Shoulda stayed in the group chat
Social media, appropriateness, boundaries, and the blurring thereof
✨ Welcome to obscure arts, the section of my newsletter where I write in-depth explorations of creativity, capitalism, and making art in uncertain times. If you’re only here for book stuff, feel free to unsubscribe from all sections except lexical gaps here.
Well, well, well, what do we have here, the first obscure arts essay in over seven months? Don’t look at me like that; I’ve been on deadline for GUARDIANS 2 and also…I don’t know if I have much to say, honestly. Writing about the state of creativity at large while struggling to be creative is really difficult, but also we are currently stuck in the AI Quagmire and I’m not sure I have much to add to that conversation that wiser heads have not already said.1
The last time I wrote an essay, I mused about the Almighty Algorithm™ and the lowest common denominator, and while a great many other thoughts about social media and AI have proliferated in my brain since then, I haven’t yet figured out a way to convey them all to you—if you even want to hear them. Everyone has A Take on What Is Wrong with Society (READ: The “Youths”) Today; you surely don’t need to read mine. Mine aren’t even backed by a modicum of science or statistical analysis. It’s just vibes here, baby, all vibes.
And the vibes are deteriorating.
A few weeks ago, the fracas du jour on the interwebs was the issue of BookTok and the Seattle Kraken, and while I’m not particularly interested on commenting on that particular topic (as I have no skin in the game), I am a bit more interested in what feels like the near-complete erosion of boundaries between, well, everything. Between fiction and reality, public and private, morality and ethics.
And I think it is a problem of thirst.
Let me be clear: I have no problem with open thirsting or being horny-on-main. The problem of thirst isn’t even really about thirst, not really. It’s about anything we consider acceptable “in group,” but could potentially be considered inappropriate or even harmful when exposed to the public at large. We could even substitute gossip or bitterness for thirst and the principles would still hold.
I think in today’s social media environment, we have trouble differentiating between levels of privacy and intimacy, and this has led to an erosion of commonly held ideas of decency or…boundaries.
I think about boundaries a lot these days. It’s a subject I keep coming back to, this idea of a matryoshka doll of the self, of having different selves for different audiences and different levels of intimacy, but more and more these days I feel as though social media has obliterated the idea that publics—just like audiences—are curated and created.
There is something innocuous about thirst that I think perfectly illustrates this deterioration of boundaries between curated audiences. Because amongst ourselves, our friends, our associates, being thirsty about our objects of desire is fun. It’s a way to bond with each other, to share in the pleasure of horniness, to perform for each other the joy of being ribald, rowdy, and maybe even a bit rude. The object of the thirst has no relation to this group; thirst itself is merely a means to an end for the group to bond and strengthen relationships with each other. A group of friends laughing together over shared thirst is a joke, but once the joke leaves the group chat…what then? Especially on social media?
Is social media the group chat?
Or is social media the public?
Where is the line?
Is there even a line?
I miss the early 2000s internet. The internet was local in 2003.
In the summer of 2003, I had just turned 18 and would be off to college in the fall, leaving behind the perpetual summer and palm treetops of Los Angeles for the grey concrete and brownstone façades of New York City. Everything was great. I was headed off into the greater world on my own, where I could be absolutely anything — anyone — I wanted. I was going from a gated school of less than 300 girls to a university with no campus, no walls, and no boundaries within the city that housed it. I could remake myself into someone cool, someone different, someone more me than the me I had been before this. I mean, it’s not like I didn’t have practice recreating and remaking myself; I had been online since 1999. This was just my opportunity to do it in real life.
In retrospect, that was probably the beginning of the end.
Kids These Days™ probably have no idea just how different the internet was in the late 90s and early 2000s compared to today. I’m off that strange half-generation that the media has alternately termed “geriatric millennial,” “Xennial,” or even “Willennial,” so I remember a world both Before and After everything became “digital.”
Back then, the internet seemed like a whole new frontier. When I was in elementary school, the internet wasn’t really a thing kids had much use for — computers in general really did seem like a machine from future, something only adults would be using to get their work done while we waited to get on and play Oregon Trail. In middle school, it was mostly a replacement for the phone, where I talked with schoolmates and my crushes on AOL messenger, parsing out and negotiating with my parents the single hour after dinner I could hog the landline. The internet: so new, so cool, so precious a resource treaties had to be signed in our household.
Things started to shift in high school. “Ethernet” became a thing, as well as cellphones. The privacy I had to negotiate with my parents now became something I took for granted. Cords were getting cut, both literally and figuratively. I went from taking calls with my friends in the back bathroom, stretching the coiled cord as far from the wall mount in the kitchen as I could, to taking calls on my completely unwired device in my bedroom, conscious only of the “minutes” I was allotted to spend. In some regards, I came of age with the internet and cellphones. After all, 15 is a good age for parents to be giving their children more freedom and more privacy. My parents, more cautious than most, still monitored my private time from afar, but were good about respecting my boundaries. And all that previous negotiating had taught us just where those boundaries were.
