Do you remember 2019?
Reflecting on five years of a changed internet, reality, and worldview.
I’ve been having a rough month. I’m as prone to depressive thoughts and gray episodes as anyone else, but something about this particular month has me thinking about another, similar period of my life from five years ago.
In December 2019, I was miserable. I had been trying to work up the courage to leave my job for nearly a year. My boss had made dozens of passive-aggressive comments to me about how smart I was, and how promising I would be “if only [she] could polish [me] up.” The job was draining me — it took everything I had not to break down in tears most days, and I knew it was starting to leak out into my personal life. I couldn’t separate myself from it. It was the beginning of the 2020 presidential election cycle, and I couldn’t break away from it. Twitter was destroying my impulse control. I was overly conscious of how much time I spent with my friends — my boyfriend, now husband, and I had just moved in together that April and I really did not want to lose my social circle the way so many women do when they get serious about their boyfriends. I was tired of doomscrolling election news on Twitter and then switching to Instagram and feeling a pit in my stomach about not “living my life to the fullest,” whatever that means.
I don’t even think I’d heard of COVID yet.
Decembers are always for looking back on the year behind you. For me, it always starts with Spotify Wrapped dropping — it’s like a siren call for the kind of navel-gazing you can only do when it gets dark at 4 p.m. Decembers are for reflection in this culture we live in, and this year it feels impossible to look back while it is so terrifying to look ahead.
Before COVID was really on my radar, the thing that scared me most about 2020 was that it was the start of a new decade. I think maybe it was on Twitter that someone posted about this and once I read it, I couldn’t let it go. A new decade — a new election — the end of my twenties — there was a lot of possibility in the air. A lot of uncertainty.
And then COVID sucked up that fear like water and hit me with it like a tsunami about a year later.
Right now, I feel that feeling again. Immense fear and uncertainty — and no chance of it getting better.
I was recently listening to an episode of the podcast StraightioLab, which was recorded and released within the week after this year’s election. If you’re not familiar, StraightioLab is hosted by Sam Taggart and George Civeris, two gay men who interview guests in comedy and queer media about what is and isn’t straight culture. The guests pick a topic, like “Christopher Nolan” or “Clothing Rental Services,” and the three of them just go to town on why it’s a straight topic for 45 minutes to an hour.
It’s usually hilarious and incisive, but what I really appreciate about it is George and Sam’s ability to blow up even the smallest detail of something into a bit of discourse. It’s funny — the entire show is intentional about its irony — and it’s hyperbolic, but it’s not entirely serious all the time, and is also exactly what I do in my head with everything.
This specific episode was recorded around November 8 and dropped November 12, right after the election, so much of the cold open is Sam and George commiserating about the results and talking about what’s different about this election, this time, from the 2020 election. But they then bring in their guest, Tim Platt, who I wasn’t familiar with, and they have one exchange about 35 minutes in that really got me:
GEORGE: Something that is very concerning to me is that there is no major thinker that I am craving looking towards right now. It’s like, I just think in a different era there would be a writer who I would be excited about seeing what their big essay about it would be, or a public figure or a public intellectual that I would know, “alright, in a couple of weeks, their big thought, their big take on it is coming.” I feel like the lack of leadership within, let’s say, politics, is mirrored by a lack of leadership or a lack of moral and intellectual leadership outside of politics. Universities are, like, a husk — there are no academics that I trust — everyone on cable news and everyone that’s supposed to be commenting on the news is a complete hack. You start to see why there is this vacuum that’s been filled by people like Joe Rogan.
SAM: Yes, but this is why you need to be speaking, because that is a really good point, like, I haven’t considered this yet. And I fully agree that even in 2016, I’d be like, “ok, I want to read what this person is saying, I want to read what this person is saying, yes, this is incisive” and now I’m like, I don’t trust anyone because I know everyone is trying to sell a book, they only got that book because they had more Twitter followers, because they were more insane the two weeks after the election — it all is false, and because there is no quality control, it’s just who has the most numbers. And I don’t trust anyone.
TIM: This is a reason why I needed to get off these platforms now. And that needs to be my step one, and it’s because i’m impressionable, everyone who I followed during this time, I don’t want to hear from them because I feel really played. I think I developed a naive optimism about this that my experience and my knowledge tell me isn’t true, and I allowed a lot of internet talk to get me pushing in different directions, and [what you’re saying] is 100% true. Everyone who was checking to see what they were saying every moment of the election coming up, I was like, I don’t want to hear from them. I don’t care what they have to say. And I know what happens when I follow down that path — whatever answer I find is not going to be on those platforms, and I need to practice being away from them and practice what it means to engage without consuming. Cause I’ve been consuming since 2016 — I’ve been consuming obsessively since 2016.
