cybernomads #2: the endarkenment™️
"this is no ordinary darkness, it's advanced darkness"
a nomad has no real home, instead opting to be constantly on the move, historically moving seasonally or on a loose schedule to set temporary roots, sell wares, live off the land, etc.
where do we call home more than anything these days? where do we sell our wares (and sometimes ourselves?) where else but the internet — once a lavish, limitless canvas, today a digital dystopia.
2015 – the end of pax technologica
if 2014 was a sort of pax technologica, 2015 was the powder keg of the internet where WWI was about to erupt online – a new notable battle in a long-running “culture war.”
all the websites were industrializing, creating new tools for their users to use and also collecting data on those users to soon inundate them with another round of products, another tier of membership, and another way to mine their innate most human need to connect. big swings around the end of pax technologica:
IRL:
we were past midway through a second Obama term – the post-racial American fallacy was beginning to dissipate
whether you believe he didn’t do enough or did too much is immaterial – the fact that he existed at all caused a sociopolitical ripple that became a wave that you’re either riding or being drowned by
a Hilary Clinton campaign – years in the making – was heating up
hope for continued representational progress was in the air but the smog of misogyny tainted it and a brewing faction of dissatisfied people, online and off, began to organize
the American right wing was looking for a hero
the GOP needed a figurehead to lead their party into an election and they would take anyone – and i mean anyone – to harness their power locally and nationally. they just needed a guy, they’d figure everything else out in post
URL:
the “disaffected” tea party movement and far-right rumblings were injecting themselves into all conversations online
safe online life free from some sort of hate-fueled conflict that could turn into online abuse was fewer and farther between
the fresh killings of Eric Garner, Mike Brown, and Tamir Rice met with the surge in online activism post-Trayvon Martin and began to radicalize some (not nearly enough) online
blind support of the police and informed distrust of them —with calls to reform or abolish the police state — carved a deep divide online
the 2016 Oscars So White campaign, headed by April Reign, was meeting with the recently established black lives matter movement, creating both a structural and representational movement to center black people
this was not nearly as big as the other two to me BUT it highlighted a concerted shift toward diversity and inclusion that further lit a flame under contingents of nerd culture who could imagine Wookies but not Black folks in space. nuts.
IRL/URL
Gamergate brought out vitriolic misogyny towards any woman adjacent to or involved with diversity, inclusion, and improvements in the historically toxic video game space
these campaigns crossed the line between real life and the internet through doxxing and other vengeful tactics by people who organized on 4Chan, 8Chan, and Reddit — the same places with users who threw in with the GOP in the 2016 election
put almost too simply, people who felt, historically or imaginarily, left behind were snatching up an opportunity to fight for what they believed in on both sides and both were served a pipe dream. i don’t aim to be apolitical ever, i know where i stand but – this sentiment —whether you belive it for the other side or not — encapsulates a core truth for both sides and the arena they chose for combat? social media.
the incoming election wasn’t going to serve the people on the right or the left by restoring jobs, god, and/or masculinity or whatever the american right is constantly moaning about and Hilary was not going to usher in a super woke, progressive post-gender america, especially with the likes of the GOP playing hard defense or cheating the way that they do anytime the ball ain’t in their court.
the rising far-right – including nazis, rightfully left “dead” in 1945 – met a wobbly progressive movement – trying to keep the progress train going, unwilling to go backwards, trying to manage the needs of their constituents. war was imminent.
the goal here is not to parrot the way that history is taught in America, where we just jump from war to war, president to president without learning about the creeping conditions that create social and financial collapses like recessions, depressions, and the rise of fascists with the intention not to repeat the past. the goal of this portion is to label the creeping conditions that led to an American Online Civil War without doing a corny reenactment (even though we just did in 2024).
the internet allowed for a large range of behaviors to exist and gave people tools to block, mute, and ignore the behaviors that they chose not to interact with – the birth of an “echo chamber.”
we do not deserve to interact with people online who choose to harass, harm, and hurt us, full stop. that’s not how The First Age was, that’s how it should have stayed. there are definitely some horrible parts of the First Age but we’re supposed to make things better, right? not worse.
in my approximation, people online went from making the internet a space for connecting outward (how do i fit into all this?) to connecting inward (how do i make all this about me?)
