for somebody that didn’t really use a cellphone until age 12 and didn’t own an iphone until senior year of high school, i’ve certainly made up for lost time. unless i make a conscious effort to face reality on its own terms for the first 10min of being alive on a given day, i usually roll over and grab this stupid thing to look at what other people are up to on instagram or scroll twitter and bear witness to the terminal polarization of society itself play out in real time.
i have to admit, if it were anyone other than elon musk (a nasty petulant man child of a person who seems to have obsessively dedicated his energy and platform to making life miserable for people like myself after his famous pop star ex left him for a trans woman) who had done it, i would genuinely think that buying twitter and changing its name to “X” was a hilarious and ascended move. like anything else elon does, it comes off as the bloated and out of touch result of never being told “no” in your life.
having unfiltered access to social media fundamentally altered me as a person in a really weird and kafka-esque manner. before senior year i was shy and watched the social dynamics of people in my class play out from the sidelines, disappearing into worlds of my own creation with my siblings and close friends once the school bell rang. i was a quiet kid and felt like nobody liked me or saw me, so why would i want to engage socially with the greater Point Loma High School Bubble once i wasn’t physically forced to? of course, these feelings were largely cope as like any other human being i just wanted to feel part of it all and i hadn’t yet realized that channeling this feeling of alienation into art was my greatest superpower. i saw the feeling as a personal failing of sorts, empirical evidence that i didn’t belong because something in me was broken and fundamentally unlikeable. secretly, i wanted really badly to be seen as popular and regarded by my peers, something i probably have never fully reckoned with as my adult life has largely been defined by the pursuit of becoming a famous musician. the roots of that go further back though and that will be a post on here for another time — at this point i’m an angsty 17-year-old completely cut off from the various social dealings of my classmates once school is out and i’m home with my guitar or a pen and paper or a lump of clay.
that all changed once i got an iphone 4S in the fall of my senior year. i immediately downloaded instagram and twitter and snapchat, wasting no breath in making up for lost time. i found that many of my classmates were quick to follow me back and engage with me on those sites, and i quickly became addicted to twitter in particular. the refreshing of the interface and pace of conversation and the way all of our adolescent drama played out for all to see in real time was basically kerosene for synapses yet to be fried on various psychoactive substances. i started making new friends at school from twitter, popular and attractive friends. i didn’t notice it at the time, but my previously regimented and passionate pursuit of excellence in songwriting and my instrument began to fade into the background as i was going to more parties and snapchatting girls and generally becoming a bit more full of myself with each passing day.
i like to joke that if i’d found tumblr at that age and had used soundcloud for discovery instead of just posting half baked acoustic demos to impress my classmates, i probably would have realized i was trans a lot earlier than i did. i tell myself that things play out the way they’re supposed to.
as time went on and the people from my phone began to see who i was in real life, i think whatever charm i was somehow able to conjure initially faded as i grew ever more confident in behaving like the exact kind of person i hated. i got too drunk at every party, i acted snide towards friends of mine i deemed to somehow be lower than me on my imaginary social ladder, i checked twitter every 45 seconds and i treated anybody foolish enough to date me like a disposable accessory. and the thing is, i wasn’t even really popular by any means. i think people kind of just put up with me because i was around.
i can’t blame my phone for this shift because it was simply the catalyst for igniting teenage insecurity into an unstoppable inferno of cringe behavior and self-centeredness. the nature of a tool depends entirely on the hands making use of it, and unfortunately those hands happened to also belong to a tool. thankfully about a week into college i fell in with a wonderful group of friends who immediately put me in my place and to this day we’re all still pretty close. they saw the lonely girl behind the toolish exterior and something about her was worth loving, even if she said dumb shit sometimes.
like i said just now, i don’t blame technology in principle for amplifying the worst parts of human psychology and behavior. i think those traits are things we need to reckon with in an existential sense, and we’ll always be inventing new things that enable our worst selves. however, i think right now in particular that dynamic is functioning at its most sinister in terms of our greater society.
we have just elected a convicted felon slash rapist slash racist slash wannabe dictator, someone who by any objective account had a messy and disastrous first attempt at the presidency and has wasted no time in round 2 sowing fear and hatred and platforming bigotry. so many people agree this man and his underlings should be taken down, but thanks to social media being the forum for these conversations most if not all attempts at collectivizing and strategizing seem to devolve into a mushy goo. no one can agree on who’s leftist enough or what constitutes bulletproof moral standing — my own community can’t even agree on who’s trans enough. no one wants to say it but i feel like all of this is largely due to the way these platforms incentivize negative engagement, and shrink our scope by addicting us to instant gratification. it’s a far quicker serotonin boost to dunk on some teenager with therian lesbian (it/she) in bio than to dismantle oppressive institutions over time collectively. we’re all hooked on feeling like we’re right and more importantly, like someone else is wrong.
i love the one meme where the left is arguing about whether or not a dog is allowed to play basketball or not, while a dog runs around the court dunking on all of them.
rich people will always have access to healthcare and abortion and be free to express their sexuality however they’d like (just look at how grindr activity spikes at any given RNC event), their decadent lifestyle directly subsidized by us peasants and our phone addictions. i think it is absolutely fucking insane that so many of us regularly acknowledge and joke about the fact that we’re being watched and our activities online are recorded and farmed and sold to advertisers. our going back and forth on x dot com about which pronouns are real actively and materially makes money for these people. our attention spans are so short that they can just keep introducing new events to milk our stupidity for capital and widen the gap as the world around us literally burns to death.
i think the whole luigi thing was a psyop sometimes.
think about it: wouldn’t it be in the ruling class’ best interest to knock off a mid tier ceo in a time of growing social unrest and awareness of the evils of that class? tiktok made it impossible to ignore the genocide israel has been committing on palestine for the better half of a century. even if we don’t always use them responsibly, we have open forums from which to commiserate and collectively realize that life doesn’t have to be this unfair. if i were a billionaire oligarch and could afford to do any insidious thing i wanted, my billionaire oligarch friends and i would absolutely sacrifice a lower tier one of our own in a staged event to placate the masses. when brian thompson was executed like a dog in the street we all pretended that it was this massive instant of social awakening and class consciousness, but really what happened is it gave us all means to sit on our laurels and pat ourselves on the back because Someone Else Had Done It For Us. notice there wasn’t a copycat killer! nothing happened! there was a highly publicized chase (the evidence every step of the way looking extremely convenient and staged) and then it turned out they found a guy and he was hot, and once he was imprisoned that was kind of the end of it. CEOs continue to leech off of us and destroy the planet with no fear of retribution, while the rest of us go online and tell ourselves good job.
tools are what we make of them. i think in this crucial time we’re experiencing, this rapid fall to fascism that is ALREADY TAKING PLACE, we either need to learn how to use the tools we have responsibly and intentionally, or perhaps make use of new or different ones. i feel every day like true class consciousness and organized uprising is within our grasp, yet we keep shooting ourselves in the foot while they laugh. i hope with all of my heart that the next brian thompson (would be awesome if it was elon) faces justice at the hands of the people, truly. no frills or discourse or fancam edits, just cold lead karma and an awkward gmod ragdoll pose on the ground.
regardless, it’s about to keep getting uglier and while i reserve no love for these disgusting rich pigs i’m trying to have a greater sense of patience and empathy for everyone else and even for myself. no one’s looking out for us anymore and it’s clear they never were; now that us faggots and trannies have lost our value as a photo op the democrats aren’t coming to save us. i have faith in and love for the people around me and hold a firm belief that we will have each others’ back once the chips are down.
i also wonder how much of my data has been sold in the time it took to type all this.
