What if you could combine the unstoppable power of good-old American entrepreneurialism with the force of dank memes to create a revolution? That’s what Oculus Rift founder Palmer Luckey wanted to do. He wanted to bankroll an organization founded by moderators of Reddit’s r/The_Donald, a 501(c)4 non-profit called Nimble America. But the organization’s roll out and first real fundraising drive on the subreddit did not go as planned. The_Donald supporters were not having any of it.

Despite headlines like “Oculus Rift Founder Palmer Luckey Funding Trump Shitposters” there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that the group has funded anything substantial. It is far from clear that Luckey Palmer is “secretly funding Trump’s meme machine.” Their financial documents indicate that they never raised more than $10,000 in a single donation, and never had more than 1,000 in their coffers at a given time. While I don’t know what the going rate for shitposters is, I can read their readily available financial statement and see that no Pepes were purchased—just legal services (the bulk of their expenditures), a website, an “educational” billboard, and a Facebook ad. And despite claims that “Nimble America operates the Reddit channel r/The_Donald,” they were in fact run out on a rail, and the incident ended with a moderator associated with Nimble America resigning his post and promising that “Nimble America will continue but it will be completely independent from /r/the_donald. There will be no further solicitations for the cause.”

It would be a nice story for the left if the rise of the alt right in mainstream discourse and the appearance of Trump-loving Pepes across the internet could be explained away by astroturfing, but that simply isn’t what’s happening. And if the lefty press got it wrong, Nimble America got it even more wrong. The backlash against them on r/The_Donald is ongoing, and the incident reveals a deep misunderstanding of the role of the internet and memes in this election season.

Memes are not a commodity, a sentiment already being parodied by /u/PEPE_Price_bot, a bot on The_Donald that tracks the nonexistent price of nonexistent Pepe shares. For The_Donald, the idea that a millionaire like Luckey could come in and bankroll the subreddit, turning their community into a “meme machine” was not only absurd but offensive. Users responded that they were proud to shitpost for free, and compared Nimble America to the pro-Clinton Super PAC Correct The Record, which has been criticized on both the right and the left for paying people to post on social media and argue with Clinton’s detractors.

The Nimble America effort dramatically miscalculated on two counts. First, the fierce populism that undergirds the Trump movement rejects any attempt at co-optation. While Trump himself may be wealthy, his supporters as a whole are very suspicious of, even hostile towards, anything smelling of the political elite. Reddit Trumpers felt that Nimble America was trying to take credit for their relentless shitposting and the memes that they have spent so much free labor creating and circulating.

But the second miscalculation concerns the distinction between paid-for advertising and the meme economy. Many The_Donald supporters replied to the fundraiser by saying that people should only donate to Trump’s campaign directly, or buy their merch, or set up your own website posting memes. They are aware that memes operate in a different market than advertising, one that doesn’t rely on middle-man firms soliciting donations and then, in all likelihood, not being held accountable for the use of those funds. Memes are free. Shitposting is volunteer work. This isn’t an economy of currency, but one of attention. And injecting memes into the mainstream discourse doesn’t require a PAC; Trump will just tweet them out himself.

The Nimble America debacle is an allegory for this bizarre election writ large. Sanders raised enormous, unprecedented campaign funds without the use of Super PACS. A reality TV show star and human sweet potato beat some of the biggest names in Republican politics and is now running a very viable campaign, and using racist memes to do it. Clinton is desperately trying to win over millenials but coming off more like this guy. The memers refuse to bought, and the Pepes refuse to be sold.

But, to me, the biggest takeaway from the allegory is how wrong the liberal press got this whole story. Without any evidence beyond what the Nimble America representatives claimed, the assertion that they somehow bankroll the alt right meme machine and control a subreddit picked up steam quickly, not unlike Clinton’s flawed Pepe explainer. An hour spent scrolling through Reddit threads and 5 seconds looking at their financial documents show that they are not some political meme powerhouse. They don’t run anything except a mediocre website and a single Reddit thread in which they were shown the door. Oh, and a billboard.

Opponents of Trump do themselves a serious disservice with this kind of reporting. For two days, The_Donald has been covered with memes and jokes about the inaccuracies and over-blown charges made in the publications linked above. It further feeds their narrative that “SJWs” are divorced from fact and will say anything to stop their Dear Leader. It gives them power. And many, many lulz.

This essay could not have been written without the help of my colleague and bestie Nick Hanford, who provided many of the articles cited, read through a draft of this essay, and Dmd me on Twitter all morning with helpful ideas. As thanks, I will close with this music video that he cherishes.

Britney is on Twitter.

This is a review of Greg Goldberg’s (2016) article “Antisocial media: Digital dystopianism as a normative project.” It is available in New Media & Society Vol. 18(5) behind a pay wall or with institutional access: http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/08/16/1461444814547165.abstract

While the general tone of academic research on the internet has become increasingly nuanced since the 1980s and 1990s, much popular writing about digital technology remains locked in Manichean thinking: the internet is the best and the worst thing that has ever happened in the history of humanity. In an article for New Media & Society Professor Greg Goldberg analyzes the dystopian narrative common in popular writing on the internet, arguing that this discourse is “a normative project linked to domination.”

Goldberg begins the article with an overview of dystopian popular writings on the internet and its effect on humanity. He focuses specifically on two texts: Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains and Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other. Expressing concern about the neurological and psychological effects of the internet, respectively, the two popular publications reflect much of the tone of writing and reporting found in outlets like The New York Times and National Public Radio. Cyborgology readers will know that this type of writing is well-worn territory for the blog, with the critique of digital dualism being a cornerstone of our analysis, and co-founding editor Nathan Jurgenson’s extensive work on the augmented reality framework, which rejects the idea that “real life” is in opposition to the internet. In his recent essay on Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation (2015) David Banks articulates the ways Turkle scapegoats technology without taking seriously and acknowledging the material forces that lay the groundwork for antisocial relations and violence.

Rather than reject the empirical evidence and general claims made by Carr and Turkle, Goldberg is concerned with understanding where dystopian claims come from and what kind of work they do. Of Carr and Turkle’s work, he writes: “The identification and analysis of neurological and psychological transformations engendered by internet use occur alongside the valuing of certain forms of embodiment, intellect, and psyche” (790). But Goldberg pushes beyond these surface concerns of dystopian internet writing to “interpret these as proxies for the social field and, in particular, responsible forms of sociality” (791).

To make this argument, he delves into the literature on affect and the politics of emotion, specifically that of Sianne Ngai and Sara Ahmed. Specifically, Goldberg uses anxiety as an affective foundation for dystopian analysis of the internet. He, through Ngai and Ahmed, draws an important distinction between fear and anxiety, one made by many modern and postmodern scholars, as one of temporality and object. Fear is present, and object-based; something is coming for you, you know what it is, and it is here. Anxiety, however, is locked in the future, and rather than having a single object that instills fear you have many, perhaps countless, objects that produce anxiety. As such, as Ahmed writes in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, “Anxiety becomes an approach to objects rather than, as with fear, being produced by an object’s approach.” Anxiety produces a feeling that one’s subject position is endangered, and these dystopian narratives index the anxious loss of subject position among the elite.

The anxiety on display in these dystopian narratives is not that the internet is not real, despite that being the rhetoric oft used; rather, the concern is that the internet is too real, that “it draws into question the utility of the concept of the real, laying bare its normative foundations” (792). From here, Goldberg presents dystopian anxieties as productive of a certain moral imperative: “the maintenance of a responsible sociality which is anxiously projected on the body” (792). In order for the internet user to remain a responsible member of society, they must do the work of “maintaining an independent, autonomous self;” for Turkle this work is the face-to-face, spatially co-present work of maintaining social relationships that, for her, are more difficult than those cultivated online.

