Internet People

good at online, bad in real life

“An abandoned funeral parlor,” he said. 
“It’s full of ghosts: the little whore, the madwoman, the pickpocket—all those people I’ll never see again. They won’t come out there. I like the house in Parker very much, but it’s too sensible. Here…”
“Here there was a sort of magic,“ I said.
“Magic? I don’t know. But at least people dropped in, things happened.”
	—Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

The Iron Law

About two decades ago, some of my friends and I noticed something in our lives and started talking about it. The people we met who were "good" at the nascent social media at the time—Friendster, Last Night's Party, whatever it was—turned out to be dullards in real life. Legitimately boring people. Nothing interesting to say. No sense of humor. No warmth.

This came as a shock. They seemed so cool in the pictures and posts. Which had led us to believe they led fascinating and charmed lives filled with interesting conversations and adventures and good times. 

We wanted these people to like us because, even at that early date, they had cache. (The truth is that we wanted to end up in their party pictures where all the attractive people, the “white belts” as they were called at the time were ending up.)

But when we ended up hanging out with them and their people in some dark bar, it was boring, everyone seemed to be “friends” but no one seemed to really know each other.

Of course, when each of us experienced this alone and in isolation, we assumed WE were deficient, that we just didn’t have enough to maintain their interest. 

It was many many years before we got confident enough to wise up and put it all together.

There is a phenomenon that everyone can recognize but it doesn’t really have a name. So I’m turning it into a law, an iron law, like Chesterton’s Fence or Chekhov’s Gun or one of those other truisms:

The better you are online, the worse you are in real life.

One more time, slightly rephrased: The better you are at crafting your personality online, the worse you are in person. 

It is sad, it is inescapable, this life is finite, the scales and time hang over us all, it is not possible to be all things at once. Doing and being one thing takes away from doing and being the other.

All that work and energy that goes into being witty and clever for particle internet friends, goes out from being a human being. 

Eyes seeking the black endlessness and ironic anonymity of online space.

This is how, for a decade or so, people who sucked in person got kinda famous on Twitter.

Have you ever MET, actually hung out and got drinks, with someone who was kinda famous on Twitter?

If you have, there’s a 90% chance they were weird, shifty, off-putting, using online-language in person.

They make funny comment or quip or are incisive or good at memes. Or they're mean and ironic. Haha. People online likey. Funny tweets, likey.

In all these years, I’ve yet to see the Iron Law of the Internet violated.

I have never met a person with a well-crafted online personality who is AS GOOD as they appear to be online in person. North Carolina's state motto: esse quam videri. to be rather than to seem. 

They seem-seem but they not be be.

The Internet as Prosthetic 

There are a lot of mentally ill people who are attracted to the internet. 

Not even mentally ill. Also physically or vibe-wise strange people—maybe it's just a weird voice or tick or an off-putting manner, shifty eyes, strange sense of humor, froggy lips, shut-ins. Or people who were never properly socialized. Or were too alone and paranoid to get out there and become social beings. 

Maybe it's that they’re too attractive and cool, so they locked themselves up in Rapunzel’s castle (I have seen this too.) 

Whatever their shortcoming or quirk is—a quirk that is IMMEDIATELY OBVIOUS TO EVERYONE THAT MEETS THEM IN PERSON—the Internet hides it for them and helps them appear to be better than they are.

I'm talking about ingrained personal characteristics that lead a person to take a path of the online life.

For them, the internet is a prosthetic. They can accentuate their good qualities and diminish their undeveloped qualities. 

For a while, I acquiesced to the widely accepted idea that this was good or at least non-harmful—wasn't it fine for the weirdos and the isolated queers and the shut-ins who had social anxiety who can't meet in person should have a chance to build community and have friends? 

I’ve been around people with real disabilities my entire life. Not “autistic” as in “I’m kinda weird and strange” but autistic as in “know how to do the bear hug and shield yourself from the punches.”

My brother is in a wheelchair with muscle mobility issues, and the Internet allows him to have a very active social life and be in touch with dozens or hundreds of people from his living room. For the disabled, the Internet is a vital and beautiful thing. I hope the prime beneficiary of the coming technological and automation leaps will be the disabled.

What I am talking about here is not actual disabled people. I am talking about people who have the basics of what they need in this world but still steal from the disabled, steal ADA accommodations and words, steal from the actually-autistic, because they are weak and afraid.

Dealing with Internet People in Real Life Settings

People have gotten bad in person. It was bad before, but it’s worse than ever now. They have no social skills. They’re too inside themselves.

I think it’s kind of crazy that the most popular influencers and writers of the moment (I’m thinking of

Rob Henderson

) are in the business of teaching basic social skills.

Social events are work. Social events and social things are hard. We all have to deal with them. That’s life. We all have to put on a smile and ask questions and reveal things about ourselves and pretend to care about things we don’t care about, we all do our part in making conversation. 

There is no kind of person I hate more than those who come to things and think they don't have to do the work of building and contributing to conversation for conversations to be good. I can’t stand it when people show up to social events and are quiet and don’t contribute and when people glare at them, they give a squirmy look, “I’m awkward, I’m weird.”

You have to give a little bit. Reveal something embarrassing. Tell a story. Get out from behind the wall. You have to contribute. 

If you don't, you’re social deadweight.

Stakes but No Plot

I very much enjoyed reading literary agent

Danielle Bukowski

post “stakes without plot.” (I hope she’s not absolutely mortified being tagged here in the middle of my screed—sorry Danielle!) 

She writes about reading The House of Mirth at the same time as reading two other contemporary novels. 

