By: Ben
Johnson
At this point there should be a word that means
“a link to something came to my attention via social media today, and I am
about to talk about that now.” It should be German, probably, or maybe
Japanese. Those languages have the best words for concepts that definitely
exist but that English-speaking people would rather explain to you than just
say. Today, thanks to my friend Mark Colomb, I saw this
piece. It appeared on a website. It’s about one particular website, The
Awl, and about websites in general.
“What the hell,” I thought, “might as well read
this thing about websites.” I have a website. You’re looking at it right now. It’s…
you know, it’s a website. It’s not doing much, just sitting there being a
website, kind of, but it is at least a website. So that’s something I have in
common with the website guys the article is about. Maybe I can learn a thing or
two I hadn’t thought of yet on the subject of websites and website-having.
What happened next left me speechless.
Specifically, what happened next, was that my tenderloins, or whatever those
muscles are that run up your back on the sides of your spine, constricted and
my breath got all sparse and starry. In other words, what happened next was the
same thing that happens whenever I find myself stuck in a long grocery store
line with a cart full of microwavable garbage, waiting for more well-appointed
shoppers to buy their organic produce, wondering what kind of space alien has
the confidence to purchase an actual jicama without apparent foreknowledge of
its inevitable crisper-drawer rot stink. This article, about some website guys
who have a website, is dread, and not that theoretical existential-style creeping
dread of alienation, but rather that I am going to die right now, “oh my god oh
my god I am dying” dread that possesses your actual body and explodes in your
brain and turns your vision gray.
What part, though?
It for sure wasn’t the part that talks about
the future of online content, how much of the internet is being strained
through these social media platforms, whose minor algorithmic adjustments
create entire content-providing ecosystems that spring up, thrive, and die,
like whatever weird, indistinct individual creatures feast on geothermal vents
and whale carcasses on the ocean floor. That part was interesting. So was the
part about the stratification of the human experience into ever more finely
tuned revenue management guidelines, about how human life and labor is slowly
and inexorably being converted into data, how data processing stratagem will
eventually become the shape of our society, how the individual is dying in that
way too, and will continue to commensurate with increasingly sophisticated
modeling and a few flops of Moore’s
Law. Spooky, but interesting. Fun to think about, even. Humanity’s satisfying
denouement, even better in the book than in the movie.
The part of the article that puckered my
sternum was the description of who these people are. Of course they are white
people. Of course they are based in Brooklyn. Of course their professional
backstories are a byzantine recap of internet publications large and small, and
of course they have names that sound like herbal tea variants, and of fucking
course they’re listening to Destroyer in their cramped but stylish office. It
didn’t make me roll my eyes, because my eyes were too busy being coated in
socksless boat shoes, and my vertebrae were too busy fusing into a fetal
position, and I was too busy locked inside my mind screaming “get a job” to
nobody in particular like the ghost of an apoplectic 1950’s Brooklynite concierge.
Like I said, I have a website. I’m white. I’m not
based in Brooklyn or, worse, San Francisco, but I live in an urban center, in a
Chicago apartment that’s walking distance to two dildo stores and a gourmet hot
dog place that puts Foie gras on duck sausage, which I eat the shit out of (the
duck sausage) just about every chance I get. I can’t play the “I’m different”
card while talking about the Awl guys with any outward credibility, except in
that I am less prolific and less popular and don’t make a dime from my website,
and, aside from whatever back-end justification you want to attach to
amateurism in art, all that means is that I’m less ambitious and likely also
less talented than they are. Maybe the landscape of my “trauma” and resultant neuroses
is a little different too, but we humans are not in the business of giving a
shit about that. The basic demography is roughly equivalent between me and the
Destroyer-listening Brooklyn fuckwads depicted in this article.
The eyelid palpitations I get from the section that
lists off respective CV’s harbor plenty of jealousy vibes. I’ll concede that. I’d
like to write or work for one of these places, probably. It seems nice. In
theory. I’d also like to have nicer clothes, and seem generally fuckable to
attractive and intelligent potential mates, and have my well-articulated opinion
on matters of the day valued and financed by the world at large, and embody a
sense of writerly craftsmanship, and be applauded by peers I respect, and otherwise
have all of my pleasure centers tickled by whatever manifestation of purpose-affirming
capital suits me best.
Most importantly, I’d like to like myself as
much as these people seem to, and have an interviewer note how self-effacing I
am at the interview and photo shoot I am currently participating in. I’d like
to be able to say “did you read that piece in The Verge about The Awl?” and
more or less leave it at that without my psyche crumbling into some
panic-stricken wormhole through which my fears are transmuted into the unintelligible
torrent of words you are now reading. But hey, that’s just not me, I guess.
I think The Awl is a pretty good website. For
all I know. I don’t read it. I think the New Yorker and The Atlantic are
probably pretty good magazines too, and I don’t read them either. I’m not a
great reader. I think there are probably a lot of amazing things in this world
that I have not been able to latch onto or participate in because my teeth
vibrate like a tuning fork every time I hear them described, and I’m trying to
be alive, and all this, being a website, talking about websites, reading about
websites on websites, living within the race of humans, specifically young
urban white people who are striving to document and amuse themselves out of a
self-perpetuating stupor of late capitalist and postmodern alienation with “content,”
just that one word “content,” now meaning “non-nourishing informational slurry,”
feels very unlike living. It feels, in a few bare moments of experience such as
the one I just had reading this thing about the thing, like a goddamn boa
constrictor around your neck. It feels like possibilities dying. I hate it.
It’s good to remind ourselves, and this is a
good time to do it with the New York Stock Exchange seizing up yesterday in
what was except for probably a few not very good anyway rich people a total
non-thing, that these social media platforms, like the “content”-generating
providers that feed into them, are still optional. We can still get our
information from wherever we want. And we can also choose to get no
information. Or a slow drip of it. We can decide against any information, and
might benefit from doing so if the only people giving us “content” that’s “worthy
of our attention” happen to be walking postgraduate barracudas in bespoke trunk
club trousers, experimental haircuts, and vintage blazers, people who
unselfconsciously use the word “optimization” like they are somehow exempt from
this doomed species of ours and therefore do not need to cut the shit and/or
get real. Maybe instead of hearing everything processed through the filter of
these people, we can stick to basic human truths as a more enlightened news
source.
Today’s hot content: Pam seems upbeat today.
Eugene told a funny joke on the elevator. You are at your desk in an office, or
on your phone on the train, or in bed on a tablet, and people are everywhere,
all around you, just through the walls, breathing in much the same way you do. Talking
to them and living with and among them (even
if they totally suck, and most of them do) rather than merely harvesting their diluted
essence through manufactured screen-bourne consumables is not just life
affirming for you, but maybe more beneficial, it’s also an opportunity cost for
some hapless caffeine addict currently sitting in an ergonomic chair in an office
with exposed brick, listening to New Pornographer side projects all day long,
on an infinite deadline. Instead, Pam wants her husband to build a trellis to
screen her patio, and you can tell her that seems nice, because it does.