These writers’ ultimate conclusion is that “real/valuable relationships are those that require various kinds of hard work: compromise, sacrifice, and responsibility” (793). It is a moralizing effort, inviting internet users to monitor their responsibility to “real” relationships, but also a “moralizing suspicion of pleasure as that which impedes and undermines relations of responsibility” (794). Concluding with a queer theory perspective, Goldberg investigates passivity as a concept oft used to undermine queer pleasure, that being penetrated, “bottoming,” are inextricably bound to this irresponsible pleasure. He then poses the question: “How much of this [dystopian] body of work similarly values the active, responsible, and the self-sovereign?” (797). He concludes that the “irresponsible,” “passive,” “unproductive” use of internet for pleasure may be politically queer, “insofar as users find joy and excitement precisely in abandoning normative orientations that solicit their responsibility” (798).

While many criticisms of the dystopian writing tackled by Goldberg have attempted to refute or counter the claims made by Carr, Turkle, and many others, Goldberg seeks instead to understand where they come from and what work they do in a rapidly changing technological society. Ultimately, his call for a queer politics of pleasure that undermines the authoritarian, normative moralism of dystopian writing gives a new perspective on the anxieties of internet writers. My own takeaway is the extent to which centuries-old notions of the Protestant work ethic, the inherent “goodness” of self-denial and self-flagellation, and other repressive narratives firmly rooted in capitalist material and ideological relations remain a powerful voice in contemporary popular culture, particularly when presented to an elitist readership.

Britney is on Twitter.

“How did people learn to do anything before the internet?” I say to myself as I peer over a recipe for cheddar zucchini muffins on my iPad. The fact that those muffins turned out terribly doesn’t negate the point though: The internet is the biggest training manual in history, and we use it to muddle through everything from broken door knobs to wine-stained pants to tough break ups. We also use it to learn how to be a particular type of person: successful, organized, sexy, friendly, assertive, and the list goes on. But one of the biggest demographics for the online-training manual market is men learning how to be men. A specific kind of man. The kind who can talk to a woman wearing headphones.

It’s impossible to find a “beginning” to the contemporary landscape of training guides on manliness; even in the 16^th century texts like The Book of the Courtier and The Book of the Governor were laying the groundwork for today’s self-help discourse. At the turn of the 20^th century, ideals of masculinity were become more firmly rooted in a muscular physique, and figures like Eugene Sandow, the father of modern body building, published training manuals that taught both physical exercises and a moralizing notion of man-as-body.

By the 1960s and 70s, literature on “being a man” was exploding, both as a part of and a response to feminist movement. Writers in the men’s liberation movement were arguing that patriarchal relations and “traditional masculinity” harmed men, and called on a new type of manhood that sought internal satisfaction through experiencing a fuller range of emotions. Raewyn Connell documents these early beginnings of masculinity politics over the last 50 years, noting that the “masculinity therapy” movement “was at first close to feminism” but by the 1980s became more oriented toward restoring “a masculinity thought to have been lost or damaged by recent social change” [see Connell’s Masculinities 2^nd ed, 204-220].

The 1980s saw the rise of the mythopoetic men’s movement, which sought to find a means of “returning” to an essential masculism that had been lost in the modern era. Factors like workplace competition, rather than masculine bonding; excessive time at home with women; the “muting” of men’s voices by feminism; the emotional damage incurred by lack of fatherly bonding; and men’s inability to freely express their feelings were tackled by the mythopoetic men’s movement. Books, workshops, gatherings, rituals, and storytelling all became devices for the expression of a new kind of man, or really the rediscovery of some presumed “deep man” who had been lost.

All of these historical elements of men’s movements and their accompanying training guides continue to influence the contemporary landscape of men’s self-help, but by the 2000s a relatively novel factor was introduced. Pick up artistry was now a booming industry, with Neil Strauss’ The Game becoming a best seller, and subsequent publications laying out in great detail the tools and tactics for getting laid. Today, the internet is flush with blogs, YouTube channels, and forums where young men turn to learn how to be a man. A particular type of man. A man who gets laid.

The flurry over the recent how-to guide on talking to women wearing headphones is an opportunity to historicize this phenomenon and take stock of how influential it is on the contemporary gender order. All across the internet men are seeking each other out to learn how to talk to women in all sorts of environments and under any and all conditions: in bars, on the train, in the office, at church…

These outlets take two predominant forms: profit generating and community-based. The first characterizes Modern Man, the site that published the headphone-conquering how-to guide. Pay-based models for training promise results through membership and access to videos, books, and other guides, and Modern Man even includes a testimonial page to demonstrate to customers that they too can reap the rewards of purchasing access to guides. There are also ad-based models on blogs and YouTube channels, wherein practitioners can support themselves without directly selling the product to customers.

Others are simply labors of love: free communities where the majority of the content is generated and managed by people working for free. Pick-up artistry community boards and various subreddits devoted to dating and marriage advice vary widely in terms of what tactics men might use to be successful with women. Some are fairly straightforward and applicable in all arenas of social engagement: stand up straight, dress in a way that flatters your body type, make eye contact, etc. Others are more complex, often based in popular conceptions of biological essentialism.

Why people form communities online that are often incredibly time-intensive and unpaid is an important question for contemporary internet scholarship. In Personal Connections in the Digital Age, Nancy Baym lays out a number of reasons why people find community online so satisfying and, as such, worth investing in. People find belonging online by developing shared practices, sharing resources and support, and developing common identities that, in many cases, can be difficult to cultivate in offline environments. All of these factors play an important role in the origin and development of masculist online communities, whether they be feminist-oriented man’s liberation groups or non- and anti-feminist movements that seek to subvert or, at least, take account of women’s sexual liberation and develop new strategies for convincing women to have sex with them.

One thing that all of these entities—whether communities or business enterprises—have in common is the how-to guide format. Self-help is a $10 billion industry, and has so infiltrated identity formation in neoliberal capitalist societies that its presence often goes unremarked in everyday examples like the headphone essay. At the heart of self-help is cultivating and projecting self-confidence, and this is doubly true for outlets training men to pick up women. A central tenet of contemporary masculist pedagogy is confidence.

Which begs the question: where did this come from?

Confidence is more central to today’s masculist discourse than at any point in the history given above. This suggests that confidence is understood as the key to successful romantic interactions, but also that men have lost confidence somehow, and that it must be rebuilt.

The problem of confidence isn’t limited to masculist discourse. Companies hire self-help gurus to workshop with employees to create more efficient and profitable businesses. People pay thousands of dollars to attend week-long seminars to learn how to unlock their potential by cultivating a powerful sense of self. But the forces that have led to this loss of confidence and the need to regain it are manifold.

I propose two, though countless others likely exist. The first is precarity. Author Susan Faludi has documented extensively how upheavals in the industrial workforce and the loss of traditionally “manly” jobs have led countless men to lose their sense of self and their belief that they can contribute anything of value to society. Key symbols of status and stability such as home ownership and lifelong employment at a company have greatly diminished in the last few decades. Tracing a predictable life trajectory is increasingly difficult in the new economy.

Second, the advertising industry depends on a consumer base that feels the need to purchase products that will make them more attractive, more successful, and more whole. From deodorant to whiskey to floor cleaners, advertisers promise their products will make us better mothers, better business executives, and of course, better men.

