Downward Is Heavenward

You're always online even when you're not

If the internet ever provided an escape from reality, the opposite is true today: Now you’re more likely to escape from reality by putting your phone down and going for a walk outside. Even then, what you’re trying to escape from is still latent in the environment—the grass you’re touching contains the same toxins that the internet has filled you with.

It’s probably more accurate, however, to say that our definition of reality is less stable than ever, and that the kind I described above is no longer accessible through any medium at all. In his recent essay for Harper’s, Dean Kissick argues that contemporary art should better respond to the hyperreal condition we inhabit:

“Consensus reality is gone. We are blessed to live now, in the West, in a strange world without common sense. As fact grows stranger than fiction, we should embrace the surreal and try harder to imagine more outlandish fictions. We might begin by accepting that we are being lied to all the time, that most of what we hear and see is an illusion, misrepresentation, or performance—and that’s fine. Life has in many ways become a fiction, reality is vanishing under its own representations, we are suffering from collective delusions, we are teetering on the precipice of the real, with a multiverse of fantasies spinning out beneath us—and that’s okay, that’s fine.”

In the wake of the 2016 election, the “filter bubble” emerged as shorthand for the cultural dynamics that had produced an unexpected outcome. This time around, no one talked about filter bubbles—maybe because we’ve accepted their existence or don’t care anymore, but more likely because we realize they’re a spurious concept. When all of lived experience is a continuous series of segmented escaped realities, why fixate on just one? The harsh landscape of 20th-century mass media made us secretly long for a world composed entirely of filter bubbles; we finally got what we wanted.

We understand the texture of digitally mediated reality better than we can often articulate. Internet culture is just culture, as we all know by now; when bad things happen in the world, they also happen online. The Matrix underestimated the degree to which the two would have merged 25 years later. The movie’s most famous line should be reversed: When you die in real life you also die in the Matrix.

As with every major upheaval, then, the election was also a referendum on the internet as a layer of human experience. Twitter, increasingly synonymous with Elon Musk, has been a focal point for negative sentiment—right now countless users are defecting to clones like Bluesky, or threatening to. People used to say they were moving to Canada after elections, now they just switch social media platforms, which might indicate how our relationship to physical and digital geography has inverted in the last decade.

In the weeks preceding the election, as Nate Silver frantically cranked out tens of thousands of simulations (poetically arriving at almost exactly 50/50 odds), the masses anxiously approached the same unanswerable question through the lens of vibes and anecdotal evidence. “Who do you think will win?” was an excruciating small talk item that we’ve been mercifully relieved of. But the exercise was perhaps the most powerful reminder yet of our fraught relationship with the expansive globalized reality that we’re constantly aware of but still unable to perceive holistically, a tension that pushes us deeper into the digital jungle where vibes do indeed reign supreme.

In a previous essay, I wrote that this restricted perspective “produces a kind of apophenia—seeing patterns where there are none, overloading the particular with excessive significance, and reframing one’s own disparate observations as generalizable cultural commentary.” As hyperobjects exert more tangible influence on everyday life, our efforts to actually see them, in their futility, assume a superstitious quality.

But, as Kissick suggests, perceiving reality—whatever that even is—may no longer be the goal. We have more basic needs to meet, like social fulfillment. In a recent essay about “internet localism,” Katherine Dee makes an interesting observation about today’s cultural landscape:

“All of my IRL friends are talking about movies. Everyone I know has seen The Substance. I’m not completely doing a 180 here and saying, ‘Wait, maybe Hollywood isn’t dead after all.’ What I am saying is that everyone I know wants to focus on one thing that everyone else knows about, whether or not it’s good. People’s ability to tune out the noise, anecdotally, appears to be getting better.”

Discussing internet microtrends, I made a similar point—that they are a source of shared meaning in an environment where such meaning has become scarce. The 20th-century mass media monoculture may be shattered, in other words, but we are using the same tools that dismantled it to sift through the wreckage and reassemble it, bit by bit. The internet’s promise of long tails and unconstrained individualization probably went too far, at least where the social fabric is concerned; now a new mainstream culture is emerging online—as Sean Monahan has described here. Just like pre-internet mass culture, this current version often seems dull or vapid, but perhaps it must be in order to really bring us together.