“leave ‘em wantin’ more”
pretending the other side doesn't exist was an option offered to us; some clocked into fight online morning, noon, and night – high off the thrill of it and built for enduring abuse – and others gladly took the reprieve, at the risk of forgetting about the looming threat. no matter the reason for a block, temporary peace felt better than facing the harsh pestering and intimidation of people who disagreed with you or had plans to escalate to physical violence.
organic interactions had run their course — we all knew each other, whether we had each other blocked or not. now, it was time to keep us coming back.
users were beginning to argue, to fight – conflict was the new engine of the internet and Facebook and Twitter had noticed. Reddit had moderators for groups who weren’t perfect but they were trying. 4chan, considered too policed by some users, spawned 8chan – double the white supremacy, double the hate, double the dangerous alt-right movement.
many knew of 8chan’s existence but did nothing – that’s them over there, they ain’t really about it. a sentiment that miiiiiiight work in real life but online, “them over there” gave a false sense of distance from instigators. they were our friends, our families, our friends, our coworkers, all on our timelines, our walls — liking your post while hailing hydra. nasty work.
social trust was beginning to evaporate but people weren’t going out without a fight.
them interactions hitting like crack
freedom of speech ranged from “let people like things” to “let people hate things” with no middle ground – compromise became a cop out, nuance became a non-starter, and reveling in the ratio became the name of the game online during this time. online felt like a game – metrics like likes, retweets, reposts, making it into a “moment,” or winning Twitter for the day. high praise? getting a blue check, a mark of verified identity became a fake badge of authority or brief moment of celebrity.
there were real shooters on Twitter, incredibly talented, witty people who racked up mad followers, then got scooped up by new media companies (BuzzFeed, Mic, Huffington Post) or legacy media companies (CNN, MSNBC, Fox). a supercombo take references several news events, a niche pop culture reference, and a funny flair, ranging from cringe to classy, messy to tight. you hit that, you going viral, my pal and you get the satisfaction of knowing mad people think you’re funny or smart or well read…until the next tweet.
choosing sides
that supercombo connected news and real-life events, celebrity culture, media, arts, and comedy (its own art form). it’s no wonder that comedians, who dabble in relatability and jokes, could thrive in this environment, even more so if you were pop culture savvy and knew a little about progressive politics, social justice, and could be quick about your take. an online elite was created, at the intersection of fashion, art, rising celebrity, snark, and adjacency to (or complacency to) the white liberal media machine — an NY/LA literati, who could build careers off of their ability to game Twitter, no matter how pure their work was or their opinions/tastes were. a new class of tastemakers and visionaries? too soon to tell. but, not when one side rises…
the online right built their own media framework with “freedom of speech” with faux intelligentsia (see jordan peterson, ben shapiro, tomi lahren, etc) as their target hosts and vulnerable, agitated online marks as their audience. this right-wing social media landgrab became outrage core online, often needing to roast a “social justice warrior” on a spit or wildly and intentionally misinterpret a story or just straight up lie for views. the programming was conservative, dog-whistling white supremacists, nazis, antisemites, and tech bros to create a new media empire built out of pure spite and prejudiced jokes both for and by their own alt-right elite. a rivalry for the ages, mirroring the model Fox vs. MSNBC, for the online generations.
the views, the interactions, the impressions…all this drove revenue and where there’s money to be made, the people who stand to G off crazy off of the online dissent are disincentivized to stop it. competition is key to a free market capitalist playbook – us fighting means there’s a winner, losers don’t stay down, the cycle continues, we stay on the site. the block, the mute, anything to truly cut off harm done to each other (albeit overwhelmingly one-sided) was not going to happen. we had to fight for ourselves.