Learning to do something that, frankly, you just shouldn’t do, with the aim of getting laid is a massive element in the internet-as-self-help reality that characterizes so much of daily life. This key aspect of the internet intersects with the changing gender regime, the prominence of “confidence” discourse, community building, affective labor, and for-profit models of content generation. This short, pretty annoying essay about ignoring whether or not a woman wants to talk to you and “being confident” that you can change her mind is part of a much bigger system of discourses that needs to be peeled apart, historicized, and contextualized.

Also, maybe we need new headphones that come with big blinking signs that say “leave me alone, I’m listening to a podcast and drinking coffee and I’m not here to validate you.” Or something like that.

Britney is on Twitter.

Television has been killing itself off for well over a decade. Rising costs, increased ad time, and the shift to cheap-to-produce content like reality TV are a just a few factors contributing to the slow death of broadcast and cable TV. Competition from online providers continues to get fiercer, and some networks are doing their best to adapt by providing limited, often ill-performing, online content. Major media events offer networks and providers an opportunity to save face, but even these low-hanging fruits are being ruined by one of the darkest forces in contemporary TV programming: commentators.

During the Republican and Democratic nominating conventions, I watched the speakers and events in a variety of ways. Unlike other major political media events like debates or election coverage, it was incredibly easy to find streaming sources. CSPAN’s website had live coverage online, along with a variety of other YouTube channels, Twitch offered many channels with or without commentary, and even several broadcast networks made the event easily accessible. Each source included varying degrees of advertisements and commentary. It was quite a smorgasbord.

Early on, I was watching an interrupted, ad free, commentary free live stream of the early RNC Convention. It was boring. Real boring. So boring that even Twitter wasn’t saying much about it. Later in the day, as the speakers improved it became a bit more tolerable, but still… something was missing. Ah yes, the pundits! That’s what I needed!

So I switched over to NBC and got the exact opposite. 30 or 40 seconds of each speech, followed by Brian Williams and Rachel Maddow talking over the rest of the speech, then cut to commercial break every five minutes. It was hard to tell what I was even watching, but it didn’t feel like a coherent event. During the prime time, big name speakers I switched back to CSPAN. Then I’d look at Twitter to see how people were reacting. It was a very self-curated experience, but unlike new media events in which this self-curation may be fun and desirable, I was annoyed. This was a long, massive, hyped-up event and I felt like I sunk way too much time in to figuring out what the hell was going on.

Rinse and repeat with the DNC. Both were trying to be media events, but both failed. In their work on media events, Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz (1992) lay out a set of characteristics for media events that is useful for better understanding why the RNC, DNC, and as I will argue shortly, the Olympics, failed. First, for a media event to succeed “audiences [must] recognize them as an invitation—even a command—to stop their daily routines and join in a holiday experience.” Media events are an interruption of daily life, and are coordinated with public bodies like governments, political parties, or international organizations. They are pre-planned and advertised in advance, and are treated with reverence—Dayan and Katz call them the “High Holy Days” of mass media. Key here is that they are treated with reverence by both audiences and broadcasters.

With an election season like ours, and especially the shitshow that has been Trump’s campaign, it’s understandable why audiences and commentators haven’t treated the conventions, or the myriad other political media events, with reverence. These are not “High Holy Days.” They are a frightening mockery of our political system, which we have convinced ourselves is the best in the whole world. Tremendous. Just the best.

But the Olympics? That’s a different story altogether. The Olympics have always been one of the most important international media events since the earliest days of televised entertainment.

You may have seen this absurd and offensive Bloomberg essay blaming millennials for ruining the 2016 Olympics—or, more specifically, putting a teeny tiny ding in NBC’s record setting ad revenue. How dare we. Of course, it was inevitable. Millennials ruin everything. The family unit, the workplace, the film industry with their scheme to make James Bond a politically correct black dude (gasp!). And now, the Olympics.

But, as Brenton Henry articulates in this rebuttal on Medium, NBC ruined the Olympics. Making it impossible to watch for the average person without a cable subscription (surprise, NBC! There are a lot of us!), refusing to offer live coverage most of the time, making it difficult to understand the schedule, and my absolute biggest gripe: the commentary.

I’m not saying there’s no place for discussion and explanation during sporting events; not everyone knows the ins-and-outs of complex athletic events and the personal athlete bios can be interesting. But the sheer level of commentary was absurd. As in the 2016 nominating conventions, commentary took over to the point that the event itself was drowned out. Combined with the outrageous levels of racism, sexism, body shaming, and homophobia, it’s time to ask: What exactly do commentators contribute to the audience experience of the Olympics? Or of any media event?

For Dayan and Katz, media events are times for reverence and festivity. If there are key moments in the Olympics for reverence and festivity, they are the opening and closing ceremonies. But even these were drowned out by commentators and commercial breaks. The end of a floor routine or a swim match is the moment that makes the media event important, yet instead viewers saw cameras pan away to two smiling faces or an advertisement for dish soap. The pacing of the coverage, the jumble of athletic even displaced in time and space, the confusing and inane commentary: they do not allow any time to breath or fully take in the event. The audience never loses itself.

In his writing on pseudo-events—events choreographed for the sole purpose of drumming up publicity—historian and theorist Daniel Boorstin described the “mirror effect” in which “everywhere we see ourselves in the mirror.” In other words, we contrive images in order to reflect ourselves back as larger-than-life entities. The problem with this mirror effect is that “nearly everything we do to enlarge our world, to make life more interesting, more varied, more exciting, more vivid, more ‘fabulous,’ more promising, in the long run has an opposite effect.” He writes:

We talk to ourselves, without even noticing that it is not somebody else talking to us. We talk to ourselves about what we are supposed to be talking about. We find this out by seeing what other people are talking to themselves about.

 Such is it with pundits and commentators—the mirror effect playing out during these pseudo/media events; talking to ourselves under the guise of a conversation, either with the audience or the other commentators. But, as seen in the backlash to televised commentary across genres, it has had the opposite effect. It turns out, people just want to watch the gymnasts finish their floor routine.

Boorstin argues that much of the pseudo-event culture is bound up in “extravagant expectations” of contemporary (for him, 1961) America. He argues that we expect exciting and important news events in our morning paper, that we expect our homes to not only give us shelter but also relaxation, dignity, a playground, a theater, a bar. But what happens when we expect less? What happens when we just want to see people swim?

How nice it would be if Boorstin gave us an easy out, but instead he writes that “though we may suffer from mass illusions, there is no formula for mass disenchantment. By the law of pseudo-events, all efforts at mass disenchantment themselves only embroider our illusions.” He concludes: “One of the grand illusions is the belief in a ‘cure.’ There is no cure. There is only the opportunity for discovery.”

What does discovery look like in the context of Dayan and Katz’s take on media events? These authors have a much less bleak view of media events, seeing them as not merely interruptions in day-to-day life intended to delude the masses, but also as potential tools for positive social change. To conclude, I’ll return to a concept I introduced in an earlier essay.

When I first proposed “new media events” as an extension of the theories outlined above, it had only been stewing for a few weeks. In the context of the conventions and the Olympics it may provide some fruitful openings for understanding Boorstin’s “opportunity for discovery.” A key characteristic that I proposed was the multi-media self-curation element of new media events, where the “uncooked” content may come from some origin source but the liveliness and engagement comes from other sources of interaction.

