An Amalgamation Of Things

I have nothing smart to say and I can't remember anything

I’m not sure how common this feeling is, whether it’s a feature of being in a lockdown, or writing primarily in a digital space, but for the past few months I’ve been unable to post anything on this newsletter. There’s about 15 or so drafts on the dashboard - fleeting thoughts about moderators, whether Clubhouse is actually innovative, or evidence that social platforms just reproduce themselves, and the physical toll that existing online can exert on fragile bodies. I haven’t been able to finish them for various reasons; A master’s degree I’ve been neglecting, a sample for a second book that’s barely finished (sorry, Matt), a new podcast that I co-founded to try make sense of posting (and you can sub to here).

Ultimately, though, I think the reason I haven’t finished any of the blogs, or even interrogated the fleeting thoughts that come between various forms of content consumption, comes down to something simple: I don’t actually have that much to say. That might sound both incredibly mundane, but a bit concerning. After all, I’m someone who makes a living out of writing, talking about writing and engaging with writing, and who has set up a newsletter specifically so people can take a few minutes out of their day to read what I have to say. But, for the past few months, it has been a struggle to keep up with the internet, to figure out what “the discourse” is, whether it’s actually new, and by extension, where I, a guy who is nearly thirty, actually fit into all this.

Those of you who’ve followed me for a while will know that, despite being referred to as a “podcaster” and “Twitter personality”, I am, in fact, a journalist. I trained in journalism at a technical college, started as a reporter for a small trade publication for Newsagents, and worked in local TV for a while before starting a career on the internet. It’s strange looking back at that moment - one where Twitter was new, doing ‘live tweets’ was an innovative practice designated to “young people” and being able to post a video on a Twitter timeline immediately made you a journalist who could incorporate “digital methods” to revolutionise journalism. It wasn’t that long ago that explainer videos were all the rage, that Twitter hashtags could be churned into at least three articles to feed back into the platform, and, if the company you worked for had enough venture capital in it, you could take home a pretty big salary before you even hit your mid-twenties.

I don’t work for a publication anymore, but in my last magazine job - a digital culture magazine- I was sort of aware there was writing on the wall. While younger colleagues pitched interviews with TikTok stars and noticed new (although often algorithmically constructed) trends on the platform to squeeze content out of in a small window, I struggled each day to find some kind of discourse on Twitter, a niche, bizarre Facebook group online, or something in the neglected ends of barely-used forums. It was a strange experience because it wasn’t like these areas of the internet were dead, or that things weren’t happening on them that would be obvious much later (think, for example, of how minion groups aimed at Boomers can quickly turn into anti-vaxxer groups or spread anti-immigrant propaganda). But, it was the constant demand for immediacy, for content published online to have innate and constructed meanings, that can then be related by the not-quite-millennial-but-not-quite-Gen-Z journalist, for an audience of mostly millennials trying to convince themselves that the internet is actually good still, because of young people.

This isn’t a new thing, and a lot of readers of this newsletter will have probably had similar experiences. So you might also have that strange, disorientating feeling of being online right now; You’re familiar with the boundaries, the aesthetics, the modes of communication, but you’re also either too old, or too young, to participate in them in any substantial way. You’re no longer the ‘internet culture’ person because you’re 25 or older, and it’s cringe when you try to do the dance. “Reaching out” to TikTok creators in order to file the story you need to send that invoice for $150 is exhausting, but you’re not sure if you have the time to do much else. And, while bylines were once a big thing for you, deep down, you sort of know that said article is probably going to be used as marketing copy in order to try get that TikTok creator a brand deal at a chain restaurant.

I’ve had this conversation with a few former colleagues during the course of the lockdown - about the exhaustion of writing, producing and constantly searching for #content, and, moreover, the contrived attempts to ascribe meaning to the content in and of itself. We may complain about how wide the discourse is, or all the bizarre things it keeps producing and reproducing, but it’s also necessary for many of us in order to sustain any sort of living.

But I think there’s a much deeper anxiety too, that few of us in the ‘internet culture’ space are ready to admit - that attributing overblown meanings to an increasing churn of content also represents last-ditch attempts to stay relevant, in an attention economy with shorter and shorter half-lives, and in which capitalisation of content becomes further and further accelerated. Dwindling faith in any feasibly better future through politics and a lack of any possibility of long-term material wellbeing means that ‘relevance’ might be the only thing the “not quite millennial, not quite Gen Z” demographic still can hold on to. And I think this anxiety can be seen in the way we write about the formation of culture on the internet - an analysis that’s overly careful, relies on tried and tested templates, doesn’t question the logic of platforms in any significant way. All of which is to say, it’s a kind of writing in which it’s very clear that the writer doesn’t actually know their place. They’re on the outside, looking in, and stuck in their own cycles of nostalgia.

This was sort of touched on in a recent article in The Walrus , which looked at the relationship Gen Z and Millennials had with TikTok. I thought the tension between the groups was a little trite and overblown, but what I did find interesting was how it points out that Gen Z are the first to have grown up in an online environment where to be a person means consciously packaging and marketing innate anxieties on a huge scale, and in the process, allowing those anxieties to be further commodified and reproduced into content. This might allow a more authentic, personalised form of online existence (and ironically, one that chimes with the desires of platform surveillance). But it also means that the generation who are now considered to be the “internet culture people” have a much more limited view of what digital communities, and by extension, online, can be. It feels like Gen Z have no doubt that the internet, far from being a technology with revolutionary capability, is at its core a trap - one that they must live with, but never quite trust. That friendships and relationships on there can’t really be meaningful, but rather, are inherently transactional and subject to both marketing and constant (marketised) surveillance. And if they can’t dismantle it, it makes sense to milk it for however much they can.

All of which is to say, that while I don’t buy the whole Gen Z vs Millennials online narrative, it’s not because it’s necessarily a stretch, more than that both groups don’t have the time, nor the energy, to really go to war with each other. Instead, I think what we’re actually seeing is a much broader fear that seeps into content : the fear of being irrelevant and forgotten, and an acute awareness of just how easy that actually is.