I'm Judging You (26 page)

The Internet cannot replace real life friends who we can call, see (or Skype), and touch. We can start friendships online, but they also need to be accessible if any of our social platforms are shut down. We need to have the phone numbers of those we have learned to love through social media, because if our relationship might end due to a suspended account, how tangible is it?

Real Gs gotta move in silence like gnomes. Tell friends, not Facebook! Use GChat, not Twitter. Go to your therapist, not In-stagram.

 

PART

IV

Fame

We're living in a time where fame seems more accessible than ever before. But one viral video does not make you famous, and neither does having hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. Unfortunately, some of us are reveling in megalomania because of these fleeting things. It's all tinsel: shiny, with nothing substantive behind it
.

What do you want to get famous for doing? If the goal is strictly fame without real impact, what's the point?

They say money and fame just makes you more of who you already are. It brings out the youest of yous. Some folks were already smug nuisances. Now just more people know about them
.

I am judging us for being fame obsessed. Our pathological narcissism and dehydration for prominence leads us to do some shady and desperate things. All for what? Fame is expensive, and many of us cannot afford it. We should probably not take ourselves so seriously while we're at it. And with visibility comes power and scrutiny and obligations. You can't have fame's perks without its pains
.

 

20. About Microwave Fame

The old adage of “All the world's a stage” has never been truer than it is now. Social media has given everyone a voice that they didn't know they wanted or needed and an audience. It's like an ePulpit, where everyone can give a sermon because everyone now has an eMicrophone. “Is this thing on?” Yes. 24/7/365.

Fame has been democratized, and no longer does it mean someone is extraordinarily gifted or talented. Now, it could just mean someone comes up with the right video to post online at the right time. Our fifteen minutes of fame can now be achieved in fifteen seconds with one video that takes off because of foolishness. It could mean you decided to have sex with a celebrity on tape, even though you're technically not a porn star. It could mean you beat your classmate to a pulp while a crowd surrounded you (WORLDSTAR!). Part of what frightens me about being a part of a world where Microwave Fame is a thing and now a goal to add to a vision board is how cheap fame has become.

Actually, that isn't fame: it's infamy. Infamy is rampant and readily accessible, and it is frightening the lengths people will go to rise to levels of notoriety not previously possible. It's positive reinforcement of trifling shit, because what rises to the top is no longer the cream, but the cat hair and dust bunnies that have gotten into the churn. Our Brita filter is hella broken, and I'm not even sure how to fix it.

We're living in a viral culture, and everyone has the fame flu. Folks are so thirsty to be known for anything that I just want to offer them a bottle of Gatorade and a seat. They are parched, and the things people will do to become a big deal on the Internet boggle my mind. The levels folks will go to just for page views leave me floored.

A man created a video to surprise his wife with her own positive pregnancy test. Read that again. Some lady's husband decided to secretly test his wife's urine to see if she was pregnant, and then he created a video about it and uploaded it to the Internet for strangers to see. We have reached peak attention whoredom. You're probably wondering how he pulled it off. Well, his wife usually pees during the night, and she doesn't flush so the sound won't wake up their young child. She mentioned to him that her period was two weeks late, so he decided to sneak into the bathroom after one of her midnight pee sessions. He records himself as he dips a pregnancy test into the toilet. A couple of minutes later, it confirms what he (and she) suspected. The next morning, as she's cooking breakfast for their kids, he walks up and shoves this test in her face, saying, “YOU'RE PREGNANT.” She hams it up for the camera in possibly faux surprise, and then addresses the camera, because clearly they have an audience she's ready for. The video went nuts on the interwebs, and then, two days later, they posted another video saying she had a miscarriage. That is when people decided to get science involved, and their research revealed that there is only a tiny chance that pee diluted by so much toilet water can give an accurate pregnancy test result. Long story long, we all realized that it was a sham. It was all fake.

Those summagoats were lying through their teeth, and I wondered who in the hell left the desperation gates open? How much wrongness can you count in that debacle? The lengths they went to get attention, the intimate thing they were sharing, the fact that in the end, it was all fiction. I am judging us so hard for letting our dehydration for affirmation drive us to foolishness.

People are programmed to want validation and support. Even the most fuck-deficient, don't-give-a-damb person amongst us has someone in their lives whose approval they crave. We all want to be loved and liked. Hell, all living things seem to need validation. One of my favorite quotes is from my favorite book and movie,
The Color Purple
: “Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to get attention we do, except walk?” We all want love, but what ends will we go to get it? The things we are stooping to now to get likes are low-hanging fruit, and it's a shame.

The Internet has normalized a culture of dishonesty. The means (lying and stealing) to justify an end (validation and fame) are becoming cheaper by the day. Not only are people falsifying events in their lives but they're stealing from others to do it. On social media, we create and demonstrate who we are in spurts—status messages, videos here and there, photos. People want to be known as the smartest, the funniest, the richest, and the most interesting. So what are we doing? Instead of actually working to become all of these things, folks would rather take the shortcut of stealing from those who might already be these superlatives. Broke? Why not take a screenshot of the Louis Vuitton luggage set you saw on Instagram and post it as if it were yours? Wanna be known as a leading humorist? Steal people's jokes on Twitter, and pilfer memes and post them like it's your own material. Need to grow the popularity of your Facebook page? Download hilarious videos from YouTube and upload them to your page, giving no credit to the person who created them, and essentially take money out their pockets.