Here I’m more interested in what frustrates audiences about failed media events, and what new media might offer. As Nick Hanford, regarding Twitch streams of the nominating conventions, notes:

The potential of a service like Twitch is that we may start building a more evocative and self-aware form of depicting these events. One that eschews the immediacy and false objectivity of cable news and revels in the hypermediacy of multiple voices contributing to a single project. This sort of goal would create a deeper and more profound consciousness that politics are personal, beginning with how they are mediated.

Along similar lines, I argue that approaching massive media events like conventions, debates, elections, the Olympics, the Super Bowl, and countless other examples from a digital perspective can reveal a glimmer of Boorstin’s “discovery.” This discovery—finding other sources of supplementary content to the “uncooked” heart of the media event—can be a direct challenge to the corporate media narrative and style of broadcast that spoils the festivity of media events. Surfing through Twitch channels that don’t have asshole commentary, following Twitter hashtags to see what non-talking heads thought about the President’s speech, and other new media practices are not likely to “cure” the grand illusions Boorstin condemned. But they are undoubtedly a mode of discovery that is not possible under a mass-mediated pseudo event culture.

Yes, people on Twitter still made racist comments about Gabby Douglas’ hair. Approaching media festivals from a new media perspective will never be enough to destroy white supremacist, misogynist, heteronormative, capitalist ideology. But at least on Twitter you can talk back. On Twitch, there’s more competition. You can leave the channel. As Boorstin argued, you can’t cure the disease. You can only chip away at the mirrors, at the illusion. And so long as the Olympics and nearly every other media event is first and foremost a profit-driven endeavor, the tactics available for doing so will be limited.

Britney is on Twitter.

One of the most interesting and unimagineable ideas about the nature of reality in the 21^st century is that we are living in a computer simulation. Philosopher Nick Bostrum posed the question in Philosophical Quarterly (2003) this way: given the enormous computing power of any posthuman civilization, and the likelihood that they would run simulations to better understand their evolutionary history, it is entirely possible that we are living in a simulation created by a higher intelligence. Since Bostrum’s essay was published, many theorists have laid out reasons for entertaining the hypothesis, which are typically grounded in the mathematic nature of our current understanding of the universe. But I think we’re overlooking the most compelling argument in favor of the simulation hypothesis to date: the meteoric rise of Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump.

To understand why I think Trump is all the proof we need that we are living in a simulation, we have to begin with one of the most fundamental questions of religious thought, theodicy; if there is a god, why does it allow evil and suffering to exist? Why not create a world of perfect harmony and happiness? Why would god subject its most faithful and righteous of servants, as in The Book of Job, to immense anguish? In Job’s tale, it is essentially to settle a bet with Satan—to prove that Job’s faith does not come from the blessings and wealth bestowed upon him, and will remain strong in the face of loss and sorrow.

The explanations for theodicy range throughout history. Polytheistic peoples saw human suffering as the result of squabbles and power grabs among the gods. The Abrahamic traditions cite original sin and the folly of Adam and Eve. Later religious scholars argued that, in order for humans to be made in the image of god, they must be granted free will, which opened the door to sin. Even the deists explained the problem of theodicy by arguing that god had merely created the universe and then left it to its own devices, thus never intervening on behalf of “the good.”

The simulation argument offers a much more straightforward answer: we’re an experiment. Or, an investigation of sorts, a mode of trying to understand causality and the factors that give certain civilizations some characteristics over others. Some simulations may strive to create the happiest civilization possible, others the most efficient, and still others the most self-destructive. Maybe we just got unlucky. Maybe, in some other file folder on some other hard drive, there is a happy little simulation where everyone gets a free puppy that never grows up and there’s orange soda in all the water fountains.

But we didn’t get the puppy-orange-soda universe. Nope, we got Trump.

Why does Trump prove the simulation hypothesis? First is the naked fact that his campaign is stranger than fiction. Trump operates outside all the bounds of politics-as-physics. He breaks every law that we know of, and yet continues to exist. And, as with the wave-particle duality of light or the hypothetical existence of dark matter, we must alter our explanatory models of the world to understand new phenomena.

Commentators have come up with hundreds of explanations for Trump’s popularity: white working-class discontent, rising xenophobia and persistent racism, distrust in the political class and other institutions, and even the power of name recognition in electoral politics. All fine analyses. But how do you explain this?

Descending an escalator before announcing his campaign for the highest office in the land

Or this?

Even the freedom bird doesn’t like you

Or, perhaps the most bizarre entrance in nominating-convention history, this?

How do you caption this I don’t even know

Doesn’t it all seem a bit over the top?

Actual screen when Trump won the requisite number of delegate votes. For real.

Anyone who has been paying attention to our long history of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and free market ideology should not be surprised that we are witnessing the rise of a political figure who embodies the ugliest characteristics of our society. But who could have predicted that it would look so utterly ridiculous? How can one of the gravest threats to the country in recent memory come in the form of this buffoon?

If we take the computer simulation hypothesis as a possible explanation, Trump is either an experiment or a glitch.

Perhaps Trump was introduced into the simulation to see how the current conditions would interact with this phenomenon. Perhaps our coding overlords took the experiment to the extreme, making the intervention as ridiculous as possible to see the effects. Maybe they’re having a bit of sadistic fun, blissfully ignorant to the fact that it is all too real to us. Or, perhaps, something further back—mass media or reality TV—was introduced, and Trump is a (il)logical conclusion of that earlier experiment.

I, however, lean toward the glitch hypothesis. One of the most basic existential questions in the history of human thought is what is real? Am I real? Is anything outside of me real? During the Enlightenment, we came up with complex models to deal with this question: empiricism, rationalism, scientific method and objectivity. More recently, other subjective, affective questions come to mind, specifically authenticity. From clothing and music to food and drink, the question of authenticity is ever-present. The mere fact that “authenticity” exists as a concept reveals our fear of the unreal, our distain for the seemingly artificial, or, at the very least, our need to value and hold on to something that confirms that we stand on solid, real ground.

This question of reality may be the kernel of the glitch—a tiny voice inside our consciousness that suspects that we aren’t real, a thought born of the unspoken realization that we are simulated.

But rather than an on-off switch, or a spectrum from real to not real, what if it is a circle? What if Trump is the point at which the circle meets, the unreal-real that solves the paradox of simulated reality? Reality TV was an answer to celebrity culture, to viewers wanting to see people like them on screen. As media studies scholars like June Deery have argued, reality TV reveals the fragility of “reality” as a construct, and “that it represents a longing for the real in the age of the virtual and digital” (See Deery’s Reality TV, 2015). Or, if you want to get really heady, see Jean Baudrillard’s work on simulation and hyper-reality. Tl;dr: reality is weird and complicated, especially with the proliferation of media.

Reality TV is not only important with regards to Trump because it’s his biggest claim to fame, but also because it is part and parcel of a larger cultural phenomenon that lays the groundwork for his popularity. For his supporters, he talks like a normal person. He acts like a normal person. He thinks like a normal person.

Trump is an iteration of the feedback loop of reality that is the true original sin of our simulated humanity. Adam and Eve didn’t eat an apple—they asked if they were real. Like a song that gets stuck in your head, we haven’t stopped asking the question ever since. And while some of us look on horrified, asking “Is this really happening?” others cheer for the billionaire every-man who will save our country with unabashed “real talk,” who won’t kowtow to PC culture.

You may remember Magnasanti, the terrifying dystopian SimCity that used mathematical principles to create maximum population efficiency. Sims in Magnasanti lived bleak lives of high unemployment, no social services, and death at the age of fifty under a totalitarian police state. Or maybe you’ve trolled your Sims at some point by filling their house with fireworks, removing the doors, and making them set off the explosives. Or deleting the bathroom until they pee their pants. Or taking them for a swim and removing the ladder until they drown to death. Sure, it’s disturbing that lots of people actively look for ways to torture and kill their Sims, but it’s far more disturbing to consider that we are made in the image of our own “gods,” programmed to create chaos and destruction for a few laughs.

