I don’t think anyone cares about anything anymore
This winter’s iteration of Pacific Northwestern Seasonal Depression manifests less as the rain-soaked sadness I have felt in past years, and more like an infinite and atemporal exhaustion. Combine that with terrific anxiety about the state of the world and constant anxiety about my personal and professional life. Not to mention: for two weeks, literal fog has settled in, like, four seconds after sundown. I don’t mind overcast weather, but this is a bit absurd and as the world careens into another year of COVID, it feels a bit on the nose for my taste.
But I broke through the brain fog for a few days, and in that time I read the best piece I’ve found this year. It was written by Rayne Fisher-Quann, and is titled “west elm caleb and the feminist panopticon.” I usually take notes on whatever I read on the internet as a journaling prompt, because my freewriting eats shit three times a day and makes me feel terrible about my obsession with ordering words on the page. By combing through a backlog of tabs and articles, I have something to project my thoughts on to and from which I can find new ideas. The West Elm Caleb story sits miles outside of the scope of my ordinary media consumption but Rayne’s piece grabbed me immediately, merely with the basic details of the ordeal. She lays out groundwork for why the story makes her violently depressed but also for why she can’t stop thinking about it; naturally, these why’s are one and the same. That she’s writing about it is less a testament to the newsworthiness of the matter — in fact, the hasty tidal wave that this story generated is perhaps its most odd attribute; millions of people, of all sexualities and genders, have gone out with people who have later ghosted or lovebombed them.
The theme of the West Elm Caleb stuff that has bothered Rayne into writing her own piece about it is the bit that, from her perspective — I’m an unreliable narrator when it comes to stories that primarily unfold on Tik Tok — no one addresses (relative to everything else): that Caleb sent unsolicited nudes to some of the women who first brought his name to attention after realizing they had all been involved with a guy who used the same tactics on all of them. This fact is glossed over in favor of the lovebombing and ghosting, which brews up more attractive drama online in the same way vultures consider a meal attractive if crows are already circling it.
The root of the issue, why it was the subject of such concentrated attention as if it were a miniseries of vignettes on a streaming service, is that West Elm Caleb is not the first or even the thousandth time that problematic behavior on the internet has been overlooked in favor of less objectionable actions that can more easily piled upon, where those doing the piling-upon can see themselves as morally superior to the subject of their vigor. As Rayne says, it’s more rewarding for users to gnaw on the parts of a controversy where they can easily insert themselves into the drama, because that’s where the engagement for everyone else is. And the structure of the internet incentivizes behavior that deliberately lacks nuance, because if we were to all sit down and try to have a considerate conversation about the ethics of dating apps and of the apps’ users, there would be a new story for everyone at this table to glom onto. And it continues…over and over again.
Dozens of articles sit open on my laptop for weeks, months, perhaps years by now. OneTab is ostensibly, plausibly, a perfect invention for a person with such concerns, but it backfires when my eyes are bigger than my brain’s capacity to take in information. The longer a piece sits, the less likely I’ll get around to it; Paul Schrader’s essay for FilmComment, “Canon Fodder,” has sat half-read on my “Longform” desktop since (probably) August. I’ll get around to it, I tell myself, once I’m a writer who apparently does not write but just sits and reads to catch up on this inconceivable backlog I’ve built for myself.
But I digress.
Lately, I can afford to parse one, maybe two pieces a day; they’re usually posts I pulled up the night before when I sat half-stoned in bed, my final thoughts before waking up the next day to do it all again. This method was how I discovered Rayne’s Substack. It was also how I discovered Drew Austin’s newsletter, Kneeling Bus, and his piece about the nowhereness of the internet that everyone is apparently all-consumed by at every moment. Such a state was present as well when I finally opened Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino’s collection of essays. Even after nearly three years of feeling like there is no escape from the increased suck of this black hole we birthed from our own technology, Jia scratches at something in her writing that strikes just the surface of what the pandemic has made legible even to those who don’t know who she is.
Reading back-to-back-to-back pieces about the grandiose horror of the internet, pieces written by people much smarter than myself, was not something I intended to do. It had the same effect as doomscrolling on any of the platforms. You never mean to get angry about it, but the ultimate destination, sooner or later (and depending on how many notifications I have), is anger. Jia knows this, as does Drew Austin. Their essays about the repulsive, addictive fury that the internet is designed to generate in a self-rewarding loop of capitalization (Jia opens Trick Mirror with an essay titled “The I In The Internet”) compel because they examine this crisis from diametric points of view: Jia provides a brief accounting of her personal history with the internet and an even briefer history of the time when the internet might have been a good place — when message boards were the heart of the life online and the internet felt like a new kind of community before devolving into echo chambers for screaming matches. Austin, on the other hand begins his piece by admitting his lifelong love for Neil Young, and how he believed the words Young had about Joe Rogan’s vaccine misinformation wouldn’t matter, that they were being “amplified for user engagement,” that it would all blow over in a couple of days. (I agree with him.) He quickly realized that this spat would not only directly affect his music listening habits, but that it is “a glimpse of our balkanized digital future: a universe where content and data (and users themselves) constantly disappear and reappear on various platforms, flickering on and off, for reasons ranging from licensing to culture war beefs.”