I’m going to quote a full paragraph from the post, I think it's important:

There is a kind of contemporary novel that has stakes but, arguably, no real plot. To borrow a term from the kids, these books are mostly just vibes…There is often a premise: a reason we are meeting all of these characters at this time in particular. But the chapters read like little vignettes or sketches, scenes with great descriptions that deepen our understanding of the characters and make us think, and these chapters give the books stakes (a reason to care enough about each character and how they might all fit together to keep going) but if I were to describe to you the plots of these two novels they’re essentially… a group of people connected by X are living their lives. They don’t really have plots in terms of actions moving the narrative forward.

This is how I feel these days every time I pick up a high-brown novel on say, Fitzcarraldo Editions, or read a story and its about something that happens to someone on the Internet. 

Or a novel where the main events are events taking place on the Internet.

There are at least two (2!) literary magazines  (I can't think of the names of them, Real Life is one) specifically devoted to investigating The Internet, in a “the-way-we-live-now” kinda way. There are many podcasts based around Things-That-Happened-Recently-on-The-Internet (ie. mini-controversies, fights, dramas, etc.) I’m thinking mainly of Blocked and Reported. The situations they describe have inherently low stakes. 

Why should I care? No one experiences anything, except feelings washing over them alone in their rooms.

I can’t stop seeing the phenomenon everywhere now. Stakes but no plot. Often, there is not only no plot, but no stakes. A24 movies, literary essays, short stories.

Novels About the Internet, Internet Lit, Lit 2.0

A few recent-ish Internet Novels we were told were Good and Important to read:

Fake Accounts: about something that happens regarding an instagram account, online.

Early Tao Lin: a self-described autist who lives mostly on Gchat navigating life in the real world.

The Novelist: about emptiness of life online.

Honor Levy, My First Book: haven’t read it, but I can only imagine this is about being a very-online twenty-something.

I’m not going to do a comprehensive review because as the kids say, “I’m not reading all that.” No stakes, no plot, no characters, no spirit—just nothingness, meaningless things "happening" but not happening.

Again, instinctive repulsion, I would rather read a book a novel about baseball or ship-building, anything, anything but a novel about the Internet.

I skimmed through much-lauded Jordan Castro's The Novelist—same exact problem as in Tao Lin's novels, except written by someone about ten years younger. Just depressing disembodied-ness. 

I hate how The Internet has become a topic that people feel is worthy of discussion and analysis or fictionalization—there are writers like Sam Kriss (do i tag Sam Kriss here? I tagged the others. I dunno…what’s the appropriate Substack etiquette?) who throw their god-given talents into a garbage disposal unit writing clever, smart-sounding essays about Ibn Khaldun and "the ghosts of the internet" for people who are also wasting their god-given life "thinking about the internet.”

I know this might sound, ugh, Elder Millennial—but the thing about the Internet is that its a nullity, an empty void, it is fear embodied.

I hate how people find it acceptable to themselves or others to speak in real life conversations using Internet-coded language rather than normal language. The language these people use to express themselves is so insidery, so up its own ass, that I can't repeat it here. When they emerge from their caves using the language out in the world that they've been using to talk to their "friends" they sound like insane people, I don't know how they can live with themselves.

Like cryptocurrency, the internet is a symbiote off of Real Life, real things. Like crypto, it is a parasite, relying on the stability of the existing economic system and the existing physical energy infrastructure.

It cannot sustain or be anything completely on its own.

Tao Lin in the 2010s: The Meteor of the Storm

Tao Lin

’s novels were kind of interesting because at least what they did was present the life of a guy who was the harbinger of all this—a very awkward online guy, a guy whose real life was being behind a keyboard and in person seemed like an awkward disaster—in his books at least what you got was a self-awareness and recognition that all of it was weird, that it was kind of autistic.

My problems with Tao Lin's early novels was that they took place entirely on the Internet and chat. Essentially, they were records of ghost-people, blank young people without lives—there is a word for this, for those Japanese kids that never leave their bedrooms, and do nothing, I can't remember the word, but these novels reminded me of that.

This was clever, this was kind of new.

I have not read Tao Lin's later novels (I guess I stopped just before Taipei came out) so I do not know if he outgrew this trend and went back to reality, but from what I can glean, I think he did and I think he is now writing about drugs and spirituality and stuff, but I see that as recently as 2022 he was still doing the gimmicky "Gchat literature" thing where people talk on Gchat and purport this to be literature or talks about literature.

I admire his work ethic and dedication to his idiosyncratic vision and wish him the best, but I hope he is shepherding the people that follow him away from the awful alt-lit Hipster Runoff internet world he helped build.

I remember punk being something important to him earlier on and it made me sad, the idea that someone who grew up a punk could lead such a shut-in kind of Internet Person-life—to me, punk was always about being out late at night with friends and doing things as bodies in the real world and feeling the sun and the cold in the park at night and feeling intensely alive.

I am lucky to be just old enough and born on the cusp of a time when people did real things and that was what we called living. I had experiences I thought were normal but they were not, they were unique and momentary.

We were intensely alive. Physical bodies. In the world. We weren’t like these people today, completely trapped inside the 2001: Space Odyssey clean room.

"But Aaron," I know someone out there is saying: "We’re all on the Internet all the time now, its our everything, this is the Way-We-Live-Now. And these are incisive critiques, artistic interventions, if you will, into how we have all moved into a purely online culture...”

I hear your intellectual rationalizations. But its dead, it’s just all dead.

I know on the one hand all of these books are meta-commentaries about the emptiness of the modern condition or whatever, but that doesn't stop me from feeling a kind of repulsion towards them—literary trends are always contagious, and since in some way literature is a reflection of ways-of-being and ways-of-existing, I can't help but feel like these books are spreading or even romanticizing non-living—and I guess I believe that everyone has a responsibility to shepherd people towards life and not non-life, even if what they're portraying is non-life.