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You may have noticed you didn’t get a newsletter last week—that’s because I was blissfully offline. I’d originally planned to work ahead and get some content ready for you in my absence, but that didn’t happen. And I had a few thoughts on that and other things that I’m going to rattle off briefly.
Touching grass
Somewhere during the month of January, it became nearly impossible for me to read more than a paragraph. The moment my eyes scanned the last words of one, a circuit would break and I’d notice that I’d clicked over to a new tab in my browser. There was lots of aimless clicking and I’d end up confusing the stories I was reading with each other, combining the intro of one article with the midsection of another. It wasn’t very dramatic, but it just felt like an aimless flattening of my internet experience. There’s not much more to it except that I was very burned-out—not really from work as much as from a kind of internet malaise that has hit me hardest during the Omicron phase of the pandemic. This brand of ennui felt different than garden-variety Zoom fatigue and more of a feeling of a life that (because of a digital book tour and a few family situations that required a need to quarantine) was being almost completely mediated through screens.
I was talking recently with a smart internet person about this feeling, and they connected this type of listlessness to the uptick in conversations about Web3 over the past year. The reason why people want another version of the web, he suggested, is because the current version is so disappointing, and we’re just stuck in it with the pandemic. It’s not that the services we use aren’t useful (they’re a lifeline during this time) but that the internet is a relentless mediator of our experience. It feels like we have no choice but to spend our time with this technology. And so things like Zoom become a simulacrum of an experience some of us have either lost or are yearning for. All of us, to some degree, just want using these tools to feel better and less extractive and exhausting, he argued. And this is what has primed some people to be receptive to a new, dynamic, and (theoretically) decentralized internet.
It’s an interesting argument with some merit. The impulse to desire a truly immersive internet is also somewhat worrying. The current remote-knowledge-worker-during-a-pandemic experience isn’t exactly living in the metaverse, but for some, it’s an experience where the bulk of one’s interactions are in a transitory space. I’ll use myself as an example. There’s my job, which is, rather obviously, almost all taking place online. Sessions with my therapist are mediated through a screen. A substantial percentage of my workouts happen on a Peloton, which adds a layer of gamification and extreme quantification to the part of my day dedicated to physical movement. There are graphs and virtual high fives and a digital trail associated with each exercise. My pandemic hobby—learning guitar—requires virtual lessons, which also employ progress trackers. When I veer off the path, I end up in YouTube-lesson wormholes, which then shape the autoplay videos and suggestions, which inevitably lead me to fumble through songs I may never have otherwise chosen to learn.
All of this is hugely privileged stuff, I realize. And I’m not complaining. I don’t even think the experiences I’m describing are de facto good or bad—they’re just different. But they occupy an ever more liminal space between the physical me and all those physical interactions and a bunch of my digital identities that are sometimes connected through accounts and sometimes not. A number of the conversations about Web3 and the metaverse (which are not the same conversation, mind you, but are related) seem to be about combining those digital identities into one place. Your crypto wallet, for example, can be a passport for much of your data, allowing you to take them into decentralized internet communities and leave a legible, immutable public record of your life online. And the metaverse seems to want to provide an all-encompassing digital experience that feels … less disjointed, I guess, because it takes place in a large universe (where apparently people don’t have legs).
I’m not sure these features would do anything to solve the stultifying feeling of a life totally mediated through different screens and digital services. Most plans I hear for a metaverse sound as if they will only exacerbate the Zoom-fatigue feeling into something that feels like life fatigue. Granted, digital spaces don’t have to be like this! I think a lot about this tweet from the writer Ryan Broderick: “If your metaverse drama doesn’t involve a large-scale trade war caused by the hoarding of a virtual currency and multiple people having sex with dragon avatars, it’s just a bunch of boomers having an argument on a conference call!!!”
There’s some reason to believe the metaverse could be much worse than Boomers on a conference call. I came across a story this week about metaverse mortgages that are being “collateralized using the underlying virtual real estate, which is represented as an NFT.” This is extremely depressing, in part because it is deeply, deeply unimaginative. You can build any future you want in this world, but it seems many metaverse builders just want to create a digital version of the garbage parts of adult life that grind us down.
But also, it’s just so, so good to log off and get out there and “touch grass.” I’m sure there are a lot of people who recharge by spending time in virtual spaces (gaming, etc.) and I mean no ill will toward that! But I find it really hard to break the frenetic cycles in my brain without that physical space from screens and digital mechanics. My brain works differently without digital mediation. When I run, for example, my mind seems to process long-dormant or fragmented ideas from past days or weeks. I make connections much more easily in that meditative environment. Whereas even on one of those scenic Peloton rides, I find my thinking is stuck in a kind of screen-saver mode. What does this mean? I don’t really know, but I can tell you that six days mostly away from devices has lifted a fog that was flattening my thinking. I’m grateful for that opportunity and for all of your flexibility in the timing of this newsletter.