other factors contributing to the end of pax technologica
increasing hyperbolic language: no one said what they meant anymore — it was one-sided and the most extreme version of the facts
nuanced conversations happening in online binary spaces
increased decontextualization: with goals of either joking or intentionally misrepresenting
emphasis on interpretation and less and less space for intention
“just google it” to people with little to no literacy
social media requires reactivity over responsiveness
false expertise or personal experiences/anecdotes passed as a common truth
major media fear-mongering and false equivalencies, platforming the wrong people (on both sides of america’s political aisles)
campier and cornier performances of politics/affiliations/opinions, etc
nuance falling down a chasm where people became afraid to look down into that trench, terrified of what might be reflected back up whether it be a truth we needed to hear or a hole in the lies we told ourselves
bots, Russian or not, began to infiltrate online movements and spaces, further damaging trust
brands became people
people became brands
new media companies exploited workers, stealing and making money off of the people — especially people of color, tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme
money, power, access, and attention were up for grabs — a clout gold rush. some hit big but the white whale of social media had yet to breach.
i cannot stress enough how hard it is to not make a joke about the death of a beloved ohio gorilla being the inflection point where everything went wrong but would you believe that set gorilla was killed a mere week and a half before 2016's Republican nominee won the majority of delegates? i guess RIP Harambe, welcome back Harambe…
2016 – the beginning of the second age or “online ADT”
the election cycle that changed the way we all used social media. Donald Trump was the man so many saw as comical, repulsive, impressive, silly, unserious, volatile, dangerous – he was everything to hate and everything to love to all people. the GOP found their lightning rod and the dems found their punching bag – easy to punch, hard as fuck to knock down for good, like chumbawumba incarnate.
to pretend we all took him seriously when he ran in 2015 and 2016 is revisionist history at best, a complete fucking lie at face value. he stood for everything that america really is but stood (and still stands) in the way of any social progress this country imagines itself to be capable of (“post-racial america,” anyone?”)
he was the Main Character of Twitter and Facebook, the two juggernauts of the time, so much so that people left Facebook in droves as the site did almost nothing to quell the rising right-wing extremist harassment and nazi organizing on the site — Zuckerberg pulled a Michael Jordan and said “republicans play farmville too” and we all said “bet, we’re leaving…for the Instagram suburb.” this great digital migration moved the majority of the social conversation from Facebook to Twitter, from one billionaire to another more bearded, better(?) billionaire’s website — both chock full of ads and bots of “potentially” foreign origin, but jack was better.
going to Twitter became the move to another city and Facebook became a forgotten Midwest, a rust belt of sorts — “yeah, stuff’s happening but I had to leave the small town and make it in the big city” vibes. there was the internet BDT and ADT and this seismic unkillable, unstoppable wave of attention to one maniac man caused the internet to be torn apart. the anti-messiah of the online age, he truly is unkillable — at least two people, COVID, and most of the McDonald’s menu have tried.
crossing the streams
on top of this, we all became content mills – new tools hit the creator economy, to make front-facing videos, direct-to-cam content, and/or bite-size sketches the face of the internet.
this had an upstream effect, what was being performed online was now trickling into real life. lines were drawn in the sand between friends, family, and coworkers about this man, his policies — the fissures and cracks in the conversational third-rail spaces suddenly leaked into the mainstream cultural collective consciousness.
there was no ignoring it, no opting out – the terms and conditions of a digital existence i suppose. the pressure to perform — whether this was “red-blooded american,” “neoliberal progressive who’s mad about everything,” “[insert marginalized identity here] who was fed up, indignant even” — mounted and people sought refuge in digital avatars on other sites, a sort of Goffmanesque backstage, a lighter lift of a performance, but still a performance. and there were rewards whether they be the happy good time neurotransmitters, followers, a new job, more attention, etc – the show had to go on, the immersive theater experience of engaging online kept on chugging.
Twitter wasn’t much better but it did start banning nazis and bad faith actors on the platform, beginning to add protocols to the site to protect their users — too little too late because Donald Trump became POTUS. a polarized populace performed their piece — some rejoiced, some were devastated.
it seemed that all roads were leading to constructing grave sites on the hills they planned to die on, right there, on that site.
