I knew, even as I was moving through them, that I would look back on my late twenties as a period when I was lucky to live in one of the most beautiful cities in the country, unburdened by debt, untethered from a workplace, obligated to zero dependents, in love, freer and healthier and with more potential than ever before and anytime thereafter—and spent almost all my waking hours with my neck bent at an unnatural angle, staring into a computer. And I knew, even then, that I would regret it.
I had reached the promised land for millennial knowledge work. I was making eighty, ninety, then a hundred thousand dollars a year doing a job that only existed for, and on, the internet. Mostly, I wrote emails for a living. Mostly, I worked from home. The job asked so little of me, I might have forgotten I had it—except for the fact that it required me to be online.
Some days, clocking in to work was like entering a tunnel. I would drop a waving-hand emoji into the team chat room, answer a round of customer tickets, read email, process a few copyright takedowns, and skim the internal message boards: work-anniversary posts written by colleagues to thank their bosses and commemorate themselves (humbled and grateful to learn and grow); product-release notes (proud to ship our team’s newest feature); baby announcements formatted as product-release notes (proud to ship our team’s newest feature). In the chat software, I moved from channel to channel, reading information and banter that had accumulated overnight in other time zones. After repeating this cycle, I would open a new browser window and begin the day’s true work: toggling between tabs.
The browser was sick with user-generated opinions and misinformation. I was in a million places at once. My mind pooled with strangers’ ideas, each joke or observation or damning polemic as distracting and ephemeral as the next.
It wasn’t just me. Everyone I knew was stuck in a feedback loop with themselves. Technology companies stood by, ready to become everyone’s library, memory, personality. I read whatever the other nodes in my social networks were reading. I listened to whatever music the algorithm told me to. Wherever I traveled on the internet, I saw my own data reflected back at me: if a jade face-roller stalked me from news site to news site, I was reminded of my red skin and passive vanity. If the personalized playlists were full of sad singer-songwriters, I could only blame myself for getting the algorithm depressed.
My New York friends were hanging out without me, the algorithms showed, and people I’d never met were hanging out without me, too. Everyone was working on their personal mythologies. B-list actors and celebrity fitness instructors were getting centered in Iceland. Beautiful women in wide-legged canvas pants were doing beautiful things: making candy and throwing pots, wallpapering apartments with hand-painted patterns, drizzling yogurt over everything, eating breakfast salads. The algorithm told me what my aesthetic was: the same as everyone else I knew.
The platforms, designed to accommodate and harvest infinite data, inspired an infinite scroll. They encouraged a cultural impulse to fill all spare time with someone else’s thoughts. The internet was a collective howl, an outlet for everyone to prove that they mattered. The full spectrum of human emotion infused social platforms. Grief, joy, anxiety, mundanity flowed. People were saying nothing, and saying it all the time. Strangers swapped confidences with other strangers in return for unaccredited psychological advice. They shared stories of private infidelities and public incontinence; photos of their bedroom interiors; photos, faded and cherished, of long-dead family members; photos of their miscarriages. People were giving themselves away at every opportunity.
Information and temporality collided. Amber alerts hovered above neighborhood notices about package theft and raccoons in the recycling. Animated GIFs of nineties rappers slid above ASMR videos; corporate recognitions of terrorist attacks and school shootings were smashed between in-depth discussions of reality television and viral recipes for chicken thighs. Accounts representing national organizations defending civil liberties campaigned for human-rights issues on top of indie musicians vying for sponsorship from anthropomorphized denim brands. Everything was simultaneously happening in real time and preserved for posterity, in perpetuity.
Often, I would catch myself examining a stranger’s acai bowl; or watching frantic videos of abdominal routines that I lacked the core muscles to imitate; or zooming in on a photograph of a wine cellar in Aspen; or watching an aerial video of hands assembling a tiny, intricate bowl of udon noodle soup, and wonder what I was doing with myself. My brain had become a trash vortex, representations upon representations. Then again, I hadn’t known what a wine cellar was supposed to look like.
I careened across the internet like a drunk, tabbing: small-space decoration ideas; author interviews; videos of cake frosting; Renaissance paintings with feminist captions. Cats eating lemons. Ducks eating peas. Rube Goldberg machines, Soul Train episodes, 1970s tennis matches, Borscht Belt comedy. Stadium concerts from before I was born. Marriage proposals and post-deployment reunions and gender reveals: moments of bracing intimacy between people I did not know, and never would.
A stranger in the heartland held a tabby cat up to her bathroom mirror. The tabby sagged. “Say hi,” the woman said.
“Hi,” said the cat.
A stranger danced on a stripper pole with a baby riding her calf.
A stranger’s disembodied hands slowly shaved soap.
A stranger got married in a castle in Nice.
A stranger did a set of kettlebell swings using a woman as a weight, while a dog licked itself on the couch.
I searched for answers, excuses, context, conclusions: Define: technocracy. California ideology. Jeffersonian democracy. Electronic agora. Ebola. State slogans. New dark mole. Tanuki. Feminist porn. Feminist porn not annoying. What is canned ham? How old too old law school? Best law schools. Law schools rolling admissions. Islamic State. Silk pajamas. Elbow moisturizer. Unshrink wool sweater. What is mukbang. Define: pathos. Define: superstructure. “Jobless recovery.” White noise Arctic ice cracking. Cuba tourism. How to massage your own shoulder. Text neck. Vitamin D deficiency. Homemade silverfish trap. Rent calculator. The Big One when. Hypnosis nail biting. Hong Kong protests. Dishwasher video inside. Ferguson indictment. Satellite images of my parents’ childhood homes. The names of my ex-boyfriends’ bands. The time I could expect the sun to set that evening.
I found myself watching videos of antiwar protests from the sixties; videos of antiwar protests I had marched in as a teen. Videos detailing conspiracy theories about a missing commercial plane. Videos I wouldn’t even know to search for: The rain forest hermit who stepped out of the wild. Twins get mystifying DNA results. Baby gender reveal!! (Dance). Funniest unboxing fails and hilarious moments 3. Geek wizardry magic trick. My Son Was a School Shooter: This is My Story. How to Do a Body Slam.
Sometimes I would worry about my internet habits and force myself away from the computer, to read a magazine or a book. Contemporary literature offered no respite: I would find prose cluttered with data points, tenuous historical connections, detail so finely tuned it could only have been extracted from a feverish night of search-engine queries. Aphorisms were in; authors were wired. I would pick up books that had been heavily documented on social media, only to find that the books themselves had a curatorial affect: beautiful descriptions of little substance, arranged in elegant vignettes—gestural text, the equivalent of a rumpled linen bedsheet or a bunch of dahlias placed just so.
Oh, I would think, turning the page. This author is addicted to the internet, too.
Just me and my id, hanging out, clicking.
Customer ticket after customer ticket: like swatting flies.
I refreshed the newspaper. I refreshed social media. I refreshed the heavily moderated message board. I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled.
In any case. Time passed, inevitably and unmemorably, in this manner.