When Your Phone Is A Mirror, Everything Is A Selfie
vacuums of duplication, the US election, gaza and the new yorker festival
It is possible that my mind has become so polluted that I can only think of my years as images on my phone’s camera roll. That is, with no chronological grasp on the events that stop and start a year but a colourful stream of vignettes that I sprint through without a contextual railing to hold as I bolt to the next.
I have this issue with time. I never really think of the past. Not because it isn’t important to me, to ‘Us,’ but because I struggle to conjure it. I don’t have many early memories. It takes me too many seconds to remember what I had for dinner last Saturday. Once, a therapist asked me to write down a list of the bad things that have happened to me and had to give me hints because I couldn’t remember. But likely that’s something else.
Years from now, I will think about this specific period of time as a series of duplicate images on my camera roll where each day resembles the last. The collection of images are not different enough to be fraternal, but each new image references the one before. The days squash into each other, creating an elongated plane of time mish-mashed with the usual hallmarks: work emails, poor sleep, Partiful invites, and UberEats receipts I pretend not to see. Each day a facsimile of the last. A faded photocopy. Or a continuum of warped but related messages a la broken telephone, from one cupped mouth to an ear.
Things have become inextricable from each other. Not only is everything a reference to something else but something can be a thing only because its relation to a previous thing. Such is true for the algorithm, such is true for the nepo baby. A new song comes out and I flock to (Rap) Genius to see if I identified the samples correctly only to discover that the song it was sampling was sampling another song I never heard of. Maybe this is why the days all feel the same.
Industries run on this. Hollywood would rather invest in a film reboot or sequel than take a risk on true innovation and then act shocked when it performs poorly.
In fashion, garments are allowed to be ugly if its ‘a reference’ to an ugly thing from a previous collection.
To sell a novel, one must prepare a list of “comps,” that is, books that are similar enough in theme and audience so those in publishing can predict its sales rather than assess the work on its individual merit. Maybe this is why everyone’s writing sounds the same.
To implicate myself in the very thing I am critiquing, I will reference a previous essay, “How To Age Gracefully,” where I wrote:
It’s concerning to see stars embarrass themselves as they try to regurgitate the success of yesteryear, often at the expense of true innovation.
But, in hindsight, my thought was incomplete. Maybe artists repeat themselves not because they can no longer innovate. Perhaps it’s because we, the consumer, can no longer metabolize innovation. We are turned off by change. The edges of novelty are too tough on our tummies and we’d rather have something we can easily digest.
The internet operates this way, too. We are served things not because they are great but because it is believed that we will enjoy them from our previous engagements. On Twitter/X, I like one image of Drew Starkey at the Queer premiere and all of a sudden my whole feed is pictures of Drew Starkey. An elongated extension of images once again. On TikTok, thousands of people lip sync to the same sound, mimicking their mouths like puppets with quips of Tokyo Toni or Tiffany ‘New York’ Pollard or NeNe Leakes or Azealia Banks or whatever Black woman’s thoughts they feel inclined to sever from her body for the sake of online ventriloquism. It’s all reference, zero novelty. It’s kinda like the thing but it's not. We blend like the days, a mashed potato of online puppetry.
I call it: the vacuum of duplication.
A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to snag a ticket to a talk at The New Yorker Festival where I listened to Jia Tolentino,
, , and Andrew Marantz discuss the perils of our online vacuums of duplication. Imagine: me sardined with the other tote bag-carrying writers and readers to hear a panel of other writers and readers talk about the internet. Another shoddy duplication, I suppose.During the discussion, Tolentino highlighted the dangers of the never-ending cycle of reference and how the internet can make a representation stand in for the real thing. This, over and over, can reduce the impact of the actual thing, she argued as we “accept one in place of the other in a way that’s profoundly consequential.” This can be examined with the online relief shared over Kamala Harris’ nomination for President this summer. We rapidly accepted ‘kamala IS brat’ because it was familiar, already referenced and endorsed by what the algorithm was already showing us rather than interrogate the Democratic Party for real change. What did that get us? My mind sprints back through my camera roll to reference another essay of mine from July. This time, “Have We Lost Our Minds?” where I wrote:
“Recently, I’ve been trying to understand why things need to be memed to the point of infantilization for me to comprehend. For me to pay attention. Everything important seems half-assed or a joke. Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the presidential race in a tweet. People discovered that Kamala Harris is in the race from Pop Crave. And, honestly, maybe that’s the most effective way to reach us nowadays. It’s all we have bandwidth for. When everything is serious and everything is constantly at stake and everything is on fire…it’s like yeah, I’m going to choose to digest the predictions for Kamala’s VP through a brat green fancam scored to ‘360’ that weaves in edits of the Challengers cast. Is that okay with you?
… The incessant caricaturing and dumbing down of major life events numbs us to their significance. If a meme pokes fun at someone’s bad behaviour, it gives the bad behaviour a pass. Through our rapid meme-fication and IJBOLing, we obfuscate the evil of the muse and cartoon it into something less precise and palpable... I think of memes of Trump or the January 6th insurrection. Although the threat of the muse is blurred beneath the cartoon, it isn’t defanged. It’s us, the prey, whose vision becomes blurry, and becomes the easier target.”
Naomi Klein is also fearful of this. At the festival, she acknowledged that the reduction of reality into a vibe puts humour and lifestyle content within the same contextual frames as the most horrific world events. It blurs horror into the everyday. She said the following to the crowd:
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