GEORGE: Oh, there’s a pandemic of consumption. If there’s one thing we’re all doing, it’s consuming.
SAM: We cannot stop consuming. There used to be points in people’s lives when they weren’t consuming, like, back in the 1990s, and now we don’t have that.
Sam laughs at the end of his statement, and they transition to their next segment (which is literally talking about how acoustic covers of songs are straight — this podcast has everything).
This is not the first time George or Sam or this podcast has slipped into and out of a political discussion so seamlessly and also so poignantly, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. But what struck me about this in particular is that it’s the first time I felt my own feelings reflected so succinctly.
I do consume a lot of media, and I don’t have the kind of networks I imagine people used to have to discuss that media and what it means or what I thought about it. Most of the time I’m afraid I’ll annoy or alienate people with my perspective, which I know to be much further left than a lot of folks’ perspectives. My friends are usually in agreement, sure, but there is also so much fucking media to consume — I bet like, less than half of you have even heard of this podcast until now, and I’m sure that you listen to media I’ve never heard of either.
So, if we’re not listening to or reading the same things, and I actually want to enjoy my time with you instead of debating about media, how do we talk about what we read and listen to, especially in the news? How do we find or create space to discuss things like this — which came up in a single episode of a single podcast among millions! — without doing an extensive, exhaustive preamble before we get into the topic?
You can say, “you don’t do the preamble,” but I hate to agree with that. Another podcast I love, Maintenance Phase, has a recurring joke about how much context (and caveats) they need to give at the top of each episode in order to talk about the specific issues with health, weight, and fatphobia they discuss later. Sometimes I’m familiar with the context already, sometimes I lament that they have to have so many caveats because people online are more interested in pointing fingers than learning.
But by the end of each episode, I realize that without that context, I usually wouldn’t have understood the true harm and impact of weight stigmas, diets, weight loss drugs, and fitness culture on people with bigger bodies, even though I am someone living and moving through life with a bigger body. The context matters.
You can say, “you read multiple perspectives and discuss them.” The news media used to do this for us, but like Sam pointed out, there is no quality control there. I really believe Jeff Bezos’s refusal to let The Washington Post endorse Kamala Harris is evidence of the fact that quality control — which in this case looks at the morality of letting one person make a decision that impacts hundreds of millions of people — doesn’t exist. There is no one checking billionaires. There is no one checking Donald Trump. There is no one coming to save us because they’ve all been bought or are hamstrung by people with more money and power than they have.
This is true across MSNBC (the Morning Joe people were literally at Mar a Lago right after the election) and NBC (consider Matt Lauer’s entire run) and of course Fox News (need I say more about the Murdochs than has already been said?), but it’s also in the New York Times’s coverage about the genocide Israel is committing, how NPR uses as neutral and detached language as possible to discuss children being executed at gunpoint in Gaza, how CBS’s news anchors attacked Ta-Nehisi Coates on live television during an interview about his new book, The Message, which includes a section that details his personal experience in Israel (I haven’t read this yet, though I own it, so I’m going off of his own description here). This continues to be true as Patrick Soon-Shiong kills op-eds criticizing Trump and we slowly (but faster than I want to admit) lose the ability to speak freely about how we feel about this administration that promises to upend life as we know it.
In 2016, I was universally told to look to these “dissenting” newsrooms for information — the same papers we’re talking about now led their own PR campaigns looking for subscription revenue from panicked white people like me. They of course capitalized on our confusion and fear and then hired people like Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss and Yascha Mounk to play “both sides” games for eight years. They pretended like Richard Spencer and every other suited lookalike had really valuable, important, luminary things to say — when they were blatantly advocating for racial and ethnic cleansing and a return to “traditional” lifestyles.
If you were on Twitter in 2016, or at any point during Trump’s first presidency, you know there were many people who worked at those papers who disagreed with their work being printed alongside work from bad-faith pundits like this. There were many people — usually Black women and men — who called out these so-called journalists playing as Republican propaganda machines for what they were.
You can also say, “go on social media and chat with your friends!” But the internet is not the same internet. We are so far from the days when going on social media actually meant chatting with your friends.
