A chance for happiness, p.20
Rejection, page 20
Oh and I just remembered one of my faves, @Probl_O_Matic. After I realized that the similarities between most callout posts make them easy to automate, I threw together an app where you could enter a username and @Probl_O_Matic would comb its timeline for slurs, likes of offensive tweets, follows of far-right accounts, etc., then generate a copypasta of the account’s top three gaffes, along with their profile picture. Whenever anyone said anything annoying, it took seconds to find some unfortunate rap lyric or solution to “the homeless problem” or opinion on a celebrity’s body. What’s nice is anyone who’s been online long enough always has dirt, every post is like talking to the police. And once people are onto you, dirt occasions more dirt, the whole place becomes a dragnet, every vestige of your past scrutinized with maximum cynicism, toward the goal of furnishing more proof of malevolence. I did this dozens of times a day, and never worried about getting things turned around on me, because to be canceled requires the two things I completely lack: identity and shame.
My only motive was fun, it was a hobby, not a crusade—efficacy-wise cancellation is a blunt instrument, and inadequate besides. (I say bring back the duel.) But how nice to find a form of revenge accessible by Wi-Fi. Some demagogue or dumbass leans a little too hard into their worldview, or relates some lapse in manners as a boastful anecdote, and out pops their legacy, an instant designation of global antagonist. The dogpile a ritual sacrifice, collective ills concentrated and purged in a single exemplary sinner. Like Gator Lady, like Bean Dad. Just the phrase himbo is ableist makes my nerve endings sparkle like Diwali. Happily, in the court of public opinion everyone is their own incompetent counsel—you happen to earnestly plead the case that raising the minimum wage incentivizes child labor, or indoor cat owners are the moral equivalents of Josef Fritzl, and you get torched. If you’re smart, you ragequit. But the best ones are those dauntless donuts and gormless corncobs yanking full force at their fingertraps, who triple-down and rearrange their whole belief systems around their stupidest opinions just to avoid publicly admitting they’re wrong, and by day’s end find themselves unemployed and divorced with 50,000 Blackpink stans skywriting their Social Security number.
Still even this wasn’t enough. All I was doing was spreading a fixed number of posts thinly across a handful of accounts, when I wanted to troll at scale, to dunk on Earth, be everywhere heard but not seen. Here, finally, is where I got my big idea. My mistake had been to assume the identity trap could only be avoided with obscurity, anonymity. White makeup, proper language, false virtues. But my whole life had given the lie to this. The co-op kids had been right after all: you can’t not identify. So since I couldn’t be no one, I would be everyone. Become context itself. I only needed more lives. Having long despaired of being understood, I became a misrepresentation maximalist.
The agenda was, first, to undermine confidence that anyone you interacted with online was real, and second, to so thoroughly debauch discourse by filling the place with freak behavior and godawful takes that nobody would ever again take its tenets seriously. Flood the zone with clones, make what was visible so manifest that nobody would assume anything was left underneath. In brief, the accelerationism of identity.
To properly uncontain my multitudes I had to scale up, so I gathered dead accounts. Because new accounts are easy to spot as fakes, I bought massive datasets of breached user info off the dark web and used them to commandeer accounts that were over three years old, had 100+ followers, and had been inactive for a year or more; this yielded something like 12K accounts. Then I spent about $15K buying followers for each account (~$5 per 8K followers) and had them follow each other in a complicated, hard-to-track way, until I had a combined total of something like ~8 million unique followers.
From there I assigned each account different niches—fitness, politics, gaming, grindset, parenting, various aesthetics—and bided my time for a few months, as I built out tools and methods to automate the management of my thousands of selves. When I was ready, I started generating posts with an LLM, each account seeded by popular accounts of the same niche, and posted on a regular schedule. This was easy because posts are so formulaic and aphoristic. You know, in video game design, what they call AI usually involves a measure of artificial stupidity—bots with perfect aim and reflexes are unbeatable, so game designers have to handicap them, and likewise the majority of my grunt work was roughing posts up to sound dumber. I set alerts to catch any post that went viral, at which point I’d intervene and try to steer things in the most toxic direction imaginable.
What’s hard about discussing anything on social media, beyond the embarrassment (but we’re way past that), is that no account of it is as exciting as watching it unfold in real time. The promise and suspense of new developments, and the riffs and goofs that tide you over as you wait, are lost in the retelling. Nonetheless I want to bring up an incident that gets at what I’m talking about, which is variously referred to as “Circlejerk Firing Squad” or “The Cancer.”