2017 to 2020: the mid-age “resistance” years
Snapchat has since ceded to Instagram, but held on to the edge of relevancy somehow. Instagram somehow remained Instagram even as it became a refuge of sorts from the ravages of the Facebook and Twitter Civil Wars. the shadowboxing in the echo chambers was over, people were going to fight back, they were going to chat their shit, they were going to use their voices to make sure that 2016 would never happen again. never. ever. i’m serious, never.
where there was some enlightenment in this period, it was met with some endarkenment — people were learning more about each other at digital gunpoint, whether from their followers, contemporaries, friends, or themselves. not knowing everything was a sin before God and, conversely, completely understanding the horrors around us built an indestructible malaise we all had to wade through.
the blank pages in the historical record (collective and individual) were being filled in and people were tired of reading — there was enlightened, educated, woke, too woke, and clockwork orange Ludovico machine woke. people were burning out before burning everything down.
social media with its metrics gamified everything and it began to gamify education itself, hot takes, dunks on hypocrisy, and soon, trauma. this would be fine if the attention didn’t come with a splash of competition by the nature of social media. pain became a game and less attention to X because or Yism and Zphobia added blame and shame to the education gains — the binary internet failed to make room for other’s timelines.
Tumblr, under their new Yahoo! parent company, limited their NSFW content (which also had some adverse effects on what LGBTQIA+ users could post) so all the horny people moved to Twitter or OnlyFans and Twitter. people could be depressed at the state of the world and oh look a tiddy — could be nice if you could feel anything anymore. a sexual and queer education joined the social media discourse. thinkpiecing hit a tipping point — the “game” of following Trump’s every move wasn’t as fun anymore, “no more back and forth, we need change!”
the performances of identity — political, racial, patriotic, gendered, guilt-ridden, pick your poison — kept up the fallacy that simply looking good, strong, or moral was on par with actually fighting for good, building strength, and cultivating collective moral values.
community became the conversation with conformity at the core. self-proclaimed abolitionists became judge, jury, and executioner. intellectuals took bread from their masses rather than breaking bread with them. donate here, add this or that to your bio — aesthetic trumped action and some people are making the blue friendship bracelets to this day to prove it.
slacktivism and constant reputational maintenance met with tools to explain away our personal roles in [insert social ill here] or self-victimize created an environment where everyone is a victim, no one is at fault, and the best way to do your part is self-care, further isolating us from what we got online to seek – connection. the convenience of it kept us online even though we were all addicted.
whether it was tuning into the #MeToo story of the week, laughing at the GOP or Tory clown show of the day, or sharing the meme of the minute, digizens congregated to their online town square to throw their likes, retweets, shares, and tomatoes at the increasingly insane happenings in all sectors of life. putting it all on one site didn’t mean all the stories had equal value, but the leaderboard of trends told a different story — stories went from lasting a week to lasting a day to lasting an hour.
quick observation: people only have so much attention and america suuuuucks at it the most when it comes to anything we need to focus on anything for more than a week and it wasn’t always like this.
if there’s any evidence for the compressing of time and space meeting overexposure, i feel like online social movements like BLM and #MeToo flamed out quickly because people confused reaction with action and the constant reminder of what monsters are out there made people crave more and more violence to register them to click on the victim of the day. i don’t say this to minimize anyone’s experience — i’m just leaning into basic psychology and studying patterns in general online apathy
my hypothesis: slacktivism develops/developed a tolerance to intolerance
solution: initiate calls to action on social media, find your people, build the solidarity offline
making moves
a series of digital migrations made Twitter into the new Facebook with less nazis and no Donald Trump after then-CEO Jack Dorsey started implementing bans. it didn’t serve the same purposes as Facebook was meant to but we were gonna make it work for us goddamn it.
the edgelords and antagonizers found new mediums on YouTube, Twitch, Discord, and in real life on podcasts if they didn’t stick to the fringes of 8chan — out of sight, but still fucking with your mind. they organized in their own echo fortresses while others used the rivers and lakes they were used to to get back onto their feet after getting the tko from Trump in the election.
