the cruel optimism of the phone

digital misery and desperation for a flourishing online life

i love posting. it’s one of the digital life’s biggest pleasures for a guy with a lot to say. posting has a casual urgency to it; you can’t wait to tell your friends later, but you realize what you have to say might not be that important, so you resort to posting, in the hopes that they’ll see it on their own time. you also never know who will resonate with your post, who your post will spark a connection with, which of your online friends will see it, cackle, and maybe engage with it, sparking a connection that might even evolve to bestie. 

i sometimes post as a form of release, to jot things down in writing or image so that the central idea exists in a place other than my head. i also post to entertain: i found this funny, you might too. some post to inform, of accomplishments or issues or events surrounding accomplishments or issues. posting, when it comes from the heart, can be a beautiful thing. 

within your phone is a world of possibility. in the before times, if your older brother’s friend fed you misinformation in passing, you had no way to correct him if you didn’t have a computer handy. there were few ways to meet other people with your crackpot niche interests if you didn’t live in a large city. the phone exposed you to worlds of information and people you would never come across if you only dealt with the world in front of you.

this is the fantasy of the phone, the mobile device at peak performance in an imagined world where money was secondary and a non-factor in one’s overall happiness. in a reality where our attention can be monetized, however, the phone seizes our time, and collects as much data as possible to package and sell off to companies that are desperate to figure out what we’re willing to spend money on. i’ve known this for a while, and have persevered in cultivating a digital life by continuing to post against the odds, but i’m worn down. the phone makes me miserable these days, and i think it’s making you miserable too.

i wonder if i was too young to appreciate the golden age of the internet, if there ever was such a thing. the perfect medium of forums, blogs, full anime episodes on youtube, when information truly felt free. maybe it felt liberating because i was young and had time to throw around on miniclip dot com, but the internet was a site of joy, a window into an entire world for someone who had no money and couldn’t leave the house whenever he wanted. theoretically, the phone should’ve optimized this experience, because i now had access to this world whenever i wanted. information felt quick and easy. now it feels like information is cheap. the labor of discovery is nonexistent in the age of streaming and constant flow of knowledge. it’s made us lazy to the point that we won’t even listen to an album if it’s not on spotify, even if it exists on youtube in its entirety. why open up a book when you can go on wikipedia and check the references cited in your article of interest? why take the time to discover who you are and build up an identity when whole personalities can be fed to you via algorithm? we glom onto communities and aesthetics with no real connection to them because they are so easy to cultivate now. instruction manuals on how to be a cinephile or a music head or an office siren or a leftist exist en masse, and if we parrot the right points, wear the right clothes, fake it until we make it, we will actually become a part of the thing we aspire to. the ease with which we can cultivate personalities results in a lack of commitment, which means we can drop them just as easily as we adopt them, cycling through trends at warp speed.

in a world in which we are beholden to our phones, there is more of us available than ever before to be collected and analyzed. because of this, the internet is beginning to feel less emancipatory as it continues to extract from us. what good is all this information if we’re only being fed what we think we want by the algorithm? finding things has become harder than ever, with SEO bringing bullshit to the top of my google searches. twitter and instagram, the places where i spend a majority of my time, are beginning to feel especially miserable. for every tweet that makes me cackle, there are ten full of vitriol that reek of a desperation to prove one’s superiority towards the uneducated — in other words, a dunk-fest. Pseudonymous blogger ock sportello eloquently captures how this has affected the sector of twitter that is either part of the media class, adjacent to the media class, or desperate to be a part of the media class by staying up to date on its happenings, but it feels like I see this mentality everywhere online. everyone has to chime in on everything, and no one can shut the fuck up. what do we achieve by collectively shaming a woman’s essay in the cut? does taking dating discourse seriously bring you joy? if so, then it’s worth re-examining your own relationship to engagement-bait. 

instagram dabbles in a different form of solipsism that makes me feel just as bad. for a long while now, it has been a place designed to sell us aspirational lifestyles, usually from your own friends.  pictures are curated, thrown through a million filters, and perfectly captioned to the style of the times. years ago, it was hashtags and drake lyrics, now there are often none, or simply the word “lately” with a dump of photos. instagram convinced us to participate in influencer culture, because it made us believe we too were influencers to those who followed us. thus, everyone has an aspirational lifestyle to sell. even the friend who shitposts photos of trash on the street is trying to convince you of the quirkiness of the machinations of their mind. online influencer culture is probably as old as instagram itself, but something has obviously shifted with how we experience the app these days. we see less of our friends’ posts and more random shit that instagram thinks we might like. oftentimes, when it’s not straight up pornography, the content is sanitized, inoffensive, replete with hashtags advertising partnerships and motivational lifestyles. people who dress too well and look too hot in tropical and urban paradise. their posts show me a version of new york that is void of rats and full of well-off young people out to brunch. what makes me sick is i’m starting to believe this is the only way to live in this city. i could go on, about how the city is starting to exist to be documented on instagram, and how the desperation to exist online infects how we experience the real world and how business advertise themselves, but maybe i’ll do that another day. for now, just know that the optimism and perfection sold to us online is making us feel worse about ourselves. 

****

i can’t tell if we’re all losing our minds or if the people are onto something. For several months now, many of us stateside have been posting on social media to spread awareness about the ongoing genocide of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli government. when we’re not taking to the streets, we’re sharing as much information as we can, about assaults on hospitals, protests in our city, and infographics that reveal the long history of violence that Palestinians have suffered for decades. there’s a barrage of information attacking our feeds, because there is so much violence to comprehend, against anyone in the world who challenges the Western-backed colonial project. posting feels within our power, a tool we can use to spread and consume relevant information. however, many of us are suspicious of the American social media apparatus and its intentions. we fear that our posts are being censored if we use certain buzzwords or hashtags, that if we post too much about Palestine we will get shadowbanned from instagram, so no one will see our posts anymore. often, people will slot in a post of their face between their stories depicting the violence in places like Rafah or Al-Shifa or Columbia because they believe that posting your face on instagram increases people’s engagement with your content. As far as I can tell, all of the evidence of this is anecdotal, from people who believe this has happened to them (please correct me if I’m wrong). regardless, “face for engagement” dabbles in a paranoia, justified or not, that our digital overlords are betraying the principles of free speech they claimed to ascribe to. it pushes forth the idea that they are in cahoots with the US government, suppressing information that could endanger the empire, and they’re using social media’s hold on us as a sedative, while we try our best to use it as a tool for revolution. i have no idea if big tech is actually doing this. my feed is still a dissonant mix of vacationers in Hawaii mixed with videos of protestors being kettled. maybe yours isn’t. the paranoia surrounding our censorship reminds me of the summer of 2020, when some New York residents believed that fireworks were being smuggled into and set off in neighborhoods at night to drive protestors crazy to weaken the demonstrations in a sort of modern day COINTELPRO. in hindsight, it sounds a bit nuts, but can you blame anyone for thinking so then and now? The government has done crazier things to quash dissent. 

as I type this, I can feel my brain rot from screen time, and yet unplugging feels privileged. i could get a dumbphone and be rid of all this and have my worldview only consist of what is in front of me. but what about the lebron james screaming memes, the revelation that a former acquaintance is now married, the signal groups for jail support? there has to be something enlightening about possessing a digital consciousness and witnessing those of others. you might realize that that co-worker whose vibes seem off has all the same beliefs that you do. there has to be hope that a digital life is worthwhile, that it hasn’t been completely squeezed dry for capital. i want to believe being online is not a net negative, but maybe that’s my addiction talking.