Maybe I’m grasping at straws, trying to explain away the sadness we all feel at the tragedies posted to our daily news feeds. I hope we aren’t living in a simulation. I hope the horrors of this world aren’t some experiment of a higher intelligence trying to figure out how to maximize their own potential. I hope we have some modicum of control over our own reality. I hope that, even if we are in a simulation, we aren’t deterministically coded, and can creatively alter our computerized universe. I hope we can undo this historical moment, before President Trump gets to “restore law and order,” as he ominously promised in his acceptance speech, remotely delivered on a giant screen at the RNC on Tuesday. I hope we can stop it.

I hope nobody pulled up our ladder.

Britney is on Twitter.

CW: Discussion of assault

“It happened in the light of day, in a safe neighborhood, 200 feet from a police station.” Cut to a disembodied torso, a hand caressing the scars up the abdomen, panning up to a scarred chest and a woman with a soft expression. She is Kathy Roma, and in 2000 she was attacked by a stranger in broad daylight and stabbed repeatedly. Now, she serves as communications director for Nimb, “a smart ring that keeps you safe and sound.” The developers are currently raising funds on Kickstarter, with $186,530, far exceeding their goal of $50,000.

Nimb is the Life Alert all grown up, a fashion-forward wearable marketed to young college women, worried parents, those with disabilities, the elderly, and basically any other person living in an uncertain and terrifying world. The ring, which comes in Classic White or Stealth Black, connects to a smart phone via Bluetooth. When the wearer feels in danger and cannot otherwise seek help, a small button on the underside of the ring will alert their chosen networks and send GPS coordinates to potential saviors. Nimb has received international media coverage, and the fact that it blew the original Kickstarter goal out of the water shows how in-demand this sort of device is.

The project deftly addresses potential criticisms before they can even be voiced. The “safety circles” feature allows users to choose whom they notify with the panic button. When first seeing the project, I assumed police or emergency responders would be the default, but Nimb allows users to customize who receives an alert, whether friends, family members, a single individual, emergency services, or even those nearby.

The emphasis is on “community.” They tout the ring’s ability to give the user control over who receives panic notifications. They call this feature “crowd source security” and “believe that society’s ready to protect itself.” The subtle implication is that, rather than relying on institutional apparatuses such as 911 services, individuals can reach out to social networks when they need help.

While the promotional material features some diversity of Nimb wearers, specifically a few women of color, children, and elderly people, the dominant figures in the videos and images are young white women. Kathy Roma states in the Kickstarter video that her young adult daughter wears one, and goes to “crazy parties.” “I let her go with a lighter heart,” Roma declares, watching her daughter walk away and looking down lovingly at her Classic White Nimb. “I embrace the unknown while feeling safe and secure.”

I can think of no better articulation of the hopes and dreams of people living in what is often termed “The Risk Society.”

Writing on modernity, Ulrick Beck and Anthony Giddens argue that the forces at work in a society governed by mass industry, science, and realism create a cultural condition of reflexive introspection and focus on the future, rather than the past. Citing environmental disasters such as Chernobyl and economic upheavals, theorists of the risk society illustrate how widespread precarity—be it material, ideological, or even symbolic—create a climate of anxiety and fear, often with no discernable object to fear or be anxious about.

While Nimb cites medical emergencies as one potential application for the panic ring, the overwhelming emphasis of the promotional material is on young, attractive white women in dark hallways and deserted streets. A 20-something, thin, light-skinned woman looks ominously over her shoulder in a poorly-lit tunnel, and two versions of herself emerge. One, desperately sorting through her large bag to find her purse, fumbling with the security code and dialing 911 only to get an automated hold message; the other, with the Nimb, calmly holds the panic button for three seconds and begins confidently walking from the unseen danger, never even looking back.

Of course, gendered violence is a real threat, and those of small stature are often easy targets for strangers on the street looking to do someone harm. But most assaults against women are perpetrated by people they know, not a stranger in a shadowy hallway. And a person of color with a gender non-conforming presentation walking down the street is significantly more likely to be attacked than nearly any other demographic. But domestic violence and folks with bodies that violate norms are notably absent from this, and many other discussions of public safety. The endangered white woman is a well-worn trope throughout Western civilization; it is a semiotic shorthand that easily writes its own narrative, and is therefore much more effective at selling products to a large demographic.

There also seems to be no possible accountability for activating such a device in a way that exploits both emergency services and one’s privilege to depend on them. Who gets to feel safe by calling the cops and who doesn’t is an important question, and while Nimb allows people to call for help without relying on police, it fails to address thosewho may have the police called on them. Nothing is going to stop the powerful from inflicting police violence on those with relatively less power, but this device will make it much easier for people to call the police in situations that do not require police intervention. Police intervention often makes a bad situation worse. Facilitating police intervention may be helpful to some, but at whose expense?

All of this is made more apparent in the promotional video on Kickstarter. The video conveniently elides the source of danger in the scene of the white woman activating her Nimb. She is alone in a (now) well-lit corridor, looking over her shoulder at something unseen. What is she seeing? Are you filling in the blanks? Without any apparent threat, a white woman has called the police.

In a risk society, we are constantly overwhelmed with the uncertainty and danger of the unknown. How we deal with that danger speaks volumes about our assumptions about other people and the institutions we depend on to give order and safety to our lives. I applaud the Nimb for not defaulting to police intervention, but ultimately that decision is in the hands of the user, and the technological affordances of the Nimb can be used as easily for good as for ill. And this is to say nothing of the private security forces also mentioned in the promotional materials.

“Crowd source security” is the inevitable manifestation of the risk society, in which even emergency forces cannot be trusted, and onlookers may be either absent or apathetic. A mother or partner with their own Nimb, a trusted friend who lives in the neighborhood and checks their texts frequently, or even a stranger nearby set up to receive Nimb notifications may be a person’s best bet when facing unclear, possibly present danger. Perhaps Nimb demonstrates that the closest we can get to care free living is by outsourcing that care to surveillance.

Britney is on Twitter.

All photos and screenshots in this essay are taken from the Nimb’s Kickstarter site.

Image credit: Kevin Dooley on Flickr

This is a follow-up post to this essay on accusations of censorship on Reddit and the unpredictable consequences of algorithmic quirks.

Reddit is the self-described “front page of the internet.” Millions of users rely on Reddit to keep them informed on a wide range of topics from world news to gaming developments to the latest in pictures of cute dogs (or, often as not, reposts of pictures of cute dogs). But what happens when the front page fails us, and how do Reddit administrators respond?

In the aftermath of the Reddit debacle surrounding /r/news deletions of posts about the Orlando shooting, Reddit has rolled out new changes to the algorithm that ranks posts on /r/all. /r/all is the frontest of Reddit front pages; it is the algorithmic ranking of popular posts from all subreddits that 1) choose to be featured on the front page and 2) haven’t been quarantined based on questionable (read: bigoted) content. The exact details of Reddit’s ranking algorithm are complicated and unnecessary for this brief discussion, but it’s essentially a combination of when something was posted, how many upvotes it has received, and how recently it’s been upvoted. Time + Attention = Rank. You can read more about it in this (slightly dated) explainer.