Neil Young and Joni Mitchell each have the capital and cultural legacies to take a stance against Spotify, which might explain why they pulled their catalogs in the first place. But since Spotify and Rogan hatched an exclusive platforming deal in 2020, there’s no danger for Young or Mitchell in leaving one of the three, maybe four, streamers that monopolize music distribution only to keep their music up on Apple and Amazon and YouTube, the latter of which is yet another place where COVID misinformation runs rampant. If more people bought vinyls or CDs of Blue or Harvest or any other Mitchell or Young album, great! But that won’t happen on the scale the internet thrives on. Its all-encompassing nature has, in, as Jia calls it, its Web 2.0 phase, turned to a model of opposition. Specifically, performative opposition.
And it’s this axiom of performance which reflects the possibility that most consumers of media simply don’t give a shit about what they consume anymore, because they’re either going to be able to find it somewhere else (in the case of Neil Young or Joni Mitchell), or because Disney and AT&T and Amazon are the bedrocks of film and television production now and not only are their presences ubiquitous in whatever our reality is now, some fusion of what’s online and what isn’t, they don’t give a damn about producing refreshing, inventive artwork as entertainment. They exist to drive profits to their shareholders. Such is the world we’ve created for ourselves.
Fool us once — there isn’t anything creatively novel in the presentation of an Irishman’d Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in the final episode of The Mandalorian’s second season; fool us twice and Hamill’s likeness appears again, in The Book of Boba Fett as a young Luke with an artificially regenerated voice. I can’t bring myself to watch either. This is the future of tentpole intellectual property: the systematic elimination of the protagon —
Oh. Wait. I’m forgetting that protagonists are also being doubled now, even tripled. The Multiverse penetrates the larger screens as the Metaverse overwhelms our small screens. (Is that how that works???) I can’t bring myself to go see Spider-man: No Way Home (God, that hyphen is fucking stupid) in theaters. Marvel doesn’t need my money. Yet the clips I have seen from it involve Andrew Garfields’s Peter Parker but not Tom Holland’s, although his pals played by Zendaya and Jacob Batalon are there and are confused. Yet their agape pauses are too long and too silent for anything other than the practiced, edited indulgence of audience uproar. I go apeshit for Andrew Garfield under normal circumstances but these clips are just unwatchable. I sound like a real Old Man Yells at Cloud type right now, I know, and I had a great time laughing my stoned self hoarse at Jackass Forever. Best theater experience I’ve had in years. I was also pleased to see West Side Story with one of my best friends in a completely empty corner theater while No Way Home played in seemingly every other auditorium in the multiplex.
Disney, and hence Star Wars and the MCU, barely even seems interested in expanding their universes anymore. Circa 2016, it seemed like corporate streaming platforms were on the verge of blowing up the universes of IP that had given rise to contemporary blockbuster franchises. Villains like Snoke served as a chance to dive into the origins and the history and the mythos of the Force, which had previously been served only by books and video games on the outskirts of the canon; it was a valid question to wonder after Endgame where, say, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 might take the intergalactic exploits of the literal Marvel Cinematic Universe. Instead, two of the biggest entertainment cash cows in history have collapsed in on themselves, the same characters doomed to pop up over and over again in ostensibly different places, but they’re really all just the same. No one seems to notice; the crowd roars. The lines for tickets and concessions were the longest I’d seen in five years at the local humdrum Regal, the only theater around for miles that hasn’t yet installed the mildly cushy reclining seats which, in my estimation, merely serve to inflate bad box office numbers. Perhaps Regal should install leather in the theaters where pricks like me go fuck themselves during West Side Story and Nightmare Alley, while the true populists destroy their backs to holler at the shit that needs nobody’s help. They’re standing up the whole time, it doesn’t matter.
Existence in this profoundly, historically stupid time is not a recent or shocking twist in the big picture. America built itself in the Enlightenment guise of a truly free nation and immediately embarked on a mission to enslave its peoples domestic and abroad. The pandemic has altered exactly none of this; it has merely clarified it. So once again, millions of people act as though resistance to vaccination mandates — which have been in place as requirements to enter public school in many states for nearly eighty years — or nonexistent attempts to defund police departments are the last line of defense between civilization and madness. We’ve been going the opposite way for decades now. Half a dozen companies know everything about everyone and they make no effort to hide their interest in using that knowledge to spoon-feed misinformation and fan service to their products to, just as has happened with West Elm Caleb, keep them dependent on a feeling of personal participation with a drug dealer that got them to sign a terms sheet without a second glance. (Of course we’re all guilty of this.) The pretense that everything has suddenly gone to shit is, in its way, its own kind of fan service. We’re getting just what we asked for.
