Valley of the Sun Bowl

thought digest, 09.28.2022

Katherine Dee

Sep 29

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A lot of new names after my Tucker Carlson appearance!

You might be wondering what I’m all about. Well, I’ve got bad news for you: I have no idea either! I’m a digital nomad—a smear across cyberspace—but I’m happy that you’re here. I hope you stick around.

Normally, these emails, which I call “thought digests,” are brief rundowns of what’s been on my mind. I’ve been stretched thin these days, so the answer is not much. Or maybe too much, and my CPU is fried.

Since my last note, I attended the third installment of the National Conservatism Conference in Aventura, Florida, where I was struck by how many speakers were concerned about the metaphysical implications of technology. I spoke about new media at Urbit Assembly—shout out to Anika of Forever Mag for organizing such a wonderful event. My writing appeared alongside Jordan Peterson’s in a Tinder retrospective. My dreams of making a docu-short about a Twitter micro-celebrity were, I think, fortunately, dashed. I had a wonderful conversation with Benjamin Boyce, who might have the world’s most relaxing voice.

I also re-watched Napoleon Dynamite, a movie I saw something like a dozen times in theatres, back in 2004. For the first time in easily over a decade, I felt the stir to write fan fiction about an actual media property. The plot is so unsatisfying, and the world is so rich, I always feel compelled to fill in the blanks myself. Napoleon Dynamite has always been so much more than a hokey comedy for me. There’s more to see in that world—I can feel it in my bones.

— Katherine

A thought from Clinton…

If I'm going to be a writer, then I figure I'd better up my game, so I've spent about 16 hours of the past weekend just reading books widely outside my usual obsessions to try and round myself out. Keeping myself off-balance keeps me creative, and keeps me writing. But at the same time, I have an acute sense of what I'm getting myself into and have to stave off the use of reading as a means of avoiding writing.

Here's what's got me worried. The 16th-century French writer Montaigne wrote, “I owe a complete portrait of myself to the public... Amusing notion: many things that I would not want to tell anyone, I tell the public; and for my most secret knowledge and thoughts I send my most faithful friends to a bookseller's shop.”

In something of an aside, Andrey Mir writes in Human as Media: The Emancipation of Authorship, “In their struggle for more and more doses of this drug[, social responses], the users develop a virtual presence at the expense of their presence in the real world. Society has not yet developed a code of Internet hygiene to control such risks. Meanwhile, the situation is changing so quickly that new risks are appearing. There is no time to get used to the old. Risks are increasingly leading to culling rather than adaption. Or perhaps the culling of individuals, as is the practice, will turn out to be a means of adaptation of the species.”

You've got to love that Russian directness!

It's perverse: the awareness that I'm particularly sensitive to the risks of pouring my guts onto the web entreats me to do so. I think it's because I do feel some security and a rich sense of identity offline, however, that emboldens me. I suspect that the maintenance of a sufficiently-robust “private” self of ephemeral, embodied social moments and memories, unrecorded by electronic media, can suffice to keep one anchored to the ground. Whatever selective forces were in play, it wasn't algorithms or interest-based affinity groups that created my offline group, either.

Unless beer is an affinity. Like the books I'm reading now, it pays to work outside one's comfort zone.

And one from Taylor…

In all the talk about the influence of sites like SomethingAwful, 4chan, tumblr, Tiktok and Twitter on internet culture, I think an important sphere is woefully ignored.

One that is very near and dear to my heart. I’m talking about browser games like Neopets, Gaia Online, IMVU, Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin, and even Runescape. Special mention goes to Toontown. And if you know what Maid Marian is, then you get bonus points. Back in what I like to call the Silver Age of the internet, sites like these were where all the coolest nerds, emos, and pre-tumblrites first cut their freshly grown adult teeth on the Dos and Don’ts of talking to anonymous strangers online. And it was all supported by developers that supplied their members with plenty of digital swag to develop an identity from the ground up, and of course had no idea what future monsters they were shooting with a life-giving bolt of God’s lighting, all in the name of profit.

My personal favorite was Gaia Online. In 2007 and 08, when Tumblr was born, many of its future members were daily users of the site that, interestingly, was more like 4chan’s annoying little sister, in contrast to its blood feud with its mentally-ill girlfriend/rival Tumblr. Chances are, if you were on Gaia, you probably liked anime, at least a little. The aesthetic was cutesy and colorful, and every member had a pixelated avatar they could customize with thousands and thousands of unique clothing pieces and accessories that could be purchased with Gaia Gold. Many of these accessories were nods to popular culture, memes or just straight up tie-ins to everything from Skittles to Marvel and DC.

Almost all of these sites had some form of currency and economy that ran the entire operation, and contributed significantly to the culture. You could get Gaia Gold by browsing, playing games, and selling items. Bots were a popular tool for farming cash, and of course you could also spend real money for the items you wanted. The sites had tons of forums for chatting and roleplaying, and that’s where I spent most of my time. Your avatar was you, and if you didn’t look cool and unique with rare, expensive items that showed off just how cool you are, why even post, loser? No one even had to vocalize this judgment, and certainly didn’t to me, it was just taken as a given.

Many of the cultural artifacts and memes we’ve lost appreciation for were first being shared on sites like Gaia and Habbo Hotel. You remember Pool’s Closed, but did you know Boxxy, the first e-girl (rawr X3), got her start on Gaia Online, pioneering the art of getting simps to send her gold for items?

The founder of 4chan, moot, once claimed the Rules of the Internet, which gave us Rule 34, originated on Gaia Online, although I doubt that one. A literal 13-year-old girl, known as Loli-chan, first joined the internet through Gaia where she would trade nude pictures for Gaia Gold, before becoming a *chan celeb. Eventually, the FBI got involved. Of course, many of these sites, especially Gaia, were partially defined by their connection to 4chan; its influence is unavoidable. But what they collectively offered that 4chan did not was places for teenagers and college kids too scared to enter the unfiltered dungeon of Anonymous, but still wanted the feeling of a hyperactive, cutthroat and socially-awkward community with its own special rules, memes, lore and cliques. Also you had the benefit of an actual avatar, which gave you an identity. What 4chan did not yet know, and perhaps these sites did, as SomethingAwful before them, was that Identity would soon become the most important thing in the world.

The gamification of modern life may not have started with Gaia or Neopets or Runescape, but it certainly crystallized there for millions of young millennials. Everything about you, anything that’s worth talking about anyway, can be bought and sold. You might not even know it’s an important part of you until you’ve bought it! And if you don’t have the gold to buy your identity, maybe you can get someone else to buy it for you, or you can just keep playing the game and “get good”. Followers, likes, producing content. While YouTube and MySpace were instilling the religion in us all, these browser games were doing it too, but with cute or cool characters, level ups and experience points, achievements, handicaps, safety rails, freebies and tips & tricks.

The remnants of their models can be felt all over the net, in Twitter and TikTok or Fortnite and Roblox, where the philosophy of fandom has begun to control almost every aspect of how we interact with one another. What if Twitter was even more like a game? Imagine for just a moment, if Twitter or TikTok had a huge achievement list, with special titles. And a step worse, users created the achievements themselves. Get 10,000 followers with Pepe Avatars for a special shade of green to your twitter handle. Now, it’s likely that the lack of these kinds of corny game-like features actually helps modern social media achieve such massive reach. But what if they don’t even need to add the features, because the users can do it all on their own, after years of experience?

Some housekeeping…

We were going to do a discussion of The Cybergypsies by Indra Sinh today, but pre-existing subscribers asked if we could postpone it. The new discussion date is 10/12 on Discord. If you’re a paying subscriber and don’t have a link, just shoot me an email.