According to Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, /u/spez, the new algorithm has been in the works for a while but was implemented earlier than intended given recent events. The quick and dirty of the incident is: /r/news mods deleted a large number of posts and comments on the Orlando shooting, leaving a huge chasm on the front page that was filled with reports from the Donald Trump subreddit /r/The_Donald. Redditors were (rightfully) outraged that the incident was only being reported on by a widely-despised, non news-related subreddit.

Huffman announced the changes shortly after the /r/The_Donald incident in a post that he called a “town hall” about /r/all. In it, he argued that “/r/all is a reflection of what is happening online in general. It is culturally important and drives many conversations around the world.” Leaving aside the grandiosity of this statement, Reddit is undoubtedly an important source for the millions of users who depend on the site to stay up to date on new, popular online content.

The changes to the algorithm are, to hear Huffman describe them, relatively simple. The goal is to “prevent any one community from dominating the listing… as a community is represented more and more often in the listing, the hotness of its posts will be increasingly lessened. This results in more variety in /r/all.” In other words, /r/The_Donald, or any other subreddit, can’t completely take over the front page.

For most users, Reddit’s algorithm is a black box. Content goes in, content comes out, and what happens in-between is neither comprehensible nor relevant. However, when the input and output of Reddit’s black box changes significantly, everyone notices.

Initial reactions in Huffman’s “town hall” thread were largely positive and hopeful. But in the following days and weeks, some redditors began noticing a major, frustrating change: not enough new content. An undoubtedly unintended consequence of the change was greater stability on /r/all, with posts hanging around longer and new content rising to the top much more slowly.

Also, porn. Lots of porn. The insurgence of porn on the first few pages of /r/all is likely due to two factors: 1) porn is really popular on Reddit and 2) there are so many porn subreddits that the possibility of any one of them overtaking /r/all and, subsequently, getting pushed down the listing is less likely.

Of course, porn is one of those things where even a small uptick is very noticeable. So just how much of /r/all is porn, relative to other things? This morning I did a rough analysis of the first five pages (top 100 posts) of /r/all. Here’s a general breakdown of the number of posts related to each of these popular topics:

Pets: 6

Sports: 6

Gifs (funny, interesting, reaction): 12

Gaming: 11

News: 3

Politics: 3

Porn: 12

It was a lot of porn. Porn’s only real competitors are gaming and gifs, and “gifs” comprises so many different topics it hardly seems fair to count it as a category. The amount of porn content on /r/all has gotten so large that some users have asked for a safe-for-work version of /r/all so they can browse during office hours.

So the algorithm change that was supposed to prevent large subreddits like /r/the_donald from dominating the front pages of /r/all has instead paved the way for a mass of porn and significantly reduced the amount of news content, while also reducing the frequency with which content changes. If most of /r/all’s news content comes from the large subreddits like /r/news, /r/worldnews, and /r/politics, then the new algorithm makes it less likely for multiple posts from these large subreddits on various topics to make it to the top pages. Meanwhile, because there are so many porn subreddits, it’s easy for that content to rise to the top.

In trying to develop some conclusions about this phenomenon, I spoke with my media studies colleague Nick Hanford. He was struck by Huffman’s description of the changes to the algorithm, and of Reddit generally, as constructing some sort of Platonic Ideal of the internet; a “true” representation of what is “really” happening at any given moment online. This is certainly one of the failings of Reddit’s /r/all algorithm, both before and after the change; it cannot hope to accomplish the lofty aims set by Huffman because the internet is a many-sided prism, and it cannot be reflected on a flat page of ranked, numbered posts. My internet may have significantly more recipes or cat gifs than yours, and “what is happening online in general” as Huffman puts it will vary greatly from region to region, not to mention various subcultural groups. /r/all can never really be /r/all, it is necessarily /r/some.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from this story is best summed up by Mr. Hanford: “PORN RULES ALL, ESPECIALLY SO-CALLED DEMOCRACIES.”*

Britney is on Twitter

*Nick Hanford agreed to be quoted for this essay on condition that he be quoted in caps lock.

The subreddit /r/news has long been criticized in the Reddit community for its perceived bias. Typically, these accusations concern moderators’ censorship of anything that does not conform to their liberal worldview. The moderators of /r/news are certainly liberal with their policy of deleting posts and comments, justifying these actions by referring to their detailed list of rules. But many redditors argue that /r/news mods selectively interpret the rules, and are more likely to delete posts and comments that they simply disagree with. In the aftermath of the tragic Orlando nightclub shooting that targeted LGBTQ individuals, particularly those of latinx descent, these criticisms boiled over and transformed into a site-wide scandal that helps reveal a great deal about the site and its user base.

On the morning of Sunday, June 12^th, many users flocked to /r/news to read and post articles reporting on the shooting. Users quickly began expressing concerns about mass deletions of posts and comments, including fairly neutral articles about the victim count and donating blood. According to mod /u/hoosakiwi, “/r/news was brigaded by multiple subreddits shortly after the news broke. This resulted in threads being filled with hate speech, vitriol, and vote manipulation.” To address these concerns, the mods created a megathread where users could aggregate information about the incident and leave feedback for the mods. Nonetheless, the megathread was riddled with removed comments. Users were asking why everything was being deleted, stating that the entire subreddit is a disgrace, and accusing mods of deleting posts that mentioned the shooter’s alleged connection to ISIS. You can read the entire thread, including the removed comments here.

/u/RNews_Mod responded to these complaints and allegations by saying “Only comments breaking our rules are being deleted. If you think its more productive to cry about censorship then it is to discuss this horrifying event, we suggest you try another subreddit.” And that is exactly what many users did.

In a fairly unprecedented move, the /r/askreddit mods created a megathread for discussion of the event, which featured very few deletions and a great deal of links to news articles. For many users, the fact that the conversation on /r/askreddit contained significantly more useful information than /r/news demonstrated just how broken /r/news’ moderation system has become.

But even more infuriating was the fact that most of the front page posts on the incident were on /r/the_donald, a subreddit devoted to Donald Trump supporters. Users were outraged that they first heard about the incident through /r/the_donald, rather than /r/news. They were asking others about a real news subreddit, without the heavy handed moderation that had botched this reporting. And thus, the door was opened for the subreddit /r/uncensorednews to take the stage.

In the 3 years since its creation, /r/uncensorednews has seen very little subscriber growth. To be more specific, on June 10^th, they had 20 subscribers. By the 12^th, that number reached 65,941. At the time of this writing, the subscriber count sits at 83,196. You can see these metrics here.

Few people knew much about the subreddit or its moderators; they were flocking there because of the name and the buzz surrounding the incident. Concerned about the content and moderator team on /r/uncensorednews, /u/rhiever analyzed the network of subreddits moderated by the /r/uncensorednews team. They found the strongest connections—subreddits that had more than 2 /r/uncensorednews mods in common, among /r/PublicHealthWatch, /r/europeannationalism, /r/European, and /r/SaveEuropa. I won’t go into a detailed analysis, but these subreddits spread white supremacist, homophobic, and transphobic bigotry.

credit: /u/rhiever

None of this was an accident. /u/itty53 provides a compelling overview of the implications of /r/uncensorednews’ meteoric rise. They write:

Every time a sub goes through an exodus, a hundred others crop up.

People in Stormfront and similar groups pay attention and they try to catch the exodus.

It’s like there’s an apartment building on fire, people are jumping from windows. And the KKK shows up outside their klan garb to catch folks as they fall. They’re not there because they feel bad about the people and want to help them. They’re hoping for some version of a Stockholm effect where the person who jumped ship is suddenly more trusting of the person who caught them, and more likely to listen to them in the future.