In December 2019, I quit Twitter because even though I had built a cohort of academics, journalists, friends, and comedians whose opinions and insights helped me cope with the world as it changed, it wasn’t enough. These people knew what was happening — they spoke about how dangerous the rhetoric used in the Trump administration was, and how easily we could use social media to desensitize and radicalize people, and how racism had been eating away at our systems of care and infrastructure for years.
But they were not making meaningful change happen. They were being shouted down by lunatics. The worst people found their posts, shared them with even more of the worst people, and in some cases yelled people offline for good. And how could I blame them for leaving when just two years earlier, Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian faced death threats, swatting, and some of the first — and most terrifying — doxxing campaigns we’d seen yet all for simply existing as women?
I don’t think it’s an overstatement to acknowledge how important Twitter was to so many of us in terms of finding and holding space for each other. As the world got faster and our politics got worse, I think Twitter served as a stand-in for ye olde watering hole, the kind of place you could gather with your sweatpants on and have a good time. Do you remember how much people were traveling in 2019? What book tours and speaking tours and #conferencelife was like? US airlines saw 925.5 million passengers in the calendar year 2019, which was the highest total since 2003 and the creation of the TSA. That is so many people traveling!
But what’s interesting is that this year, we reached 104% of pre-2020 air traffic levels. We’re back to the unrelenting pace of 2019, except this time we have COVID and everything is worse.
We can talk about how the purchase of Twitter and all of these “dissenting” platforms by radicalized billionaires inverts their purpose and turns them into propaganda machines. We can talk about how so many people are just posting less, and we can realize that as millennials, we’ve literally been posting for most of our lives, so doesn’t it make sense that we’re tired of being perceived?
It occurs to me that a lot of the people who I followed and am talking about here are also millennials. People like Anne Helen Petersen, who I’ve linked to a lot, and Jia Tolentino, and Virginia Sole-Smith (I’m not totally sure she’s a millennial, but her birthday doesn’t seem to be online, and I love that for her). So if none of us are posting as much, it makes sense that my timelines are dead.
But the reasons for this, which are outlined in the Culture Study link above, mostly fall into one of three categories:
I’m tired of being perceived so much
I’m tired of being part of the constant hate machine that is social media right now
I’m tired of thinking about how to post “correctly” when I am being perceived so much, so I don’t post at all
All of the platforms we interact with are built to incentivize consumption. We consumed so much from 2016–2021 — according to the Circularity Gap Report, which studies sustainability practices in multiple industries, during those five years we consumed 75% of what was consumed in the entire 20th century. We did 100 years of shopping in FIVE.
And if that consumption statistic is even remotely correlated with our internet usage — which at least in my case, it is — we’ve probably consumed a lifetime of information in the last few years alone.
As Sam said in StraightioLab, we are always consuming and we never stop.
It feels weird to be starting a newsletter as I’m coming to this realization. Keeping up a weekly newsletter is basically me giving myself a mandate to consume as much as I can in order to either share it with you or give you my own take.
But really what I’m coming around to is that I miss having my own fucking thoughts. I miss having a feeling and knowing exactly why I feel that way — and not thinking about what some rando who doesn’t know me is going to say about it online. I miss not being on edge around everyone because I don’t know who is consistently masking (probably like 2 of you) and who respects trans people’s right to exist (I hope it’s all of you) and I don’t know who is going to tell me they think Elon Musk is great.
I miss not feeling like I have to read the entire internet before I make a decision or say something about how I feel. I miss having a space where all of my friends exist — because as many wonderful friends as I have, there are so few times a year when all of them are in the same place. With parents using social media, there are even fewer places I feel like I can share what I feel or think honestly, with my peers, than I’ve ever had before.
I have a lot to say on this topic, and a lot more to say about how the five years in between December 2019 and now have made me even more fearful of sharing my opinions and my lived experience with other people. I have even more to say about how, despite longing for that single writer or person who has the answer, I know there will come a day when they aren’t around or they change their mind or someone with money comes along and buys their silence, their capitulation. And I have yet more to say about the role social media plays in our own surveillance of each other. But December is for reflection, and I need that time to gather myself.
This will be my last post for the year. If you joined Sacred Rage this year, thank you so much. I’ve been thinking a lot about what to do with the money from the subscriptions I received and am making a plan for them I hope to share with you next month.
But I hope while I’m gone that you take some time to reflect as well — on what you want to do next year, how you spend your time online, and how you plan to make your life a little different.
I’ve been doing that work for five years. Now, there are the final five of this decade ahead of me. And while it isn’t easier, this work — of decolonizing, deconsumerizing — is still the only thing I know I’m fully able to do for myself. I wish that level of control and comfort for you, too.