In early 2017, Flaunt magazine published a series called “Can We Halve Your Attention? The Memeing of Life: A[CTRL-C] + [CTRL-V] FAILED EXPLANATION.” My contribution was a short satirical piece, “It Could Have Been a Brilliant Career,” about a young person whose self-perception has been radically altered through having his entire existence documented and shared on social media.
Though the connection between mental/emotional/spiritual/physical/social health and technology is now so fundamental to public discourse as to be rendered banal, I have not become inured to it. It preoccupies me greatly. Last week I watched Lauren Greenfield’s documentary mini-series Social Studies, and found it upsetting without being at all surprising. A recent episode of The Assignment with Audie Cornish, about ethical considerations around posting images and information about children online, reminded me of “It Could Have Been a Brilliant Career,” and inspired me to return to the piece, contemplate its themes, and share a revised version with you under a new title, “Superlative.”
Superlative
A Story
They tell you nothing lasts forever, but plenty of things last longer than you want them to, and some things feel like they should last forever and don’t. My mom says she’ll love me forever, and science says everything and everyone will die, so I know that’s more of what my dad calls “her wishful thinking.” My mom thinks wishfully about losing eight pounds and my grades and getting back together with my dad. She says that if I pass math and social studies, she’ll quit smoking, but what she doesn’t know is that I need her to keep it up, I’ve made a business of selling loosies at school for almost a year, and at $2 per, ten kids a day, five days a week, I’m raking it in.
The verb post is defined as a display or notice in a public place, and I guess the internet is the most public place there is now, especially when hardly anyone is outside, and whoever is outside is looking at a phone. My mom displayed her whole pregnancy—you can still find the archive if you dig down deep enough into the sad sinkhole that is her online life—and her labor and my birth, and then my infancy, and then my childhood. This, I’m certain, will go on and on and on. She’s always shoving her Proto in my face or implicating me in one of her elaborately crafted selfies. This, regrettably, has only been of meaningful benefit to me once, when one of her posts blew up, one that featured me as a breastfeeding newborn.
Back when social media was more tribal, you had your different apps and feeds, and you used them for different things, like posting photos (PicPit), making friends (FriendZone), scoring human value points for everything you bought (Zoid), and creating a parallel existence if you were too depressed to participate in the actual world (SurreaLife). There were more then and there are hundreds more now, and they criss-cross and vibrate together as one pulsating cybermass.
We built pieces of technology that move so quickly it’s like our brains are whitewater rafting without end, and now everything in creation is always flowing through me and nothing ever sticks. I love it. I am bathed in images and microblips of sound and light all day and all night, and it’s fucking awesome. Who needs to remember anything? History is irrelevant when every moment is transformed into an event but not a single one means anything, not really. I’d get into this more but it’s too complicated, and complicated usually becomes boring.
Let me describe this picture to you. It was posted on PicPit. It’s baby me, sucking on my mom’s tit, which is enormous. I’m white, my eyes are brownish-blue, my hair is just a thin layer of peach fuzz. You can see part of my mom’s nipple, and some of her face (nose, chin, the left side of her smiling mouth, her left eye), and her hair falling over her forehead. But the center of the image is me, and I’m sucking on my mom’s tit and looking at the camera, like directly into the camera, as if I understand it as a reliable entity in my life even then, and I have this deranged look on my face, like I’m happy.
My mom says people used to care about boobs on the internet. She said she used to have her accounts reported and blocked for posting images of herself naked, with or without a baby. I try to imagine this and I just can’t. It’s like trying to imagine how people lived before the invention of text messaging, or fire. It’s a world I don’t want to know or be a part of. What I love about the internet is that I’m twelve years old and I’ve seen everything there is to see. I’ve seen people having sex, people being born, people being assaulted and murdered. All themes of great art, of great literature—isn’t that right? It’s the best education kids have ever had access to. It’s like, hey, assholes, this is the world. You can’t hide it from us.
There must be billions of pictures like this on the internet, who knows why someone picked mine. But one day, years after it was posted, I’m nine years old and I’m scrolling through FunTime on my Vital and I see my own baby face looking back at me, and right underneath my dumb expression, is the caption: YOU MAD, BRO? And I’m like, cool, I’m famous. And then I’m like, wait, is this cool? How do I feel about this? Is this fucked up? So I search a bunch of different word combos—baby on nipple, baby likes boob, weird baby breastfeeding—and every search brings up this one picture of me reproduced across platforms along with a variety of captions: MORE, MORE, MORE. MY EVIL EMPIRE WILL RISE. CHILDHOOD OF A LEADER. I’M LOVIN’ IT. THIS BITCH. You get the idea.
The weeks after the world discovered my meme were the best of my life. Kids at school taunted me, their insults undercut by jealousy, by desire. One of my classmates had the post blown up and printed out and hung it up in our cafeteria, and another classmate—though it could’ve just as easily been a teacher—snuck it into a PowerPoint presentation during a school-wide assembly. I was voted Most Likely to Be Famous and Most Likely to Become a Successful Influencer. It was featured on tabloid blogs like Gossipist and Fuckweed. The New York Times interviewed my mom and I, and published photos of our apartment. MSNBC invited us onto a morning show for a special Christmas episode. Everyone knew my name, everyone recognized my face, everyone wanted what I had.
Users of the internet enter into a sacred agreement to never complain about or dispute the way their words or images are used. That’s just a fact. It isn’t law, not yet, but it will be. My mom said she wasn’t concerned about being “exploited”—esoteric!—but she was worried about me feeling humiliated, and this is one of those important generational differences: what would have humiliated someone her age is a rite of passage for someone like me; no, it’s more than that—it’s a gift, a blessing.
I felt no shame then, I feel no shame now. What I do feel is anger and despair, because I’m not the exception, I’m not the thing that sticks, and while the memeification of my innocence is still out there, orbiting the alternate universe we have collectively crafted with our exquisite hearts and minds, free to be manipulated by anyone for any purpose, nobody cares enough to manipulate it, nobody wants to manipulate me. I’ve been forgotten, left behind, absorbed into the singularity. This, a fate worse than death, I cannot accept.
I’m not insisting that I should be remembered forever. That would be arrogant. All I’m saying is that knowing I was popping up on screens across the world was like existing in four dimensions, like exploding beyond time and space, and it wasn’t just cool, it was a liberation. The only thing I can compare it to is that inner peace I carried with me when I was a kid, a kid running down a big hill, maybe my parents were there, chasing me, catching me, laughing, and I ran so fast I was nearly flying, my feet hardly touching ground, going going going, my whole body full of sun and sky and air, a feeling that comes from nowhere and everywhere, a feeling I’m afraid I will never find again.
Reading Recommendation: In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin