his work. The less you do, the more you might like my assertion that he was one of The Nerds of all time. As in, his obsession with objects, iconography, and people had less to do with their ‘quality’ or obscurity or any other metrics commonly associated with ‘taste-makers’ and instead with their level of fame or notoriety or his perception of their ability to garner it. He was obsessed with creating ‘superstars’, reproducing advertisements, and documenting things that everyone could recognize. He was obsessed with stardom for its own sake.
This is the kind of nerd that has come to define the early 21st century. I am far from the first to point out that nerds are running the show at this point. To be clear, I don’t mean nerds as in having niche and obsessive interests or being awkward. In the essay All the Nerds are Dead, they are described as such,
“The nerd doesn’t like bad things because of their actual qualities; the nerd likes bad things simply because they’re there. What counts is collecting, itemizing, consuming.”
Understanding the ideology of the nerd is essential to understanding their cultural output. At this point, most of us have become this kind of nerd. If we are indeed the “lonely generation”, as most major media sources report, collecting, itemizing, and consuming is a well documented way of coping with loneliness (think of what you know of hoarding as a mental illness). If this is starting to feel like it’s drifting away from a conversation about social media, let this excerpt from the famous conversation between Warhol and Gene Swenson reel it back in,
Warhol: …Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we’re getting more and more that way. I think everyone should be a machine. I think everybody should like everybody.
Swenson: Is that what Pop Art is all about?
Warhol: Yes. It’s liking things.
Swenson: And liking things is being a machine?
Warhol: Yes, because you do the same thing every time. You do it over and over again.
Liking things, over and over again.
Sometimes, in the throws of the worst of my social media dependence, I go on Instagram and just scroll and like almost everything on my feed, maybe considering each thing for about 1 second. Person! <3 Nature! <3 Art! <3 Show poster! <3 Devastating headline about war…! <3 It’s not so much about actually liking the things I’m liking as it is about, well… monkey… brain? Dopamine..?
This isn’t a generational phenomenon. Even our parents and grandparents are suffering from phone addictions, being tricked by AI-generated images of Jesus, and giving all their money to crypto scams. And just for fun, let’s add gambling to the roster of activities you can do from bed. [Americans have wagered almost $450 billion on sports since the Supreme Court struck down a federal law prohibiting sports gambling in 2018]
But I think the reason the conversation surrounding phone addiction is at a stalemate is because it is almost always framed as this monkey brain conundrum; that the nerds just figured out how to hack into our neurochemistry and now we are mindlessly and helplessly addicted to the tiny evil screen in our pockets which watches us and steals our data and money. Okay, on some level, true. But I can say, having personally kicked other addictions in my life, that this is different. This isn’t just about being tricked into using apps that intentionally make us sad, it’s about really wanting and needing to.
Let’s get intimate, let’s talk about you and me. No more bullshit about nerds and statistics. To make you feel safe and invisible, I will gift you the power of detachment and frame everything about myself. I want to break down the Laing quote from earlier. I think it captures so many of the fundamental hypocrisies of this addiction.
What do I want?
I wanted to know what’s going on. I wanted to be stimulated.
I can’t bear the FOMO of not seeing what’s happening online. Even at times when I have controlled my social media addiction, I always find a way to stay tapped into a constant stream of information. Needing a fix, I’ll scroll through deeper and deeper trenches of information, hoping to learn something that might keep me current. Despite living in NYC, where I am never disconnected from what is happening in the world, and always within access to public spaces; I’ll endlessly listen to podcasts, simulating the feeling of being in a room full of conversation; I’ll find increasingly obscure and disconnected streams of consciousness to scroll through like YouTube Shorts or Google headlines. I’ll start really reading my emails like the daily paper. I can tolerate being alone, but I can’t tolerate being completely removed from knowing what’s going on. I can’t tolerate being digitally detached.
I wanted to be in contact and retain my privacy, my private space.
One time, while in the midst of one of my confusing relationships with a man who had a real partner that wasn’t me, I once wrote of myself in a journal that I had become a “love and connection junkie” for continuing to meet up despite repeated suggestions that I was little more than a physical stand in for a then absent girlfriend. It was like gambling. Some nights I felt on top of the world, loved and admired, unconcerned with the transience of the feeling. Other nights I felt completely emptied out by the end of being together, like I was barely there at all, a figment of his imagination and he of mine. I knew I couldn’t stop though, because the gamble is what made it fun. And when a friend asked me if he wanted to be in a serious relationship if I would, I didn’t know and honestly didn’t think so. I didn’t want unconditional love from him; I wanted to play the field, for the night. I wanted to see where my odds stood and bask in the inconsistency of the whole ordeal. I wanted to revel in my victories and sink into my failures to make contact. This is a pattern I found myself repeating a number of times. I guess it’s safe to say now that what I was really drawn to was the safety that not being ‘the one’ gave me. There was a level of detachment that kept me from having to experience true intimacy. Intimacy isn’t what I was there for, attention was.
I wanted to declare my presence, to list interests and objections, to notify the world that I was still there even if I had lost the art of speech.
Too young for MySpace, my first account was on Facebook (it was probably actually SecondLife but online games and chatrooms deserve their own piece). I was 10 years old and made the account sitting at the family computer. I’ve never used it much and have only ever been friends with family members and a couple of classmates. One of the first things I remember about it was finding it challenging to define myself as I signed up. What did I like? What did I want to see? Who would my page say I was via my bio and profile picture? I didn’t realize it then but defining who I am online would become one of The activities of my life. I got Instagram when I was 11 years old. My dad showed it to me, telling me it was for editing pictures with cool filters. He said the photos went “somewhere online” but that you could opt out of that if you didn’t want them to. The first photo I posted was of a pig-shaped barbecue he had on his balcony with the pop-rocket filter. After that slew of social media websites and apps that would aid in the creation and maintenance of my ever-changing digital identity. I developed a desire for this online identity to encapsulate everything about myself and then present it back to me, so that I could make sense of who I was or understand how other people see me. It’s not completely dissimilar to journaling or keeping a photo album or collecting media and things you like and identify with. The obvious difference is the public nature of these activities. The flattening of people into profiles. People become increasingly abstract and your relation to them heightened beyond reality. Honestly, throughout my entire life on social media, there is almost always a couple of people at any given time I find myself hyper-fixated on comparing myself to. Metrics feel real, objective even. If someone is better than me online, or better at being online, it’s hard not to internalize that they are just better.
“Rationality is a system whereby human beings make up models of measurement, then take those models of measurement to be real, work with them as if they are real things, and then produce a result that has…nothing to do with reality, but because it is internally self-consistent…because it abides by its own logic, they take abiding by its own logic to be proof of its correctness.” - Michael Judge from Death is Just Around the Corner
I wanted… to be seen.
To take this a step further, standing out in any way is extremely challenging during a time when every choice, interest, and personality trait is atomized and distilled into ‘aesthetics’ and ‘vibes’. Personas and categories are extremely useful tools for advertising, which, after all, is the primary function of most of the internet. Over the last few years, it has become very popular to have AI analyze your personality through your social media and publicly projected taste. Things like Spotify Wrapped are joked to be akin to national holidays, never mind that Spotify is one of the key players in the AI slopification of music and was a large donor to the Trump inaugural fund. We want to know who we are. We want someone, or something, to tell us, and we want it to be validating. This year, when due to budget cuts, Spotify Wrapped proved disappointing to most people, many took to their stories to tell us how hard they worked to have a good list this year. Meaning they privately listened to music in a way that would publicly aesthetically align with their ideal identity. The difference between being and seeming becomes negligible. Being seen is addicting, even when it’s hardly who you are at all.
Fame as Intimacy, Attention as Love
Before the existence of social media, the idea of widespread fame and notoriety was fairly novel. I mean, if you really hit it big, which a lot of people have always aspired to regardless of its realistic achievability, you could be a movie or TV star, have your music on the radio, be published in some sort of magazine or journal, etc etc. More realistically, the idea of being popular and ‘cool’ or ‘chic’ or whatever else it was that you were aiming for, was much more based on tangible community and your reputation among those nearest to you. The fear of not being liked or not fitting in or being found strange in some irreparable way has always plagued people. It is, as we all know, a biological concern.
I say we all know this because for years I have been seeing people remark on how this modern age of “connection” feels so unnatural. “I was not meant to get 100 texts a day or be connected to this many people at all times.” Something that Laing points out is that since the possibility of being instantly connected with someone else exists at any given time on the internet, it’s like they’re always there. You are never really alone. And, in being never alone, you are always being watched. To not be watched is to not exist.
What moved me to spend so long writing this essay is the absolute futility I feel about meaningfully emotionally detaching myself from social platforms despite years of attempts to have a “healthier relationship” with them. Reading through my journals reveals the same feeling present over 6 years now. I mean seriously what! the! fuck!!! Social media is like an abusive boyfriend, I just can’t seem to get away from, despite how much I want to. I see people talk about how they have successfully ‘de-centered’ social media all the time, mostly, ironically on social media. I’m going to post this on social media. And even submitting to publications usually results in an internet article since we brutally murdered print media with our bare hands over the last two decades.
Maybe before the internet, we all wanted to be seen just as badly and just accepted it wasn’t going to happen for most of us. Like the mom in Requiem for a Dream, who is so excited about a chance to be on an infomercial about juice (?) that it destroys her life. She believes that the material lack of love in her life would be remedied by even just a morsel of national attention. And realistically the end point for a lot of influencers isn’t that different than being in an infomercial. Once you get big enough, you get to become the ad, selling products to your followers that are consistent with the identity you built and they want to emulate. Selling out isn’t even a concept anymore because there isn’t any other path. Like seriously, artists need to make money and there just isn’t any other feasible way to do this than sponsorships and corporate commissions.
Fame is the golden lamb, once I have that, I’ll never be lonely.
Despite there being no service in most of the tunnels, riding the train is usually full of people, face down staring at their phones. Even, or especially when, someone is screaming in distress just feet away. Lately, on the train I do notice more people reading books, or my personal favorite, just sitting there. But to be honest, it’s hard not to feel like we’re living in a zombified city as most people walk around looking at their phones, sit at dinner on their phones, spend nights at the club mostly curating it to look good for other people on their phones.
The other day I was at a dive bar in Brooklyn and there was a girl at the bar live-streaming herself the entire time we were there, at least 2 hours, for an audience of about 150 people. She mostly just sat there, commenting briefly on the happenings in the bar, occasionally answering questions. A guy came up to her and they made out for the camera for a couple of minutes. Though she seemed excited to meet up with him, their interaction was ultimately cut short because, I mean, she was live-streaming. If that doesn’t illustrate the use of a screen to mediate and ultimately kill intimacy I don’t know what does.
The thing is, though, that when a tree falls and no one is around, it does make a sound. We do exist when we aren’t being watched. And maybe I am being overly optimistic, but I genuinely think platforms like Instagram and TikTok are losing their appeal. There is a global movement among teenagers moving away from these platforms to more community or interest-based forums. So I don’t think these will be problems forever. But I do wonder what now? AI only continues to expand its reach, devastating the careers of many of our peers who have spent their lives developing skills that are no longer deemed necessary. It feels like we have to start from scratch. Or at least I feel like I do; to rebuild my sense of self and community, my idea of success and how to achieve it. I realize (somewhat in thanks to my therapist’s reactions to my neurosis surrounding the internet) that this kind of very emotional distress based around social media is very particular to those of us raised in it. In this way, I don’t have an objective or intellectual point of view. But I do have an emotional one.
To the billionaire nerds who have created this moment: I know what it feels like to want to be connected. I know what it feels like to feel you’ve missed out on some social experience that you can never get back; to feel like you’ve lost years of your youth to screens; to feel like you will never be as good as the people around you, as attractive or as talented; to feel left out. I feel completely cheated out of a healthier, cooler and sexier version of myself that could have existed at a time where these feelings weren’t implanted in my brain by your platforms before I was old enough to remotely understand the consequences of growing up online.
It’s true that I have met some of my best friends online and been able to share my art, for whatever it’s worth, for years on here. But that feels like less of a privilege than a necessity in a world that has been increasingly and forcefully flattened into the digital landscape. To be honest, I can’t even imagine what my life would have looked like if social media never existed and I hate that. I don’t know how to reckon with my lack of imagination for a world sans phone. I can much easier imagine living in Wall-E than I can the 70s (not that I want to go back to the 70s, but you know what I mean). So maybe I tricked you, maybe this is a phone bad essay. But honestly, I fear I’m going to continue to struggle to get my relationship with it in order for more time yet. And if I have to struggle this long with something as stupid as Instagram.com, I want to at least get some writing out of it.
After all, this is my online diary and this is what I’ve been thinking about lately.
Thank you for reading.