Thanks for meeting me here on such short notice. I picked a public place so there’d be no worries about either of us “freaking out”. The hidden cameras are for your protection as well as mine, and oh by the way I’m live-streaming this to anywhere from four to five dozen people so cool it with the racial slurs. There might be kids around.
I’ve made quite a few friends in my time on social media, and more than a few enemies. The enemies part, well, oftentimes that one’s on me. Because I need to remind you of some things about myself.
Long enough ago to be historically significant, I was a surly record store clerk in a shopping mall. That is who I was over the lion’s share of the 1990’s; the absolute stereotype of the unpleasant, arrogant, condescending, angst-ridden, counter-dwelling slacker. Guys like Kevin Smith and Richard Linklater used to make movies about us. As a side gig, I was selling Xeroxed copies of my cartoons (“zines”, if you will), which is practically another 90’s stereotype. Well, that was me. I was that guy.
After high school, my snobby, weepy art-punk personality was tempered by years of interacting with hostile customers in music retail. Again, this is thirty years ago, so this may be before you were born, and I’ll do my best to explain something that to modern readers might seem alien and incomprehensible.
Working in music retail means you stand for hours at a time, typically behind a cash register. It means that no matter how fond you are of Christmas, you will come to dread it as you would your own painful demise. It means that no matter how much of a “people person” you consider yourself, within a week you’ll be fantasizing about violent mass murder. Take the most obnoxious, shittiest song you’ve ever heard in your entire life. Now imagine 1000 people asking you where it is over the course of ten hours. Imagine 100 of those people shoplifting it while your back is turned. Imagine 800 people reading you the Riot Act in front of everyone because the song is “too expensive” (of course it is, we’re in the fucking mall), or because they don’t want to buy an entire album for just one track. Imagine the remaining customers buying it, then purposely damaging it so they can demand their money back, then cussing you out at top volume when you can only offer them an exchange, as per store policy.
The song is “Whoot! There It Is!!”, by 95 South. Don’t lie to yourself. You’d have done a fucking swan dive off the upper level into the food court before lunchtime.
When I made the transition to website proprietor just before the turn of the century, largely to promote the Last Laugh humor zine I was self-publishing, I subjected myself to an extensive trial-by-fire of early internet culture. Whereas in the music store I was expected to know and identify as much recorded music as humanly possible, on the internet I sought out the most offensive humor imaginable. Stuff I’d heard about in retail, but didn’t believe existed. Music and movies that I wanted to know if I could endure, and/or mine for acerbic material.
Early internet was grand because you had to be smart to access it. Most people weren’t online all day, because the modem used your phone’s landline. That meant kids were much less of a nuisance; parents were fully aware of their children’s internet use (within the home at least), and fathers were in general touchy about what might get broken. But the humor of the dotcom boom era was, almost infallibly, as pure as it gets. Humor so good you could get addicted to hunting for it. Humor that makes you laugh from the darkest parts of your soul, and it becomes a part of you, from that day on.
The reason for this historically high watermark of lulz was simple, and akin to the “zine revolution” I’d been some negligibly tiny part of in the 1990’s; everyone was posting humor based upon what they themselves found funny, without a thought about whom it might offend. All that mattered was impressing others by making them laugh. It wasn’t just images; in fact, pictures were downplayed due to their ability to strain patience with heavy load times. What you see here is a holdover from the days when regular people would attempt to entertain readers in text article form, which itself was a holdover from the hand-typed zines of yesteryear.
So; take a grouchy, know-it-all music retail clerk, who also happens to be a misanthropic, quasi-satirical cartoonist, and add over two decades of constant competition with the gnarliest corners of the world wide web. What do you get?
Well, you’re looking at it. That is the perspective from which I write here, intended to be consistent with both the titular comic strip and my previous rantings. My political leanings align almost identically with a guy who calls himself “Salty Cracker”, and more or less with The Babylon Bee (a far better Onion rip-off than I’d ever managed with The Last Laugh). Neither of those entities has had a smooth relationship with social media platforms over the years; why did I expect to fare any better? Why would anybody?
Long story short; I chased an unfeasible goal for about half of my life, that being selling my harshest, most personal self to the public, and expecting people to accept extremes that took me years of desensitization to handle. It happened so gradually that I didn’t even notice, but I’d been trying to accomplish this where mommies post pictures of their children at play.
That, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. However, there is an inevitable cost incurred when this happens; someone gets offended on behalf of children. Now that images are easy to share instantaneously, you can put a picture of a child in the vicinity of a comment you make, and voila, the reader gets a subliminal actor that will persist until another image bumps it from their neural buffer. People who think they aren’t gullible believe what you say, and people who say they don’t get offended start investigating you in a quiet, seething rage. Suddenly something you intended as a larf is being intentionally misinterpreted by bored, unhappy people who have nothing better to do than fuck with you.
