I’m always thinking about this…
I often imagine Trads, those too-online pro-family and marriage advocates, as little league baseball coaches. Many of them have got this suburban, mini-van enthusiasm to them. You can easily imagine them on a field, clapping their hands, rallying the troops, shouting, “We’ll win this one!” But the game never starts.
I’m not the only one who’s noticed that a significant number of these Internet personalities are missing one vital thing: a family. But that’s the way it is online. Many of the most popular anti-feminists are unmarried cosmopolitans, hustling their way into a subscriber base that can pay their rent. So on and so forth.
The Internet is a dense forest of people advocating for and gatekeeping communities that they have no experience with.
Sometimes people criticize me for obsessing over authenticity. And they’re right to—what does authenticity mean? Who gets to decide who is and isn’t “authentic”? But still, there’s a disconnect between the way people present themselves and the way they are. The lesbian (not bisexual!) who dates men. The Black Lives Matter activist who claims to be black yet has two white parents. Rinse and repeat. The Trad influencer with no spouse or children. This tension is everywhere.
I wonder if this is part of why the social media age is so hung up on the axiom that you and you alone can tell your own story.
The sense that only you can speak for yourself is universal online. It’s not just a feature of ‘wokeness’ or ‘social justice warriors.’ Pay close attention and you’ll observe people of every political affiliation and identity trapped in the ouroboros of “look at me/don’t look at me,” “you can’t speak for or about me, but I deserve my credit,” and “you can’t talk about my experience.”
Is it really about being understood or is it about control? Maybe we subconsciously realize that if we’re looked at for long enough by a third party we’ll be discovered. The lesson of our moment seems to be “I’m entitled to be recognized as who I say I am.”
A lot has been written about trends that seem like they contradict this, that people want some all-seeing eye to come down from on high and tell them who they are. “Types of guys,” “the ____ girl,” the now decade-and-some-change-old “revival” of astrology.
I think that the gravitation towards labeling is at least partially because labels don’t emerge organically, through experience. Everybody wants a label, but nobody wants to be told what to do. The choice is always yours with labels: you’re not a tomato girl unless YOU say you’re a tomato girl. Nobody can tell you you’re not being a tomato girl correctly. There is no one way to be a tomato girl.
This is a fundamentally American impulse.
Isn’t that the beauty of the U.S.? That you can be whoever you want to be? Not just with respect to class, but everything: ethnicity, profession, whatever. The American dream is complete autonomy over who you are.
The U.S. fell short of this promise, but the instinct remains, regardless. You see it a lot with people’s heritages—you’re Italian, Irish, French, so long as you say you are. Rachel Dolezal always felt like an extreme version of something we encounter every day.
I think about this all the time. How different is the lesbian-who’s-not-really-a-lesbian from someone like Cher, or Liz Warren, claiming they have Native American heritage? You are who you say you are. You are what you have an affinity towards.
The Internet amplifies this impulse ten-fold. The Internet is America. When early commentators referred to the internet as a social laboratory, of course, that’s what they meant.
Here, you’re free to be whoever you’d like to be.
It's mostly about, if not only, control. perceive me/dont perceive me - every user chasing to develop lore that shouldn't exist, to envelope then emerge from. Desperation lurking of every kind. All impotent, yet deeply inclined to solidify an online legacy whichever way they can to rectify whatever delirious disenchantment they suffer from. Americanos have already priced in and cashed out as much of genuine personhood the world wants to offer now that velocity of identity creation has been fully tokenized & marketable. But behind this reality and pseudo-reality looks really like ersatz countercultures. As someone that feels its futile to be understood met by belittlement, there's only so much one could prove before crossing some fine line that made it authentic to begin with. Not much in what I say, but to hop online and let your nuts hang the way it should is authentic as it can get. Fraud is fraud at the end of the day. I like your sentiment, and overall the "The internet is America" because it sounds true to the nature American tactics along with its monstrous identity swamp of neverending reinventive fantasy culture it drowns in. While the ancient crafted fabled deities enforcers, America crafts accounts of online personalities to cement its pneumatic authority. There's also the historical truth that the internet is a byproduct of American ambitions. Perhaps the internet is just an extreme form of cultural immigration. Its all spiritual, and haram.
The internet isn’t forcing your autonomous identity on others, it’s waiting for people to acknowledge that identity you want to be identified as. As these identities get more and more niche, this becomes nigh impossible --what does average Joe facebook know about tumblr tomato girls? That would require telepathy. It would be great if it could really connect minds in a manner that doesn’t accelerate confirmation bias, but that cultural machinery isn’t built in yet.
If anything it’s a bunch of support groups affirming their own neurosis. Theres nothing americana love more than being allowed to do something; permitted the right to complain under some boardgame rule amendment. That’s why cults are so American, the Book of Mormon was the original alternate reality game. The California ideology is the internet’s founding doctrine. It’s a filter not a megaphone, a bunch of intentional nudist communities, not a sports arena or conference center. Every slot in a server farm is a social Petri dish, and any lab leaks are traceable to their cultural roots, mutating beyond recognition a la Covid.
“In the United States, as soon as several inhabitants have taken an opinion or an idea they wish to promote in society, they seek each other out and unite together once they have made contact. From that moment, they are no longer isolated but have become a power seen from afar whose activities serve as an example and whose words are heeded" (Tocqueville 1840, 599).