Some years ago, @LOVERS_TIF, a sub-1,000-follower account, posted:
timothee chalamet reach down my throat and pull out my guts challenge 💦
The post didn’t break through until two days later, when a larger verified account, @lemondroppe, an undergrad at UVA best known for long review threads of YA literature (and specifically the opinion that teenagers, not adults, should be in charge of publishing YA) quote-tweeted it:
this is disgusting. timothee is a child!! leave him out of your vile fantasies 🤬🤬 I s2g some of y’all can’t consume any media without sexualizing it and it shows 🤢
After this hit the mainstream, it was pointed out that Timothée Chalamet was 21 years old during the theatrical release of Call Me by Your Name. @lemondroppe argued that people were responding to the fictional 17-year-old character Elio he played in Guadagnino’s film, not the actor playing him, and that regardless of Chalamet’s legal age, many people expressing attraction for him were in their thirties, which made for a problematic age gap. Challenged further, @lemondroppe went all in:
likeeee even if it were the real life timothee, his features are VERY clearly minor-coded and openly expressing your attraction for him is mindblowingly weird and not even subtle?? we see u pedos 🧐
This take was widely circulated for about a day, and was largely dismissed as a case of Tumblr-addled moral panic, until another user, @PlatoFunFactory, discovered on @lemondroppe’s public Facebook feed—revealing in the process that @lemondroppe was not a college undergrad but a 35-year-old Russian-American woman working for the Forest Service in Tupelo, MS—this post from two years earlier, accompanying an image of Patrick Star from SpongeBob wearing fishnet tights:
ok but dommy mommy patrick star be honest u would
The ensuing debate was most people’s introduction to the discourse. First, people argued over whether SpongeBob canon had definitively established Patrick Star’s age as 13 or 38. Some contended that sexualizing a children’s cartoon character of any age was at least as bad as expressing lust for Timothée Chalamet. In her own defense—deflecting attention away from her imposture as a co-ed—@lemondroppe argued that she was expressing appreciation not of Patrick himself but of his high-heeled leather boots and fishnets, and that critiques of this appreciation were homophobic dogwhistles.
Months after this squall died down, it was revived by @Plato FunFactory, who had by then turned the denunciation of @lemondroppe into a full-time endeavor. In his research, @PlatoFunFactory had discovered that the Patrick Star post was actually plagiarized from a three-year-old post from a Black female user, @trina_everdeen, and he mounted a campaign against @lemondroppe for perpetuating the trend of white people poaching content from Black creatives. @lemondroppe and her defenders argued that if the tweet was stolen, then the original charge of sexualizing Patrick Star was moot, and that @PlatoFunFactory’s quick pivot to a new grievance was proof that his real agenda was to harass women off the internet; she corroborated this claim with his past tweets criticizing female-led reboots of beloved film franchises, adding further that he was singling her out for abuse because of her well-known advocacy for middle children. By this point @lemondroppe had found a good deal of success in routinely sharing @PlatoFunFactory’s obsessive replies, and many of her followers agreed that his fixation was dubious and excessive. Her criticisms often took for granted the race and gender of @PlatoFunFactory and his supporters (I do find it QWHITE interesting that all of the people defending this guy are white men 👀).
It was true that @PlatoFunFactory had a smaller, mostly male following that soon became equally dedicated to harassing @lemondroppe and speculating on her personal life and ulterior motives, playing on conspiratorial themes. One of @PlatoFun Factory’s dedicated partisans, @realcarsonVEVO, began pushing the unfounded narrative that @lemondroppe was operating a child trafficking ring, using her interest in YA literature and college-girl persona to groom minors, before posting her phone number, home address, and a Google Street View image of her house. This escalation drew the attention of digital media outlets, who ran email interviews with @lemondroppe about the nature of online harassment campaigns. One journalist, in his popular email newsletter about internet culture, tracked down evidence that seemed to suggest that @PlatoFunFactory and @realcarson VEVO were operated by the same person, after finding two accounts on Pornhub with the same usernames, who followed each other and no one else. (This revelation led to the incidental discovery that @PlatoFunFactory was an aficionado of giantess vore.)
