I sure as shit tried to give myself a break by going online to write earlier in the day, but the site I use was down. So now it’s 10:30 and I just made myself a late meal (quesadillas) and my headache for today has shunted itself to the recesses of my brain stem, so I’m gonna pretend like it’s normal to be up until midnight on work nights.
Also, Erin made a cheesecake. Miracles happen.
So I saw something today on social media. A person basically wrote what they probably took as a funny comment in the wake of the tragedy of Chadwick Boseman passing away.
The gist of it was, “Here’s who I wish would have died instead of Chadwick.” And then they named one person who is pretty famous in comics (and, because of comics, in other medias too).
I won’t go into names. I’m a defender of the person that made that “hit list” most of the time. I get why some people have problems with them. I’m not a fan of all their work, and I know they, like everyone, have had ups and downs, done great things and not-so-great. They’re what people like to call a “love ’em or hate ’em” person. Because that’s what society has been reduced to. Especially online.
(food is still too hot)
But ignoring the fact that this post, which I’m sure is going to get the poster in some heat since they also work in the industry, is an insult not only to the intended target, but also to Chadwick himself who would never, I believe, have stood for someone using his name to target someone else like that, let’s look at why shit like this exists.
The internet can be incredible. Right? Like, I remember dialing into BBSes on my Commodore-64 (we don’t talk about that) and later on Prodigy where I met some wonderful and creative people. Now, not all of these people were my favorites. You get a virtual room of strangers, some people you’ll take to, others not as much. But we were part of things that were like-minded in the pursuits of writing or playing a game or whatever. And if we didn’t care for one another, well, we could always edge away. The internet was a lot smaller then, but it was still plenty big enough for everybody to not be clumped into thesame space if we didn’t want to be.
The internet has gotten so much bigger. So much easier to get to, better organized, smarter in how it finds you want you want.
And worse. SO MUCH FUCKING WORSE.
So I like to talk about my love of the old LiveJournal, where I found myself writing often, not as a character, but as myself (or a version of myself at least which is still technically a character in a way). LiveJournal was a social media site and set the precedent for a lot of the things that continue now. As a user, you had your own “page.” You would add Friends that you could follow their posts. They could follow yours if they wanted, but it didn’t have to be mutual. As things got more unruly, things were put into place to privatize your posts or block people if you needed. Customization was there, user icons, then photos. Then the first Memes started to show up and I think that is what caused it to lose some of its shine.
At the heart of it though was writing stuff and sharing it with your “group.” You cultivated it, found your people, made your space safe and enjoyable for yourself and others.
There were occasional trolls, but since so much of LJ was about putting yourself into what you wrote, they didn’t seem to gain much power. They didn’t have enough personality to get a following, so when a person to their profile would see them, there was nothing that painted them as interesting enough to spend time on.
MySpace happened because it was flashy. Graphics and music and Top 8’s as a popularity contest. I went to LiveJournal not originally knowing anybody. I went to MySpace because of people I knew from work, mostly. It never really clicked for me, and it seems obvious now that it didn’t really for anyone considering how quickly it came and went. It was really empty calories.
I found my way to Facebook, frankly, because of my mom. Mom wasn’t an LJ user. She’d read mine on occasion, but wasn’t into doing an open diary online. She encouraged most of my family members to go there. And Facebook became so huge that practically everyone just shifted to it. LJ lost meaning if you were writing to a ghost town (which is really sad to think about because that’s so not what LJ should have been about. I see that now more than ever).
In Facebook I had work friends, family, people I went to High School and Middle School with. And so many others. I love comics, reading them, making them, introducing them to others… A lot of the comic people I looked up to were on Facebook. Actors and Writers and Directors too. I could interact with my heroes.
But do you ever look at your Friend’s List now and wonder, “Where did all of these people come from?” Possibly not. Other people are more guarded than I am, often for good reason. But I remember when games started showing up on FB. The worst kind of games. The “sit and wait anxiously to get the next level-up you need, or you can pay us a dollar and get there now” kind of games. The ones where it’s not about skill at all and you never win anything. Some of them, I swear to you, are used in casinos. It’s the same deal. Dopamine convincing you that you’ll somehow win, maybe even get your money back (but unlikely). Just keep playing!
And games really advanced you faster if you added more people. So you’d talk your friends into playing. And your parents if you could. And then you’d just be hit up all the time by other people who wanted to add to their lists so they could advance. So you’d have all these people you didn’t know and you didn’t vet on your list of friends, mostly just seeing them post level-ups or “click this for energy” messages.
