OR IT DIDN’T HAPPEN: thoughts on the digital space
Imagine explaining the concept of celebrity to a visitor from another planet.
We basically vote (through money & attention) to elect a group of individuals to glorify, care about, and serve as proxies for our problems. We feed into entertainment industries that serve as middlemen, vetting these proxies for us. They decide who is most likely to be relatable — and aspirational — to the greatest amount of people.
We (plebeians) rely on this vetted artist class of celebrities to create the content that fills gaps in our time, cheers us up, and distracts us momentarily from reality.
Now enter the smartphone. Personal devices initially conceived as communication tools allow for the (potential) democratization of this entertainment infrastructure. Platforms like Tik Tok break open the old pathways people connect themselves with content, through a trick as simple as making the default option seeing content from people you don’t follow.
But at the same time as they created the possibility for changing entertainment structures, smartphones and social media introduced the expectation (for young people) to be both the entertained and the entertainers.
One could counter that what we are seeing is positive — the democratization of fame, as Andy Warhol predicted. But more perniciously, we are all becoming algorithm junkies, goaded into exposing our personal data and sexualizing ourselves for a hit, hypnotized by systems designed to exploit us for profit.
Young adults and teens, from the tail-end of millennials to Gen Z, know no different. We feel and re-enforce the expectation to record, curate, and fabricate our lives digitally, as if we have chips implanted in our brains asking us the question, “does it really happen if there’s no digital record?” Does a tree fall in the forest if no one is there to capture it on a smartphone? In early 2000-teens speak, pics or it didn’t happen.
The introduction of this split between the digital and physical world was hardwired into our brains during adolescence. The moments that should have belonged to us only were always secondary to the copies we made for circulation online. This was the landscape of my growing up. I knew something was afoot — that everyone I knew was splitting- but I didn’t have the stability to process it nor the words to explain it.
Now, the process is almost complete. We all live two lives, a virtual and a real: We give two sets of birthday gifts, have two addresses, two personalities, two kinds of social interactions, and even have two modes of sex.
I’ve learned that authenticity in this world is futile, because it is impossible to precisely map one’s digital existence to one’s physicality. Digital existence is the closest we have to art: it is our town square and also the cultural product of our time and lives.
Authenticity is furthered warped by social media through the expansion of what are essentially rewards programs for “popular” creators. When services like Twitter and Instagram introduced the “blue check,” called “verification,” it allowed users to identify celebrities’ “real” accounts — and simultaneously created a dangerous incentive for everyone to become “verified.”
The danger is already present linguistically. The latin prefix veri-, refers to the real or true. To have the check is to be real, to be true. Blue check or you didn’t happen.
But 2020 breaks all molds.
The Pandemic foreclosed the possibility of congregating in real space, forcing everyone into digital space. The Movement for Black Lives injected reality into digital space. Black people, historically and systemically denied guarantees of bodily safety and equal prospects in life, invaded social media, and no one could look away. During the beginning phases of M4BL post George Floyd, the guardians of the algorithms rushed to re-brand, promoting Black creators and mutual aid funds with feverish urgency. Organizations and magazines that have long cloaked institutional racism and classism under layers of irony rushed to assure viewers digitally that they care.
The next 50 years, hopefully, will be taken up with the radical reconstitution of our collective consciousness (as Americans): reflecting real history in education, changing government, restricting the power of monopoly and oligarchy, re-apportioning resources to marginalized people and communities, redefining what it means to be American.
But then we need to address our digital lives. Because they’ve become real. Because my back hurts from sitting at this desk, because I didn’t aspire in life to the inevitable eye problems caused by blue light. Because no one, no child, should aspire to little blue checks. Because sometimes I forget to eat and drink watching Tik Tok for five hours in my bed, and then I get up and feel as though, if I don’t make my own video, if I don’t contribute, I am worthless. And I know I’m not alone.