That kind of thing doesn’t happen if you avoid corporate social media. If you make your nest in the deep dark web, where censorship finds no purchase, you must accept as I did that you will be shunned by the mainstream. There is too much liability in even acknowledging an idea that goes against the Approved Media Narrative. Politics and mass entertainment are now conjoined twins. Multinational companies spam you with emails that speak to you like a long lost friend.
“Friend”. Think about how much meaning has been stripped from that word in the past fifteen years. I’ve had friends in real life for longer than that who decided that an implied parasocial connection with a public figure whom I’d lampooned was more important than our friendship. The complexities and nuances of human interaction, not to mention civil courtesies and mores developed over the last 200 years, are reduced to Like, Follow, and Block. Instead of analyzing why someone’s opinion “triggers” you into a psychotic apoplexy, you can just make them cease to exist.
Then you can easily justify it by naming some bad example of web behavior you’ve read about, “trolls” or “misogynists” or whathaveyou, and bingo, you’ve triumphed. Without even getting up from your computer. Never once giving a thought to how you’ve ruined yourself as a person by establishing this all-too-common behavior pattern. Endorphins are a hell of a drug, aren’t they?
Social media is the one place in the universe where it’s possible to become world-famous for nothing more than existing, just like how Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. After you’ve been rewarded like that, you are forevermore spoiled rotten. You know why I won’t stock shelves, or work at a grocery counter to pay the bills? Because I’ve been paid thousands of dollars for creating artwork, that’s why. Because I don’t want the responsibilities inherent to the job, or the useless, fatally politicized healthcare. I don’t want to be around people who resent me because they’ve never taken the tangible risk of creating something.
Because I don’t want to take the tangible risk of exposing my creative self to people who get their rocks off attacking anyone they perceive as better off than they are.
Look around you. That’s literally all social media is. Envious, bitter people who seek out and share things that they believe will lionize themselves in the eyes of their peers. They have a computer or (more likely) a smartphone, so we all get to suffer. Half the time they don’t even pay for anything, like I have to. They’re just there, like virulent bacteria under a septic toilet. They’re indistinguishable from bots, or artificial intelligence.
The persistence of stupid, gullible users on social media is a net positive for the corporate world, because no one is easier for authorities to control. Someone like me will always be a problem. There is no future wherein I owe some great financial reward to a social media platform. It’s all a trap and a ruse, top to bottom. Literally, the best I can hope for is that someone I admire artistically becomes aware of my existence. There’s no “hey I like your stuff, come play with our band for cash”, no “hey let me pay you to illustrate this book”, no “we’d love you as a paid writer for our show”. It’s all 100% bullshit, because the stupid and the gullible have infested the internet to the point where anyone in a position to hire you has been worn down to an apathetic nub. They’re too busy working out how they can attach themselves to a girl who became an overnight sensation by describing how to spit on a penis.
When you see something like that happen, you know there’s no legitimate reason to pay anyone for content. There’s no reason to write, draw, or create anything. You are wasting your life. Go ahead; paint the next Mona Lisa, or direct the next Citizen Kane. You will be ignored and forgotten the second that some bare-shouldered slattern sticks her face and fake fingernails in front of a webcam. If not then, it’ll be a day later. You’re better off taking time learning to piss into your own mouth, and even then you’ll become more famous than I ever was.
It’s all over, dude. Social media is digital AIDS, and its users are ardent bug-chasers eager to catch it and wear its debilitating symptoms like a technicolor dream-coat. Everyone wants to play victim, now that merit is valueless. Everyone competes to be the One Who Suffers Most. And nothing makes The Powers That Be happier, because this behavior confirms that their authority will go unchallenged, forever.
This is the monster that social media has brought into our lives. If you think you can lay down with that thing and live on unscathed, go for it. But you’re taking a path I cannot follow. I’ve seen too much and I know too much. I’ve seen close friends turned into simpering corporate cudgels. I’ve seen women eagerly turn against their own sex, and I’ve seen men who lie with every outward breath. I’ve seen children paraded and abused for nefarious political agendas. I’ve seen grown persons abandon their loved ones to kiss the ass of openly-corrupt candidates for high office. I’ve seen people in China hurling housepets out of tenth-story windows, and being welded into their homes, due to pandemic-induced hysteria and totalitarianism. I’ve seen respected members of my chosen field swear blind fealty to mendacious imbeciles, and treat them like knighted celebrities, simply because their name isn’t “Donald J. Trump”. If I had a nickel for every person I’ve lost all respect for thanks to social media, it’d be like I won the Powerball. I’ve seen enough to make me lose every shred of humanity that ever existed in my spirit.
I’ve seen too much. I’ve seen ENOUGH.
Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. Worry about yourself. Worry that you never, ever become like me. I’m always going to be what I am. Be happy with what you are, and what you have. That’s the way to win. Just remember that social media will offer you a million opportunities to lose, every minute of every day. You win through indifference. Act as though social media could disappear tomorrow, and at worst you’d be mildly irked. It didn’t even matter to you twenty years ago. Why should it matter now? “Fear of Missing Out”? That sounds like a “you problem”.
And like I told you, it’s not you.
It’s me.
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