At 18 I had a much better sense of the boundaries between private and public than I do now at 38.
The older I get, the more I think that privacy is not a matter of who we exclude, but a matter of what vulnerabilities from which we are willing to emotionally distance ourselves. We divide vulnerabilities into public and private spheres, and those vulnerabilities are deeply individual. We can be private about our gender identities, our financial situations, our religious beliefs, or we can make them public. Sex is often considered private because it is a form of intimacy that we are uncomfortable holding at an objective distance from ourselves, but it is also a form of intimacy we are uncomfortable viewing in others without invitation—from either party. Religious beliefs can be considered private, especially in an environment that is considered dangerous to hold said beliefs, but also in environments where to be public about said beliefs is to infringe upon the freedom of others. That’s the thing about boundaries; they go in both directions. I can put up a fence on my property, but if my neighbor doesn’t respect boundary lines, I will have to find other means of enforcing it. Boundaries are communally respected, not individually maintained.
But I’m not sure if have communities anymore. No, that’s not true. We absolutely have “communities,” but what I feel we’re lacking are the bonds that hold us together, that make us accountable to each other. Without those, we lose sight of the connections that hold us together. What makes us community.
Relationships. That’s the word I was thinking of.
We don’t have real relationships on social media anymore.
When I first joined Twitter over a decade ago, the user base was small enough that it still felt somewhat intimate. Back then, I mostly used Twitter to connect with other publishing professionals, not in a LinkedIn sort of way, but in a water cooler in an office sort of way. Periodically we would participate in publishing-related chats, the hashtag easily searchable, the volume of tweets low enough to keep pace with the conversation. Back then, Twitter actually felt like a community.
But as the userbase grew larger, as the concept of “publishing Twitter” expanded then fractured into “romance Twitter,” “YA Twitter,” “SFF Twitter,” etc. before breaking down even further into authors, aspiring writers, and readers, each group participating in their lanes, of which there was frequent crossover. The larger and more subdivided “publishing Twitter” became, the more gatekeepers there were to be had.
Some of the gatekeepers were more literal than others. Agents, editors, publishers. But eventually, the longer I stayed on Twitter, the more I understood that I had to be vetted and trusted before I could participate in conversations like I used to have in the early days of the platform.
Which makes sense, and to some extent, is healthy. Establishing boundaries is important. But who enforces those boundaries? What are the boundaries? Every couple of months, there seemed to be another “drama” churning up the algorithm of my TL, retweets, quote tweets, subtweets, and of course, The Discourse.
The Discourse. On book Twitter, we interrogate and litigate everything—tone, words, identity. In many respects, this is a good thing. We should examine and re-examine the shibboleths of our culture and society. We should topple the metaphorical statues of slavers and cast them into the sea. But the problem with interrogating everything is that we then start to lose critical nuance and context. We lack the humanizing touch, the face, the life, the soul behind a tweet. As a mob, we become part of purity culture, of leftists and progressives shouting each other down, of BIPOC devouring their own for not proving themselves “enough” for an ever-moving standard. It all comes from the same boot; most of us just can’t see it. There are so many in the younger generations who do not understand how to apply the language of social justice. They lack the ability to contextualize. That’s not their failing; it’s ours. We gave them a hammer and told them to change the world with it; we didn’t teach them how to build with it. Building something that lasts is not only the bricks; it’s also the mortar. What binds us. What holds us together. There can be no community without relationships, no collective composed only of individuals. We each have hammers, and we tell ourselves we are breaking down the structures of power, and in our zeal, we start breaking the kneecaps of those whose blood, sweat, and tears were exploited by the capitalists, simply because their association renders them impure.
Say it with me, church: this is all capitalism’s fault.
I wish I had an answer to the questions I keep asking myself about being someone who exists online. Because I keep coming back to the same thorny issue: boundaries, and the lack of them. I have no choice but to exist online nowadays, I can’t be a private citizen and want to be a public figure who sells books at the same time. Even though I scarcely participate in social media anymore, the fact that I can’t treat it like the group chat I want to makes me not only sad, but lonely. Who am I talking to when I’m writing these essays? Who am I speaking to on Instagram and all the other social media platforms? No matter how small my audience may be, it’s still an audience, not my friends. Nevertheless, I still want social media to be the group chat.
But I can’t let it be the group chat.
Not that I haven’t started and stopped like…800 essays on AI.