But the games kinda played themselves out (pour one out for Zynga), and they even gave us the option to block the posts. Imagine, Facebook of now buckling to give the user a better experience! What a time that must have been!
What followed though was Facebook’s next push. News. Not just news, but publishers of news. They convinced so many big publishers, of papers, of magazines, of television and so on, to come to their platform because, like I already said, everyone was on Facebook! Why wouldn’t you go there? Getting someone to click a link to your site was so much easier if you put it in front of people instead of asking them to come find your URL on Google or Yahoo.
So you know how you go to an airport (remember airports?). I was going to say Newstands but how old do I think you are. But any place that had printed periodicals. You would go in and there would be an organized way to find what you were looking for. Time and Newsweek would be in one section. Popular Science and Wired in another. PC Computing, Guitar World, other specialized stuff sub-sectioned out. And then the “trash” stuff like The Enquirer or Weekly World News would be in the grab and go up front, paying more to be seen as the last impulse buy for someone who didn’t want to be seen and judged carrying it around the store. There were distinctions.
Facebook has no distinctions. And, as far as news sources goes, that’s destructive.
What was even more destructive though was Facebook’s (very short) long con:
Come bring your entire audience to us! And now that we’ve got them all, pay us or they will never see your stuff!
See, when I worked electronics retail, we sold DVDs and BluRays, and the players to watch them on. And then one day I started seeing stickers on the sides of the players for something called Netflix where you could rent the DVDs online, have them shipped to your home, for a monthly fee. We had a (very large) video rental store chain in our mall. I can’t imagine what it would have looked like if someone suggested we start tagging all of our players with that chains sign-up forms, essentially telling everyone not to buy DVDs from us (which at this time took up something between 10-20% of the store). But we had these Netflix stickers that people would take home and sign up and, whoops! Now my old stores don’t sell DVDs and barely sell BluRays any more. Same with CDS (we’d bought an online streaming service but only advertised sign-ups for ones that we didn’t own. BRILLIANT!).
My point is, you have a customer base. You cultivate it. It takes a lot of work to build a rapport and trust with them. It’s personal, that connection. You have to care for it. It’s the only thing that’s keeping you in business.
And then you give that customer base to another entity entirely. Say, “from now on, we’ll be here. In this new, wonderful landscape that we have no functional control over.” And then the owners of that space, having access to all of your old customers, does not need you any more.
Not even a little.
Do you know what the difference is between Fake News (a term that has come out of things like Facebook and Twitter existing) and Real News is? You might. But many, many other people don’t. They not only don’t know, but they don’t care. They have a feed that gives them what they want to see, and more and more and more and more of it all the time, so who cares if it’s real. Who cares if it was created by Newsweek.com or N3w$werk.com as long as it says that I’m great, the people I don’t like are terrible, and sometimes there’s kittens.
You know the worst thing to happen to humanity in the last 20 years? The “Share” button. Do you know why it’s so bad? Because people know how to use it a lot better than they know the “Shut Up” button (also called “Mute” or “Block”).
Say you live on a block, and you have a nice house, and a nice yard, and you’re usually pretty happy with your neighborhood. And then one day, one of your neighbors gets a load of manure. Maybe they were planting some stuff, gardening, that… or maybe they just really love the smell of manure. And it’s not like manure doesn’t have value, so some other people on your block think, “Well, sure. I may not like it like Dave over there, but I’ll take a little manure.” And then they want to share it with their friends and neighbors, so they start flinging manure over the fence, at your mailbox, at your kids as they walk innocently down the street…
And your nice little home is covered in shit.
Fuck you. It’s a perfect metaphor. YOU WILL SHARE THIS WITH EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!
(#likeandsubscribe)
I talk with Erin sometimes about why it matters or not to be part of a “thing.” Erin has a lot of Irish history in her family. I have some too. Erin said something about her being proud of her Irish heritage. And I asked why? What does that mean? And we had one of our long, soulful talks about it. Erin’s never been to Ireland. She doesn’t know or speak Gaelic (I did try to learn once with a book on tape). She doesn’t even like the American-ized fake Irish traditions like Corned Beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s Day. She has an Irish complexion I guess, but what does it all amount to? Being proud of being from a people that you don’t even know?
It’s no different, to me, than having a favorite sports team. You root for the home team (unless it’s Football and you’re from Detroit because come the fuck on). You love the lead player, until they get traded to somewhere else and then they and their new team are you sworn enemies. It doesn’t matter if they’re the best, or even good, or winning, or anything. Because you’re part of that team (who, no, doesn’t see you as part of them unless you’re actively buying tickets and their merch and just throwing cash at them. Which isn’t even about the players, again, because the players ARE NOT THE TEAM).