At this boiling point, another user, @LENA_GUNDAM, stepped forward in a long tweet thread to announce that she was the ex-girlfriend of @PlatoFunFactory, whose identity she revealed as Chaz Yin, AKA Chumpa, a well-known Twitch streamer famous for delivering rambling lectures on Greek philosophy while smoking weed and playing Spelunky, concealing his face behind a plastic Bob’s Big Boy mask. In a long tweet thread, @LENA_GUNDAM disclosed a long history of domestic abuse, consisting of the usual domineering and threats of violence, control over her wardrobe and schedule, and, more unusually, forcing her to cook for him three times a day the same Taiwanese meals that his mother used to cook, plus the fact that he wore the Big Boy mask in bed. @PlatoFunFactory, @realcarsonVEVO, and Chumpa’s Twitch account went dark soon after.
Many expected that @lemondroppe would take a victory lap around her longtime harasser’s downfall, but her account remained silent for nearly a week, prompting some concern about her well-being, until she made a surprising return post with a series of Notes app screenshots, revealing that @LENA_GUNDAM was her childhood abuser; they had attended the same high school in Eau Claire, and @LENA_GUNDAM, whose name was Harmony Dench, had relentlessly bullied her for her Russian accent, and once stole her insulin from her locker out of pure malice, eventually forcing her to switch schools. @lemon droppe’s followers shifted the focus of their ire from @Plato FunFactory to @LENA_GUNDAM, mounting a campaign to get her fired from her HR job at a plastics distributor. A contingent of @lemondroppe’s followers accused @LENA_GUNDAM of being motivated by bigotry, which spun off into a notable sub-discourse about whether or not Russophobia constituted racism. While acknowledging that they did indeed attend the same high school, @LENA_GUNDAM retaliated not by denying the bullying, but by linking to a vast trove of crossover Cowboy Bebop fanfiction that @lemondroppe had written in her early twenties, and laid out with impressive levels of textual support how Spike Spiegel’s visits to other planets engaged heavily in white savior/noble savage tropes, leading to a tiresome relitigation of Spike’s ethnicity. Though @lemondroppe’s following diminished, she accused @LENA_GUNDAM of continuing her pattern of bullying; neither relented, and both accounts are still active. The incident, in part or in whole, is to this day frequently referenced as a metaphor for the fraudulence of online debates.
Now why am I rehashing years-old Twitter wank? Because, first and most importantly, lol. But also, I was behind the whole thing. I generated the profile pics, I made the Pornhub accounts, I wrote the fanfic, I hired the actor who streamed as Chumpa. I wrote many of the outrageous takes about the incidents, and I deleted many of them, and I screenshot and posted the deletions, since the easiest way to get people online to do your bidding for free is to make them think they’re forbidden to. And this was just a single op, lasting about four months; I usually had four or five going at once. Every post and account, all of it, me. Though the discourse it spawned, the recurrences of The Cancer, that was you.
I often wonder if this is what I want to do, sit inside year-round, devising notional people. Sometimes I’d see posts of people with their friends at sculpture parks or yuzu hot springs and start feeling like I’ve never taken the shrink wrap off my life, begin to ponder all the fun unhad and wind up feeling like a thought experiment—your P-Zombie, Swampman, Brain-in-a-Vat or what have you. But I knew it was stagecraft, that people’s lifestyle content was all propaganda for the outdoors, and out of pride if nothing else, I won’t be played. I moved to NYC after my mom died, and name one reason for me to go out on this stinking heat island, with its sheen of dick sweat and rat cum on every turnstile; its face slashers, sinkholes, squealing metal, chemical insults, local news, weather, and sports. Making my envelope of protoplasm wait in line to buy bagels, or drink icemelt from a scuffed glass at a bar, it all feels so static and vestigial. The internet is obviously better, in its lack of longueurs, the presiding democratic humiliation, everyone asquat behind peepholes and gloryholes.
You’re wondering, am I still at it? I stopped during COVID. The reason—well even before that, I’ve been experiencing the first vicious subtractions of age. Typing for 19 hours a day has turned my hands into clenched sacks of gravel, and when I make a fist it sounds like I’m crushing bubble wrap. My wrists are hot and bulging, my pinkies cold and numb. Too, the mental strain—my head feels like a lint trap, hot arid wind blowing through it all day until it clogs with a mat of gray dander. Oddly I’ve hit the point where I’m too depressed to scroll the internet, which is like being too hungry to eat. And it’s not as fun with everyone indoors; you see people there with completely unwounded brains and you know they’d never fully appreciate their harassment; what would they lose if they left? But what finally killed my vibe was the exodus to video. I’ve field-tested a method for deepfake content, but it’s slow and annoying, and more than that, it feels like the internet has betrayed me with its sudden bodily requirement, and with it a face, a race, a place.
