Newfag

thought digest, 09.09.2024

Happy Monday, Deetards.

YouTube just served me this song:

I’m now fondly remembering the days when Pete Doherty was my celebrity crush and I watched countless hours of Channel 4 documentaries. Amy Winehouse was still alive. The Libertines had already broken up, and he was now in BaByShaMbLes (read to self in a slurred, British accent). Doherty had just gone through a messy break-up with Kate Moss. London still seemed like a cool place to be. There was something alluring and punk rock about crack-cocaine and dirty fingernails. You just had to be there. Or had to be 13. It’s anybody’s guess.

The way the word “old” functions online. I’ve written about this before, but accusations of being “old” often serve as a coded way to say someone doesn't belong (and ultimately, an exhortation to leave), regardless of actual age.

I've been called “old” online since I was maybe 23. Really, ask one of my haters, and I’ve been somewhere between 35 and 40 for just shy of a decade. For women, it's also often wrapped up in sex appeal or lack thereof—even a failure to speak a particular visual language associated with how women “should” communicate online.

Sometimes these labels are necessary. In a literal sense, there are often people who are too old for the spaces they're in—policing them out is for safety. And figuratively, it can be a response to norm transgression.

What's interesting here is that where in the past the emphasis may have been put on newness as a flaw (e.g. newfag), now it's placed on a resistance to aging out of a space. But there is also an element of forced aging. There is an imagined adulthood that oldheads are “supposed” to retreat to: of touching grass and caring for their kids. And you can be banished to that farm upstate at any time.

Complementing this phenomenon is the creation of alternative digital histories, where people misremember or fabricate their online experiences or Internet histories.

Examples include:

• The insistence Tumblr history starts between 2014 and 2017

• Imagined participation in GamerGate when the original posters were no more than 9 or 10 years old — not impossible, but also not likely

• The erasure of communities from the early 2000s, or lack of acknowledgement that particular online stories began before their present platform

Vindictive. Vindicated. Vindicta. There's a piece of me that's been tempted—for years at this point!—to deliberately make myself crazy by following all the advice espoused on /r/vindicta. It's a fantasy I've had since 2019 at least, back when I was an “events person” and not an Internet culture blogger. 

I think it’s similar to the fantasy where you go to the doctor, and he says, "Oh, you have [DIAGNOSIS]," and then he gives you a pill and it fixes everything. Do you know what I mean?

If you've made it this far, and you're wondering, "What's /r/vindicta?", it's a looksmaxxing subreddit for “femcels,” back when femcel meant an ugly woman with no serious romantic prospects and not radfem, “female manipulator,” girlblogger, and whatever else it’s supposed to mean now. It was a place for progress, as opposed to acceptance: women who wanted to glow up and max out their “beauty stats” so they could lead more fulfilling lives. 

I would say that the whole premise is dysfunctional, but they’re just saying the quiet part out loud. Life is easier for more attractive people, the incels have a point on this one. And this was a space for women to be brutally honest about how they grappled with pretty privilege. 

Anyway, as the community grew, it evolved. 

What began as a place for women who self-identified as ugly, amid a renaissance of spaces online for women who felt ugly, alone, and often less-than-feminine, turned into a place for “7s” and “8s” who wanted to move up to a “9.”  To be clear, the quotes are there because I don't know if I would ever assign a random woman a numerical value; these are labels they assign themselves. 

Here’s how one Reddit user describes the change (emphasis mine):