We’ve talked about this with Religion, and political groups. The larger a group you find yourself in, the stricter you need to be with yourself about what you accept and don’t accept from that group. Because while there is power in amassing more people, there is also the danger of losing the values that you came in with.
Religion has always had zealots. Someone that believes some tenet of the holy word in one specific way and ignores most (if not all) of the rest of it and can never look outside of it to let other people live their lives differently. That’s an extremist. But it’s not just religion. Every group or gathering of people, when it gets large enough, winds up attracting extremists. Because as it gets bigger and louder and more about the numbers instead of the original beliefs, it’s real easy to just slip someone like that in. And then you hear them say what sounds like reasonable, similar ideas to your own, and you think, “Well yes, sure, I agree.” And then you hear a couple of things that maybe you don’t agree with. But you’ve already got that common ground, and everyone else seemed to get their point, so maybe it’s you. And then, by the time you hear the stuff that should be scaring the shit out of you, you’re already in too deep to walk away without losing your entire social support structure.
And it used to take a slightly charismatic person to gather and con job a group like that into becoming extremists. But now the Share button or the Copy-and-Paste aspect of the internet mass produces it instead. Especially because the other joy of the internet these days seems to be “I MUST GO FIND SOMEONE ONLINE AND TELL THEM THEY ARE WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING!” So we manufacture an “Other” to become the demonic example of our point, of everything we’re fighting against. Sharing and trolling is never, ever based on listening or learning.
One of the things I used to love about the comic shops I worked in was talking to other comic fans. They’d come in, have their favorite series or artists, and we’d chat away. And some of the conversations were debate-like. Spawn or Batman (it was the 90s so it wasn’t as ridiculous as it sounds now). Thing or Hulk. Superman or Thor.
It was so much fun. But there was also the conversations that were bashing. “I don’t read DC because they’re crap. I’m a Marvel guy.” Or “That Image artist is a piece of shit.”
I’ve worked at three shops. I’ve been in a lot more. I’ve heard that “piece of shit” argument about a comic or a creator many times. It always bugs me, but never more than when i hear it from the person who works at the store. I mean, what’s your point here. You think the comic is a piece of shit, but you still stock it to sell to people? So anyone who buys it, you think their tastes are shitty? And if they don’t buy it, doesn’t that just mean you talked yourself out of a sale?
As a comic book fan for my entire life, I love comics. I love the art form. And I love that it’s had a surge in popularity. Granted, the surge is more for the characters winding up in films and on TV, but you can’t argue when you see kids and women and men and people of all types dressing up as their favorite characters, or wearing t-shirts or getting tattoos or whatever that they’re doing, that it isn’t a success story for the things I’ve loved forever (my version of forever). My reading and buying comics for 40-something years doesn’t and shouldn’t mean that I’m some authority on how they should be and who they should be for. And in my time in comics retail, I was lucky enough to work in very inclusive, very inviting stores. There was no freaking out when a girl or woman came in to buy comics (two of my stores were owned by women). There was no pointing fingers at someone saying they were a virgin who needed to move out of their parents basement (in my first store, I was a virgin and I lived in my parents basement, so if anyone wanted to point fingers I wore the badge with pride).
People who shopped there did so because they loved comics. Or the comics characters. The cartoons, the dolls, the cards, whatever.
But it’s easier to sit and insult, and mock, and hurt online because we don’t relate to each other any more. We don’t understand, don’t even try to understand, the other people there. No one wants to put in that work when we can just Share a tragic news story about a kind and good and talented person passing away, and then use it to also maybe try to score points with other assholes by jabbing at someone who is commonly a very easy target.
And the more time I spend online, the more I fucking hate it. I hate how weak we, and especially I, have become. How much we clam up and not show our strengths and our goodness and our love. Sometimes we think the only way to be strong is to attack. The only way to love is to point out hate. The only way to be good is to perceive evil in everything else.
Its exhausting. And I say that as someone who does curate to a limited, but growing degree. I say that as someone who has incredibly creative and thoughtful and kind people on my friends list. And I say that as someone who, just this week, had to call out an old family friend for being very rude to someone else on my page. I hated it, because I know that friend isn’t a bad person at all. But what they posted was mean, but it was easy, and it was very much in line with how people talk to one another online.
It’s not okay. It’s not healthy. It’s not right.
And it’s covering us with shit.
