What exactly is the internet?
This is not a joke question, though it is a leading one, one that most of us instinctively know the answer to: The internet is a way to share information. Automatons like Mark Zuckerberg will say it’s a way to “connect,” but while that may technically be true, the main way people use it is to share information, perhaps with the intent to connect but more realistically to receive unadulterated praise. Some sickos are looking for an argument, but in general, we’ve been trained to put out information (opinions, experiences) in exchange for dopamine boosts like “likes.” Boomers reply to news stories on Facebook because they need to be heard. More than half my tweets, I recently realized, were me quoting some other tweet—a reaction rather than an original thought.
We have been trained to receive this information as well. We follow people on Twitter because we like what they have to say (or because we feel a professional obligation to do so). We seek out all the people dunking on the Twitter Main Character of the Day, or gawk at byzantine Facebook fights.
As social media gobbles the internet up, there are fewer and fewer places to go that do not involve interaction, or at the very least some random person revealing intensely personal information that you absolutely didn’t need to know. (This newsletter included.) Social media has presented us with the ultimate opportunity to bare not just ourselves, but all the intricacies of our relationships, even and especially ones formed online.
And none of it is any of our fucking business. None of it. The problem is that the entire internet has made it all seem like our business.
This was perhaps less of an issue in social media’s infancy. Your Facebook friends, after all, were your friends in real life; this was simply another way to communicate with them. But as Facebook metastasized, as we began to expand our social (media) circles on Twitter, as we welcomed more strangers into our feeds, onto our phones that we began looking at more and more, we slouched toward an online existence wherein we are deluged daily with shit that is none of our fucking business.
Other people’s business is all you see now—because social media has consumed our internet use—over and over and over again, and while you may at first be able to remain a casual observer, at some point most people’s brains will give in to the stimuli and go, “Well, guess this is our business.” The lives of people you would, in a social-media-less life, never have known existed will consume increasing amounts of your time and energy. You simply must comment on this thing, because, well, it’s been shoved into your eyeballs for the better part of a day, so it must require a response. I did not need to have an opinion on Bean Dad, but then everyone else did, and I kept seeing it, and then I saw people having opinions about having opinions about Bean Dad, and, well, suddenly it was a subject on which I found myself trying to formulate an opinion.
In the quantum froth of Twitter, beefs explode into being and just as suddenly cease, but the aftereffects ripple throughout the space, ejecting fragments of particles into circles where no one has any connection to the originators. Of course it’s none of your business, but a decade-plus of use has made this the place certain people—like me—get their news and talk to friends, so, well, it certainly feels like you should at least have an opinion about all this.
This is not a phenomenon limited to Twitter’s quantum realm. Millions of people watch YouTube drama channels, wherein the myriad baffling conflicts between YouTube creators is explained, and sides are taken. A few months ago I personally spent no fewer than 10 hours of my life figuring out and then becoming an authority on a person named Shane Dawson, whose existence I had barely been aware of because he is a YouTube person whose entire personality is Being a YouTube Person and that’s not usually something I am interested in.
This is all essentially gossip on a large scale. Everyone loves gossip! Especially when we are unable to do so in-person or attend in-person events that would result in the really good shit (my biggest regret about not being able to have a wedding reception).
Maybe that shouldn’t be the entirety of our internet experience, though. Maybe it’s time to re-train ourselves to reject all this shit that is none of our fucking business.