It grinds my gears so damb much. As a creative and a fan of authentic beings, I am disgusted by it. The same way you shouldn't go into a store to steal candy, you should not steal the work of others. However, the Internet's game of Telephone has made it easier than ever to be an idea thief. And I wish I could say cheaters never prosper, but people are being rewarded for their fraudulence. Some folks have built lucrative careers and fame on the Internet by regurgitating other people's content. The message it sends is to do as little original work as possible but be the loudest and you will probably win. It makes me ragey.

Everything is so forged. Some people call themselves “Internet personalities,” and I nod my head because it's accurate. They have created personalities for themselves just for the Internet, and who they are offline is completely different. It's fascinating to watch someone on social media and know them in real life and wonder how they're going so far out of their way to be phony. I wonder why they don't feel disingenuous presenting themselves in such a fake way. Aren't you tired of having to be yourself AND somebody else? Isn't that too much work? I am lazy and I can't do it. I can only be one person, because being two requires extra thought, and I'm not a light switch. I can't be “on.”

By design, social media is performative. We create the lives we want to live online, curating our days with selective posts about whatever we want to share. We can paint whatever picture we wish by posting the shiny parts of us and leaving the dingy out. My last five pictures might be of me at nice events, but if I haven't posted anything that shows the hefty bags under my eyes, you see all the glamour without the struggle. That lie by omission is common, and even acceptable, because even though it is an airbrushed version of reality, at least it's grounded in reality. We are all lying on some level by not painting complete pictures of our lives, but there are layers to this phenomenon.

When we start lying about our experiences by creating brand new ones out of thin air with Photoshop and Google Images, that is when I will judge us for our pathological need for approval.

A Facebook friend of mine posted a picture of her hotel balcony while she was on vacation, and people commented on how beautiful it was. She reveled in the attention until someone called her out and said that the picture she posted was actually from Google Images. I don't know what prompted them to search for her picture, but they did, and sure enough, it's the default picture that comes up for the resort she said she was vacationing at. Come to find out, some of her past vacation pics were also pulled off the Internet. She was sitting at home, going on fake vacations to impress people who will never set foot in her house. She was Photoshopping herself into pictures in front of monuments, posting them unironically and telling fake stories about what it was like to be in front of Stonehenge. I was at home in my ratty pajamas rolling my eyes so hard that I needed eyedrops to dislodge them from the back of my head. Jesus be a fence and some real-life feel-good for her so she won't feel so reliant on likes. There are a lot more screenwriters out there who aren't even trying to work in Hollywood. They're just using Facebook to create stories, bless their hearts.

We ain't gotta lie to kick it, or to get people to double-tap our pictures. As social media permeates our world, everyone is now in some unofficial competition to live the most interesting life in their online circle. When keeping up with the Joneses becomes a life mantra, you know we are doing too much. We constantly compare ourselves with our friends, followers, and fans. But there is no blue ribbon for “most interesting life,” so what are we competing for? We are simply competing for likes, which are arbitrary and have no real-world value. Well, with the exception of people who get paid to be public figures. For those people, likes are currency. When your platform is your paycheck, desperation can reach an all-time high.

The quest for validation is so real that people are buying spam followers for their social media accounts to pad their numbers. Since people are now taking social media to the bank, the higher numbers they have, the more important and popular they seem. We are faking our influence so that people attach more worth to our online standing. In the great Instagram sweep of 2014, some people lost 99 percent of their followers because they were spam accounts they had paid for just to juice their numbers. Instagram cracking down on these accounts and removing them from the platform had people shutting down their accounts in embarrassment, because they were exposed as having spent money on the least tangible of returns. I've seen Facebook fan pages with 400,000 fans, but every picture posted there only gets three likes. The polygraph says YOU ARE LYING. Fake followers do not comment or interact with you. It's like someone paying for some clouds when they need something to sit on.

So who are we doing it for? From the oversharing life to the share-anything-you-think-will-get-likes culture, we're living as our most inauthentic selves. We're losing ourselves in the shells we've created for public display and we are living lies for likes. We're telling people we have jobs we don't, relationships we've imagined, and personalities that are purely aspirational. We are being owned by spaces we're supposed to be owning, allowing them to mold us instead of the opposite. We are social media's Play-Doh, and some of us are too impressionable to remain who we originally were. We are doing anything to be validated, when the only thing we need to be doing is living life loudly as ourselves. Maybe if we did that, we could sleep at night without resting in the bed of adoration from strangers around the world.

We are stuck in a validation vortex, and we're dizzy with desperation.

 

21. So You're Kind of a Big Deal on the Internet

It's kind of cool how anyone can create a community online and make their own platform to amplify their voices. Fame has been democratized, and almost anyone can become famous at any time for doing anything. But this celebrity potential has also created monsters amongst us, and I'm probably in that number.

The new superstars can be bloggers, Viners, YouTubers, and other digital influencers who built their platforms purely from social media and the work they've done online. We are getting endorsement deals, movie roles, and elevation because of our online presence, but sometimes people take whatever this Internet fame thing is too seriously and lose all perspective and humility. This is why I'm judging those of us who are big deals on the Internet. Too many of us have bought into our own hype. Let's talk about the types of online celebs you can find.

The Number Dropper:
This is the person who cannot go an entire conversation without talking about their social-media numbers and huge following. They will drop their whole media kit at your feet during random conversation, and you wonder if they want a cookie or a high five from you. You could be at brunch talking about how you want your eggs scrambled hard with cheese, and they'll mention how they have half a million fans on Facebook. Congratulations, but do you want the omelet or the pancakes? We need you to order already because we're starving and this is a meal, not a social-media conference. Relax, okay?