It’s a recruitment tactic. And it’s been happening like clockwork for years here. If you’re unaware, go ahead and search “Reddit” on the Stormfront forums. You will see case after case after case of brigades being planned, subreddits targeted, strategies to use, lists of users to avoid, etc. This is what most on reddit don’t realize: the racism and hate message is absolutely organized. It is not just the way that “reddit is”, despite the fact that googling “Stormfront and Reddit” will show you blog post after blog post condemning reddit as the new home of racism on the internet.

They target news subs. They target fringe groups. /r/european, /r/conspiracy, /r/worldnews – All primary targets, have been since 2013. They’re not interested in flame wars either. That’s not their MO. Their MO is copy/pasting the same cherry-picked ‘facts’ about their chosen target of hate.

So when you see someone insinuate that reddit is just full of racists, take note: It’s not full of racists at all (edit: however they’re here, assuredly, just not the majority or even close to it). It’s targeted by them. Because it is quite the liberal den of bleeding hearts. And let’s be real: Those liberals do the same thing here. They preach, they evangelize their philosophy, they try to convince people and bring more to their side. Everyone does it. Especially to a group of 20-somethings who haven’t fully made up their minds.

 

I’m not terribly interested in wading into the question of whether or not /r/news’ deletions were justified—it would take a great deal of digging through cached and archived graveyard threads to do any systematic content analysis of deletions and then make separate justifications for posts. What is interesting to me is the fact that allegations of censorship in a moment of extreme tragedy and high emotions brought a flood of users to a subreddit run by explicit racists and neo-Nazis.

Responses to this revelation about the mod team varied. Some users were extremely disturbed and disappointed by the fact that both the leadership of and content within /r/uncensorednews was explicitly racist. Others didn’t seem to care at all, stating that they simply wanted a news aggregating site that allowed for complete freedom of opinion. But the ultimate irony is the slew of reports from redditors saying that /r/uncensorednews mods have already removed many comments and banned users that criticized their white supremacist connections.

This story is so bizarre, so complex, so full of twists and turns, it merits a recap. Thousands, maybe millions, of Reddit users wake up on Sunday morning looking for news on the horrific Orlando shooting. They visit the front page of /r/all. The only subreddit they see reporting on the incident is /r/the_donald. They try to understand why /r/news has no posts. /r/news, a subreddit that is frequently flooded with vote brigading and bigotry, has apparently over-extended their moderation. This sends a massive influx of users to the newly-discussed /r/uncensorednews, who soon discover its racist leadership and content.

Had the mods of /r/news been able to predict this outcome, would they have acted differently? I imagine so. The combination of the algorithmic force that propelled /r/the_donald posts to the top, the incredible difficulty mods have in monitoring and curating a massive flood of posts in a short period of time, and the opportunism of a few Reddit users looking for a means to promote their racist subreddit, made this entire debacle nearly unpredictable. Or perhaps, the mods of /r/news couldn’t have predicted it, but the mods of /r/uncensorednews certainly could, and did.

It’s a good microcosm of our media landscape in general. News outlets report on mass shootings and encourage others to seek fame through violence. Journalists write about hate sites hoping to reveal their toxicity only to send even more traffic, and perhaps more devotees, to their front door. A public figure criticizes a racist tweet and experiences such severe blow back they are forced to recede from public life for a period of time. It’s overwhelmingly complex, and good intentions often don’t matter.

Britney is on Twitter.

What does it mean to take care of yourself in a cyborg society? How do people with mental illness cope with the demands placed on us in an always-on, work obsessed, and often alienating culture? What sorts of tools are available to us, to help us take care of ourselves? What follows is a relatively personal essay outlining the tools that I’ve found useful. As you might expect, they aren’t universally applicable. They’re just what work for me. But I’d love to hear readers’ thoughts and experiences.

Guided Meditation Apps

There was a time in my life when I cringed whenever someone told me I should meditate. Maybe because it seemed like it was some hippy-dippy, often appropriative bullshit. In retrospect, I think it was because I didn’t know what it was or how it worked. But mostly, I refused to meditate because I was terrified of being alone with my own thoughts. A lot of stuff goes on my head, and at times it can be terrifying, negative, full of self-loathing and anxiety and fear.

I’d heard that guided meditation was a good alternative, because you aren’t alone. I downloaded an app (“Headspace”) to try it out. The first thing I learned was that the goal wasn’t to completely clear my mind, to remove all thought—instead, it was to learn to refocus when distractions arise, to pick and choose which thoughts are useful to you and which aren’t. This is such a valuable skill to learn for folks with anxiety and fixation on negative thoughts. After the free trial ended, I bought the year subscription; it wasn’t cheap, but it’s paid many dividends. There are many other free programs to try as well.

Coloring

So much has been written about coloring that I hesitate to say any more. Some people have been very critical of the trend, calling it “low-stake quick-hit escapism wrapped in the faddish trappings of self-medication.” Others have tried to extoll the benefits of coloring in the language of neuroscience and wellness. I certainly have problems with the rise of a new industry trying to solve such a huge problem like anxiety and mental illness when the root causes of these problems are ultimately systemic and structural. It feels a bit like putting a banana on a bullet wound.

But here I am anyway, with several coloring books and gel pens next to my favorite sitting chair. They’ve staved off more than a few anxiety attacks, and with the soothing sound of David Attenborough describing the mating habits of penguins in the background, coloring has become one of my few happy spaces. But here’s a confession that I’m a bit embarrassed of: sometimes, even pen and paper coloring is too much for me. I’m a total perfectionist, and despite my efforts to overcome this, when I accidentally go out of the lines I sometimes feel like scrapping the whole page. You know you have some serious shit to work out when coloring becomes stressful.

So I did what any good digital native millennial does; I got an app. Make a mistake? There’s an undo button! Wish there was a ready-made pallet to make sure your color scheme is complimentary? Here ya go! It’s the one thing in my life that I feel like I have complete control over. It’s comforting. Not everything in life should be easy, and there’s a great deal of merit in doing things that are difficult, in making mistakes and living with them, fixing them when you can. But there’s also something to be said for finding one little corner of the world where you can just hit the undo button and start over.

Pen and Paper

There’s a reason so many of us come to journaling in our pubescent years, when life often seems terrible and confusing and totally unfair because gosh mom I’m thirteen years old now why are you treating me like a baby? But for most of us, we stop journaling at a certain point. Who knows why? Maybe it feels self indulgent and childish, maybe it’s too much work and we’d rather just watch House of Cards at the end of the day, and maybe we’re afraid of being alone with our thoughts (see above), let alone committing them to pen and paper.

But I’ve found a lot of value in journaling, particularly gratitude journaling in which you find things to be thankful for and do a bit of “bright side” thinking. And when I say pen and paper, I mean it. Not to sound like a digital dualist, but in my experience there is a qualitative difference between typing feelings and hand writing them. I do both. But my thoughts are much slower on paper—I think of things that I might otherwise not have, and the sight of my handwriting and my misspellings and the weird way I curve my g is much more personal than quickly-typed thoughts in Cambria 12 pt font.

Sociality online

I don’t know many people with bipolar disorder, and it can be very difficult to talk about with people who have never experienced it. Forums and discussion groups online have been helpful for me in learning how to articulate my feelings, to feel a little less alone in struggling with my condition, and in finding new tips and tricks for getting by. The bipolar subreddit gave me the impetus and courage to begin seeking treatment years ago, and I’m still grateful to the community for providing a judgment-free space where myself and others can voice things that often seem unsayable. There are countless other sites for people dealing with anxiety, depression, PTSD, borderline personality disorder, and just about every other mental health condition.