Many of my bots are still active. If you were online at all between 2014 and 2019, you’ve absolutely dealt with one of them. Perhaps a Naruto avatar tankie telling you restaurants are reactionary. A gentleman named Piccolo Tha Pussygetta requesting a baby food jar’s worth of your boob sweat. A Totally Spies fan account threatening self-harm, vanishing, and then three months later reemerging with a petition to reboot Totally Spies. And the Trump election . . . sike, that wasn’t me. Just some klavern of dullards after mere propaganda, which is penny-ante next to cable news. But almost everyone else who’s so terrible you’d think they couldn’t be real is me.
Now you are wondering: If I cared about my privacy, if I really wanted to stay undetected, undepicted, unrepresented, why give up the game? Listen, some bright bored data scientist would have unraveled the whole thing eventually, and there would have been the usual scramble to uncover my identity and motives, YouTube deep dives, etc. It’s a special kind of frenzy when secrets leak; it’s less the content, more the form that generates intrigue. Sharing your diseased inner life is so common and incentivized that any information not willingly volunteered seems deliberately suppressed. Whereas if I confessed a mass murder the cycle would flip within a week. Another puritan holdover, I think: this forced admission, followed by cleansing denunciation. (But I would think that—I’m from Western Mass.)
Understand this is no confession. I never got the point of online apologies, this notion that you’re accountable to strangers who aren’t affected and maybe wouldn’t have even known of your offense, had you not apologized. I guess we feel responsible to the image of ourselves we’ve installed in other people’s heads. But real accountability requires a community. Online you can meet people, hang out, hook up, meet your soulmate, but it’s not a community. In a real community bonds are hard to dissolve and antagonisms must be sustained, there’s continuity, and unavoidable neighbors. The internet is millions of solitudes blinking in and out of existence, each dreaming the others, where “consensus reality” is less an agreed-upon reality than a reality made of agreement. With identity it’s the same—this idea that a checkbox on a form is a service tunnel to a stranger’s soul. People will always fall for it.
It’s a mistake to believe social media is all about hearts and thumbs, flames and eggplants. If everyone were only trying to be liked then it’d be kinder, and way more boring. But discourse is loneliness disguised as war. What people there really want is to be perceived on their own terms, which is so, so funny. Because if the grand promise of the internet was to be whoever you want, in reality it will make of you whatever it wants, and beneath every mask is another mask mistaken for a face.
I can’t explain why I believe that privacy is the mainspring of personhood, that the more you reveal the less there is to reveal. How the only way to pass through a hall of mirrors and know by the end which you is you is to obfuscate. Which is why what you’ve read isn’t canon. I did write a canonical account, but I only used it to seed a language model, generating 230 variations, each differing along some crucial axis of identity or biography. With these I flooded every deep and dark recess of the Web: Craigslist, Pastebin, Nextdoor, Imgur, open Facebook groups, product reviews, gaming forums, chat servers, local news comment sections, mailing lists. The only thing every version shares in common is this paragraph. Skimming over a few versions now, I see that in some my mother is dead, and I have a close and sustaining relationship with my father. Or they’re both alive, or both white. In some, Kant is a dashing but melancholic tech exec with a husband and son, or a neo-transcendental shaman who treats trauma with psychedelics, or dead. I am the doctor and mother my mom hoped I’d be, a proud Guatamalan Iranian, or Thai American, Irish Ghanaian, two-spirit, diabetic, tall, mentally normal, male, a novelist, a chef, a suicide. Craig is or isn’t my husband, having either matured into a sane adult capable of genuine empathy, or worn me down into the compliance I always feared was my destiny. None are any more or less factual than the one you are about to finish. All other tellings now redundant, I cannot be represented in any way I haven’t already represented myself (though my larger point of course is that everyone alive is a misrepresentation). In my apotheosis from human to spam, I’ve ensured that the facts—which do exist—are spread over billions of iterations and perfectly unverifiable. This is what’s been keeping me busy as I look for the next place to be no one.
