Social Media is Turning Out Exactly as I Anticipated: A Fucking Horrorshow
From the onset of adolescence until I went to college far away, I was a loser. And by “loser”, I mean the closest things to friends I had was a loose clique who would, without hesitation, sell me out socially the second it was convenient. Anyone else interacting with me either had utilitarian motivations or felt that no one important was watching. I’m not over this, nor will I ever be, even though it’s been over a decade.
My formative years were steeped in friendless loneliness and the viciousness young people so casually direct towards safe targets. Before I was sixteen, my primary mantra was “A friend is someone who hasn’t fucked you over yet.”
The individual experiences of a social pariah are familiar to almost everyone. Everyone’s been thrown under the bus by someone, maybe even a friend, who wanted to look good in front of others. Everyone’s been snubbed in public by someone who was quite amicable in more private situations. Everyone’s been ditched. Everyone’s been subjected at one time or another to the myriad insinuations, humiliations, and degradations inherent to social maneuvering. But at the absolute bottom of an invisible ladder, as a sole member of your own personal untouchable caste, these phenomena are ubiquitous, and the whole is a much different very beast from the sum of the parts.
Adjusting to inevitable public betrayal taxes the emotions, but acclimating mitigates the ego and frees up the mind for analysis. Possession of zero social capital also exposes you to less pretense in many ways; no one puts on airs to impress a bum, and no one talks trash for the benefit of a canine. The natural hierarchy hikes up its skirt and spreads its legs wide open, presenting to you an obscene scene only because it knows you’re not going to get any. Those insecure in their status are marked most reliably by a tendency to attack those at or below them for the benefit of others at or above them. The more relaxed individuals simply disregard those down enough rungs to possibly taint their own reputation. You learn quickly that anyone initiating contact under their caste very likely has an agenda; maybe they want to copy homework or fish for some gossip. Maybe they’re setting you up for embarrassment further down the line. Cynicism becomes a critical survival tool, and your instincts for detecting ulterior motivations are constantly tested.
The above may seem like a bitter rant of an angry misanthropist, whining pathetically about childish shit they should have shaken off years ago. The truth is, I don’t feel much of anything anymore. I’m not angry, bitter, sad, or regretful about my miserable school years. Subsequent life events thoroughly eroded what stunted capacity for emotion that survived high school. I’m damaged, and there’s nothing to be done about it; limbs do not regenerate.
But a single, solitary truth burns hot and bright throughout everything I’ve ever seen in my life: people are at their most vicious when other people are watching.
The patterns of a teenage hierarchy don’t just disappear once a diploma is issued; they simply mutate into more subtle forms. Instead of simply accepting social stratification ipso facto, rationalization is engaged to ease the ego. This could be racism, sexism, money, manners, success, intelligence, or anything that can justify a feeling of superiority. And the amplifying effects of audience persists uninhibited.
A social media presence is exactly the establishment of a personal brand, and image maintenance is central to the success of any brand. Smartphone saturation means there’s no excuse for not maintaining this public persona. Consequentially public relations is prioritized over private development, and we have a swelling population either unaware of or unable to differentiate a person’s online brand and the actual person. ”I tweet therefore I am.”
The inevitable ugly consequences of social media were gobsmackingly obvious to me long before your grandma fucked up registering a Facebook account. The few bright moments of my young social life were contingent upon transient separation from the larger group, reducing the pressures of hierarchy. I fail to see how these social oases, so critically important to my young self, can persist in a culture of smart phones and social media. An audience larger than ever looms prepared to reflexively judge a person’s tweets or even worse, a lack thereof. The hierarchy is ubiquitous and effectively endless; the insecure members mentioned previously don’t even have to meet their victims to steal on them.
The vision of an internet breaking down barriers and ushering in a new age of understanding seems laughably naive now, but it wasn’t all that uncommon when I was young. Now we know the instincts for hierarchical self-organization so painfully apparent in high school translates to the web without any material adjustments. They are, in fact, extended and amplified by social media, and the distance created by the indirectness does nothing but encourage the most cruel facets. The pressure to transcend the pettiness of youth is released; why bother to mature when the familiar high school society is alive and well on Facebook? Social validation is on tap, there’s no need for personal growth.
The essence of social stratification has remain unchanged, despite superficial adjustments. Take for instance the U.S. south, where historically white minorities in many communities commanded great power over black majorities though wealth and implicit support of the U.S white majority. Internationally whites are a minority, so the social media expression is for minorities in the U.S. to aggressively castigate whites with implicit support of the nonwhite worldwide majority. In both instances pseudoscience provides sufficient rationalizations: misunderstood and misused evolutionary principles in the former, and corruption of economic and sociological research in the latter.
The explosion of toxic internet feminism provides another stark example of majority/minority dynamics. They’ve aggressively proselytized a myth of systemic gendered oppression as well as a narrative of masculinity warped beyond toxic into criminally insane. The social bitch-slap so effective in high school works even better on the internet; an accusation of sexism, misogyny, rape can easily have ruinous implications on every level of a person’s life regardless of frivolity. Naturally these neo-evangelicals rationalize their uncompromising propaganda and character assassination by assertion of underdog status. Of course the success of internet feminism is secretly underpinned by the fact that not only do women compose a significant majority of social media users, but the status implicit to being female in high school translates effortlessly to the web. The silent majority of women who tacitly support these shame tactics occupy the same hierarchical position as the high schoolers who didn’t bother shitting downhill, but didn’t speak up for the crap-covered either. They’re the big winners of the whole thing; we know women win at social media, fuck the content Facebook primarily provides is images of chicks despite a larger female userbase. It’s the same human nature that precipitated acceptance of white supremacy in U.S. communities with blacks; life’s simply easier if you go with the flow, especially if the flow elevates you.
So now we have what could be one of the most spurious accusations of sexual assault ever made public. Max Temkin, co-creator of the game “Cards Against Humanity,” has been publicly accused of sexually assaulting a girl in his freshman year dorm. It is almost certain no evidence of this accusation exists, and that doesn’t matter in the slightest because the bell cannot be unrung. This accusation floated through social media circles to the aforementioned feminists, and will likely end up being noncommittally reported by various news outlets. This is the world the silent majority has created, a place where a woman can effectively maim the life of any man she’s ever met via social media without repercussions, without even leaving the house. Manufacturing false rumors to attack someone is a classic tactic of high school girls, and through social media it is now a political smart-bomb available to any adult woman with a grudge. The media won’t intervene: news outlets are barely scratching by as is, and the domination of social media by women makes them the most tempting market for online content.
Though I didn’t anticipate the rise of toxic feminism, I long ago anticipated the mobbing. But I never thought it would get this bad, nor that institutions of journalism would be desperate enough to legitimize it. Not enough people are willing to jeopardize their personal brand and speak out, but why should they? The two most likely cases are they’re a woman and derive power from this social dynamic, or they’re a man born addicted to vagina and unwilling to risk their connections.
I’ve never been happier for perspective earned from my youthful ostracization, and in retrospect the suffering was a fair price a learned eye. I just wish what I saw wasn’t so ugly, and that I didn’t see even uglier things just below the horizon.
Cool Mod: Nigga that was too long, though I did read it. Good read. BUT SERUIOUSLY NIGGA.