Speaking of people who need to log off …
This discourse makes me uncomfortable
Sometimes there’s this thing where you magically miss an internet discourse as it begins but later suddenly see it everywhere. It is incredibly disorienting. That’s what happened to me with the Wordcel-versus-Rotator meme that’s been banging around Twitter and the Silicon Valley venture-capital crowd. Honestly, it’s brain-liquifying stuff, and I’m not entirely sure it’s worth engaging with beyond the surface level, as a thing that a niche group of semi-powerful people is discussing. It’s basically just a meme about the dichotomy between verbal intelligence and visual/spatial intelligence that’s metastasized into another way to divide people up into factions online.
Apparently, the terms wordcel (a play on the online term incel, meaning “involuntarily celibate”) and rotator (short for “shape rotator”) picked up on Tech Twitter and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who has been tweeting a lot lately (or apparently he has—I dunno, he blocked me), is using the terms to mock some of his favorite targets (non-techno-determinists, the media). The whole dumb thing resulted in the person who created the meme writing a semi-tongue-in-cheek explainer on its origins.
I read the post and got the creeping sensation I tend to get when I see something online that is both very dumb but that I imagine is also not going away, and indeed, it might just seep into other areas of discourse. The part of the meme that resonates with the likes of Andreessen is that it offers language to articulate what separates the tech/builder crowd (which I wrote about a few weeks back) from the critics, content creators, and public-speaker crowd. The meme implies that one group is ascendant while the other has either squandered or is naturally losing its influence and power. Here are two snippets from that Substack post:
“While some of these types will become presidents, poets, priests, the vast majority will live and die producing little value, chasing down rhetorical dead-ends, with their scholarship forgotten. This is the central tragedy of the wordcel.”
And
“Today [the shape-rotators’] stock is climbing to the moon. The world’s richest (self-made) men are almost uniformly engineers, computer scientists, or physicists. Vast portions of society that in a prior age might have been organized by government bureaucrats or private sector shot-callers have been handed over to cybernetic self-organizing systems designed and run by mathematical wizards.”
NBC’s Ben Collins nailed what makes me so uncomfortable about this in a tweet, calling it an example of “near-billionaires trying to invent a 4chan meme.” It’s not as if the Substack post itself upset me or offended my snowflake-ian sensibilities. It’s that the post and the memes and the discourse all descend from the messageboard-y internet garbage I’ve had to sift through over a decade spent chronicling online extremists, harassment campaigns, and, well, modern political discourse. I’m not making a one-to-one comparison between this meme and, like, 4chan shitposts. But the templates are similar, and the effects, though maybe not as outwardly vile, are similar. The memes are meant to create in- and out-groups. As Miles Klee notes over at MEL, “that pesky ‘-cel’ suffix” tells us the language is “coming from a place of disillusionment.” And although it’s entirely possible that the term itself was just a troll-y, absent-minded bit of shitposting, the loudest, most gleeful adopters of the term seem to be using it in a creepy, divisive way.
So goodbye STEM under the wordcel woke onslaught @pmarca https://t.co/fGW8TuuyPx
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) February 3, 2022
Cool, cool.
The meme is also just preposterously dumb in the way that all kinds of trolling are dumb. And that serves a purpose. In the explainer post, the author cautions readers not to take this stuff too literally, and that “we’re here to have a good time.” I’ll take him at his word! But I can safely say (as somebody who has now written about 700 words on this) that talking about any of this stuff seriously makes you sound like you are either a humorless scold or are so deep in web minutiae that you should have your internet connection severed. But this is a legacy of internet culture in mainstream culture—there are ways to package conversations about more serious subjects (like, say, who has power in 2022 and whose contributions to society are more valuable) and dodge any scrutiny or criticism for those opinions (oh come on, it’s a stupid meme!). It’s also a great way to stoke niche culture-war arguments (like VCs versus Mainstream Media). Shitposting is fun precisely because it gathers attention and provokes reaction but also provides a built-in mode of deflection. It’s also part of what makes being online feel so totally exhausting.
By even writing about this, I am aware I’m playing a role in this world. I’m exactly the miserable journalism hall-monitor scold they despise. But I’m not trying to say that X person is a Nazi or that we need to kick somebody off of Y service. The Wordcel-versus-Rotator conversation is, it seems, explicitly designed for the in-group to identify itself as superior to the out-group. And this dynamic usually doesn’t end well, especially when it employs the kinds of imagery and terminology of other, more pernicious internet communities. The poisonous elements of internet culture tend to leach into the groundwater of other discourses and generate new ways to make us all miserable. I’m not surprised that men like Marc Andreessen seem to delight in this type of shitposting. But I’ve also spent enough time in internet communities where dumb memes end up facilitating a dark culture and I don’t believe this will lead anywhere good.