major media lilted towards diversity and inclusion, whether it was cosmetic, just good business, or reflexive corporate guilt, some people who built their digital empires on these sites were ascending from small c celebrity to smedium c celebrity all while believing that they were big c celebrities (google “deray mayor baltimore” for a concrete example).
a friend recently brought up to me the upcoming Trump presidency and why she believed that major media companies are going to pivot to a political, very white, centrist IP driven TV and film in 2024 onwards.
i personally thought that after Oscars So White in 2016 coinciding with the first election of Donald Trump, we might see the mostly left-wing media companies try to embrace diversity and inclusion again but with every passing day, i fear that she is right because while the black or brown dollar is worth something to these companies it's not worth nearly enough to wade into the waters of the culture war like they did in 2016.
there’s been too many losses in that sector and rather than point the finger at lack of quality and bad business moves at the top, the consumer must always suffer the most – they’re raising your prices not cutting their bonuses. maybe i’ll write another series on this.
the digital performances of self were meeting the real world and online glamour and glory didn’t mean much in the real world — unless that performance meant a LGBTQIABIPOCDEI+ shuck and jive for a baby bag or critiquing of social ills into a microphone with a corporate hand on the volume knob (in case you started talking too spicy).
2020 - A Secret Third Age: TikTokification of the Metascape (4 ADT)
quarantine. a pandemic drove everyone inside and online. for online veterans and newbies alike, our mental health depended on connection, organic or gmo – we all were held hostage by a biological agent, our fear either making us hold each other closer or driving us further apart.
younger generations learned from the older ones — how we walked, talked, and dressed (if Soho fashion is to be used as a reference) — but even more, how we communicated both major and minor ideas. formative years were conducted online just like the rest of our lives. a new social media titan rose, disconnected from United States media machine —
TikTok
TikTok was the new it girl, arriving months before COVID, still finding it’s footing – completely detached from meta, popular with the youth, vaguely ethnic (Chinese to be specific), and incredibly accessible; the imperfections made the content all the more perfect and barriers to major media relevance could be hopped right over like a project gate.
TikTok was funny, it was the news, it brought a generation of shameless navel-gazers, weirdos, and a younger generation more primed to make brazen front-facing videos to a platform that was all theirs — elders weren’t trying to learn all them damn dances and it was the 10th new online hotspot that we “had to be on” in as many years. it’s creator fund, though not incredibly large, makes it more enticing, and if the movie Mean Girls has taught us anything, when there is a new girl on the block that makes them and this made it ripe for assimilation, acquisition, or if those didn’t work, annihilation.
we can pretend that TikTok wasn’t all that but Meta immediately countered by making Reels on Instagram; this move worked in assimilating some of the Snapchat audience before with stories. the move didn’t hit the same and why? Meta was all bought and paid for by American interests, TikTok suppressed less, reached more, and was shinier and newer.
all that Meta’s TikTok clone did was make everything into TikTok.
COVID-era internet
it’s so recent that i won’t go into too much detail here but man we had a rough one yeah?
at least in the First Age of the Internet, going back to at least 15 BDT, there was the illusion of choice. you can choose to find your community online or you could go down the block and try and meet some new people.
COVID made it so you could only be online and while we had a touchstone moment — an almost equal opportunity virus that could come for any of us, all of us — the division was too deep. just because we were inside did not mean that there wasn't a way to capitalize off of this. enter the rise of anti-vaxxers and anti-woke pundits (it's almost as if their entire identity is being anti- something, anything progressive. we’ll come to that later).
the pandemic made us look at ourselves. everything came to a screeching halt giving us red pill and blue pill choices — touch grass or touch screen. some tried one, some tried both, and some tried the wrong one. either way, the isolation and solitude crossed with an international solidarity movement around the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor — a chance (and some time) to turn some of those words into action.
we took to the streets and later in the year, Americans took to the polls to oust Donald Trump by a small margin. a symbolic, small “victory” in retrospect, but a gasp of fresh air at the time. the Great Polarizer was “ousted,” the anti-messiah was banished from Meta and Twitter, but would the polarizing follow him out?
up next: divisionception and nowhere left to run 🌱