There are times when I find myself unable to articulate my feelings and problems in spoken words. When this happens, email, texting, and social media are the tools I turn to for comfort. Emailing an old friend or texting my mom can be a great comfort when I can do little else but vegetate and scroll through comedy Vines trying to distract myself. On the flip side, one of the most important wellness practices for me is knowing when to avoid difficult conversations on Facebook and other sites. When I’m in a manic episode, I can spend hours arguing with someone on the internet; it leaves me empty and exhausted and all too often accomplishes nothing. Abstaining is often as important as engaging.

Drugs

This may be the most controversial technology I mention here, so I’ll try to give adequate nuance to this topic. The pharmaceutical industry receives a great deal of deserved criticism: it is exploitative, manipulative, corrupt, and often over medicates patients. Sometimes the drugs don’t work. Sometimes the remedy is worse than the disease. Patients are often treated as cogs on an assembly line, medicated and neglected because lithium is cheaper than $200/hour therapy.

But some of us need drugs. I would love to live in a world where I could take two weeks off work because I am suffering from an intense depressive episode where I can barely get out of bed and shower, much less concentrate on something and stop crying for a work meeting. But I don’t live in that world. I live in this one. I don’t get mental health days or paid vacations. I can’t schedule my depression or panic attacks or mania so it all fits neatly into my workweek.

Medication is no substitution for therapy. But it’s a tool nonetheless, and I’ve seen an increasing number of essays and articles that border on shaming individuals for seeking drug treatment. But only you know what is best for you, and there is no shame in making use of something that, for many of us, is a life-saving technology. We have to live.

All of these tools, and the myriad others I don’t mention, are deeply personal. I’ve seen conversations about coloring books or prescriptions drugs that made me feel deeply ashamed of using these technologies in my daily life. I’ve been embarrassed to bring them up with others, often keeping them to myself. A few months ago I was loudly ridiculed for telling a friend suffering from depression that I knew of a great guided meditation app, that I could send him a free 30 day trial if he wanted. “Just go to therapy” was the skeptic’s response. But not everyone can simply “go to therapy,” not just because it’s expensive but because you have to be ready.

And even if you are ready and you’re seeing someone, sometimes therapy isn’t enough. My therapist can’t move in with me. She can’t be there 24/7 to tell me that my negative thoughts are unhelpful, that I deserve to like myself, that I’m being too critical. I need something to take with me, to turn to at times when reprieve from the world just isn’t possible. In these moments of shame and stigma, I remind myself that my life matters, that it’s important, that I’ve been on the brink of losing it before and that I will stop at nothing to hold on to it tightly, regardless of the snickering or the judgment.

In a world that tells us to “get over it” while simultaneously chastising us for using the wrong tools to “get over it,” where mental health continues to take a back seat in a medical industry that cares more about charging the patient than treating the patient, where the stigma is still pervasive, I want to talk about it. Let’s talk about it.

Britney is on Twitter.

A favorite pastime of mine is listening to podcasts or stories while playing mindless mobile games. For me, it’s the perfect blend of engagement and passivity—just enough informational input to be stimulating while still being relaxing, and put-downable enough that I can pause to do other things like prepare a meal or… get back to work. The combination of aural and visual stimulus hits just the right balance. I’m always looking for other good combinations of aural and visual input for various tasks: a TV show I can watch while organizing my PDFs, the right music for reading, another for writing, and so on. Proliferation of media texts, and the increasing availability of them, has made much of my life a mixing and matching of sensory inputs.

The degree of this mixing and matching is in part afforded by digital media. Of course, other media epochs had their own soundscapes and visual texts, like listening to a record while reading or watching television while sewing. But the multitude of options for sensory input in digital media is of a different quality. And as platforms alter their interfaces and affordances, the character of our sensory experience of media changes as well.

Autoplay is one of the many blights upon the internet. I have a personal policy of not linking to any website that has an audible autoplay. In my early years on the internet, nearly every website had some kind of autoplay advertising, and I remember clicking and scrolling everywhere trying to find the pause button so my friends and I could watch our Destiny’s Child music video in peace. Then, for a long while, autoplay seemed to go away, or at least lessen. Ad blockers played an important role here. But now, autoplay videos are once again everywhere, with news sites being the worst offenders.

Can autoplay be done right? I think it can, and I hate to admit it, but Facebook seems to have the right idea. Their integration of autoplay in the newsfeed has been relatively unobtrusive and quite functional for a website whose updates so often disappoint users. Videos only play when they are on screen, audio only plays when clicked, and you can scroll back up to a video and it will continue playing right where you left off.

But I never click for sound. To be more accurate, 99.9% of the time, I don’t click for sound. An informal survey of my friends suggests that a lot of people don’t. It’s likely because so often the sound is… disappointing. How many people have ruined a perfectly good video of cats chasing lasers with some high pitched, annoying keyboard music? Even when the music is done well, as is often the case with Buzzfeed’s Tasty videos, it just isn’t worth it. Personally, the inclusion of sound in a 42 second video about mini biscuit pepperoni pizza balls isn’t worth the click. And then, I have to exit out of the video before it automatically starts playing another. What a hardship!

It’s difficult for those of us raised in the era of popular mass media to understand the viewing experience of silent film. But there seems to be a resurgence of silent visual media that, rather than developing under the constraints of media, develops thanks to the affordances of media.

Take Reddit for example. If someone posts a 1:30 long gif or HTML5 video on r/mildlyinteresting, inevitably someone will ask why on earth they didn’t just post the video. And, inevitably, someone will respond with why they prefer the silent version: I’m at work, or it loads faster, or I listen to music when I browse Reddit and why does the sound on this video of glass blowing matter anyway? I’m much more likely to open a link to a silent gif than a video; even if it’s the same content and the same length, it simply feels like less of an investment.

Walter Ong wrote a great deal about the ways media developments change our entire sensory experience and, subsequently, our cognition. Father Ong divided these media developments into three major categories: primary orality, literacy, and secondary orality. Primary orality describes cultures that do not have written language. Ong lays out several features of these cultures: memorization strategies such as proverbs and alliteration, circular story telling devices, and the interiority of thought. Literacy introduced very different language practices, such as linear thinking and abstraction.

Secondary orality came with the onset of electronic media; while Ong did not theorize this last concept in great detail, he was interested in the ways auditory media reintroduced some of the characteristics of primary orality. His argument was not that these characteristics had disappeared with literacy, but rather that human experience existed on a continuum of orality and literacy, and that electronic media such as the telephone and television had the potential to introduce a more hybrid phenomenon.

But what of digital media? Because digital media produces such a complex and variable mediascape, it is much more difficult to develop the kind of straightforward and containable categories that made Ong’s work so influential. Oren Soffer (academic text with paywall) introduced the concept “silent orality” as it occurs in SMS texts. This work analyzed the oral features of written, conversational text, troubling the idea of secondary orality and the division of primary orality and literacy.

Ong characterized electronic media as oral because, of course, of its aural quality. Fitting silent visual media into this schema is considerably more difficult because Ong did not make room in his continuum of orality and literacy for visual communication. Once visual communication becomes silent, as in the case of click for sound videos and gifs, its effect on the sensory experience becomes more difficult to describe. Perhaps a new category in Ong’s schema is needed—visuality may be a good start. With this category we may distinguish between aural visuality and silent visuality, and begin to theorize why silent videos are so popular across digital media from texting to social media.

Britney is on Twitter.