Trolling Alone

Or, unfortunately, together

So I recently learned that the switch from incandescent to LED lightbulbs is “illustrative of a deeper reflex of the manic phase of our late-stage culture - its blind pursuit of autistic efficiency and the ever intensification of illumination, observation, and homogenization,” from a fellow whose Substack is called “Becoming Noble” and who seems very concerned about the decline of the West.

Then I learned that fitness and good health are unmanly.

I’ve also learned that I shouldn’t have female friends, that I’m not trustworthy if I can’t bench at least 100 (or 200?), that I want to imprison people in high-rises and take away their cars, that I should move to Moscow, and that Europe is walkable because it kills its old people. What else? Lots of other things.

It’s slowly been dawning on me why social media is so frustrating and unnerving. It isn’t the direct idiocy I run into; that’s kind of funny. Occasionally I even have fruitful exchanges with people who come in snide or critical, and end up partway seeing my point of view (or, on occasion, even me seeing theirs). Sometimes sparring with a critic is engaging and illuminating. That’s actually one of the good things about being online.

The downside of social media is more subtle and corrosive. It’s the mental distress that comes from being made aware of the sheer lunacy with which you share your society. It does something to you—your ability to trust people, your ability to judge words and arguments at face value instead of straining to hear the dog whistle, your general outlook—knowing that people with these views exist. This knowledge never goes away, or breaks down. It accumulates, a mental persistent organic pollutant, and the symptoms of its poisoning are jadedness, guardedness, and distrust.

I’m not talking about politics or partisanship here. I’m talking about the real lunacy. This idea that the incandescent bulb or the gas stove are primal—man capturing and taming fire—and that only a barren, fruitless, culturally dead, self-loathing technocratic elite could stamp it out and call it progress (see, I can even write like these people, dammit). The idea that there’s something vaguely disreputable about seeking to avoid illness or improving physical health.

Whatever else out there—the people telling you to have kids or not to have kids, the people who think you need to be married before 25 or shouldn’t let your wife leave the house, the people who want to demolish big cities or blame rural America for all of its problems, the people who can’t speak more than two sentences before landing on some lurid conspiracy which would not exist in their consciousness if not for the internet.

You can’t just write this stuff off. These are real ideas, of a sort. Real publications with real audiences play with them. It’s impossible to know the provenance of these ideas or their proponents, in many cases. But they filter out from the online fringe into the real world, in diluted but identifiable strains. And like a car wreck, you can’t look away.

This is what social media does: it jams our brains, forcing them to peer into the sun, forcing them to take the poison that gives you a momentary high. The brain cannot distinguish a hostile exchange or dangerous idea from an actual threat. I think of how crazy it is to scroll a phone, feeling that weird paradox of sitting in a lovely, calm, happy life while feeling that reality is going to pieces.

It makes you uneasy, at worst paranoid. It makes you feel exposed. Jumpy. I pick up Twitter or Facebook steeling myself for the first mention of war or famine or death or some political insanity that I can barely wrap my ahead and which feels maximally designed to press my buttons.