1
When we Tweet or post an infographic to our Instagram story, we are behaving as if we were voices, as if we were speaking at a press conference for a public eager to point out our contradictions and immorality. And why wouldn’t we, when there is a feeling of permanency to digital engagement?
2
Although we can delete our tweet, our ‘audience’ has a long time to read it, analyze it, and categorize its author. And when we worry about how our audience thinks of us, this self-consciousness is really a proxy for our own perception of ourselves: no one is really taking too much stock in their mutuals’ personal discography of Tweets–no one except each discography’s own author, ourselves. We imagine that our ‘audience’ is thoroughly analyzing our life alongside us when in reality our ordinary days and our ordinary opinions are actually experienced alone.
3
When we really speak, however, conversations pass and our ideas are fleeting. When I speak with an old friend, I trust that they will have changed since the last time we met–naturally. If, in my view, they had once acted immorally, I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt and believe that they had changed (I can say the same for myself). I try to hold strangers in good esteem until I am proven otherwise–besides, what kind of life is it to assume ill of strangers until proven otherwise? And in the case that this old friend-turned-stranger still behaves or believes differently than I, I’d also like to think that there’s a window of acceptable difference between friends. I try.
4
The written log of our past Tweets, on the other hand, connects us directly and unnaturally with our past selves: it is always there for our ‘audience’ to see. Today’s thoughts are, with enough scrolling, curated alongside those of many years ago. This sacrilegious, graven image of our life trajectory–our trajectory being the maturation of our thought and character–inhibits and discourages growth: our digital proximity to our ‘old’ self (in the form of old Tweets, for example) implies a loyalty to our past positions (which only we, the author, are ever really concerned with) since we tend to delete any past Tweets which we’ve deemed unsavory after-the-fact. To change (not to delete the Tweet despite disagreeing with it now–or at least feeling as though you should disagree with it now) is to open ourselves up to the imagined piranha-journalists at our press conference calling attention to our moral inconsistencies. We understand our digital personas to be official: voices.
5
So why wouldn’t this paranoia seep into our ‘ordinary,’ physical world too? Our relationships can no longer handle ambiguity or difference: ‘You can either fall in line with the same dogma that I do or we can no longer be friends. After all, our friendship is only possible because we each love the same dogma, not because I love you.’ Don’t mistake me, fascists are no friend: political agendas are still important in our relationships. But those of us who can only bear the mask of connection with people who are the same as us, people who belong to the same church–they are not much friendlier. This impulse comes either from a sense of moral narcissism or a fragile sense of moral wandering, where friendships can only last through the sanctioning of a third party–a shared dogma between friends, friends who cannot possibly offer supportive friendships if their basis for empathy is measured by their own moral righteousness or that of an infallible third party.
6
We know that this is true, that friendships are suffering due to our historical conditions and that people who are averse to difference will suffer the most, because, simply put, people are different. Some traits are shared and some distinct, but the years of the pandemic have thoroughly convinced each one of us that we are alone–unique, at the very least. Some experiences we share, though isolated–‘yes, all people must feel this way when they scroll’–and some things we know to be even more distinct from one another because of these atomized years.
7
Our digital personas, by the addictive design of social media and Big Tech engineering, display time in a flat line: our periods of growth and regression, ideological fluctuation, et cetera, are fused into a single incoherent character who, unlike a ‘physical’ friend whose conversations truly pass, we can study all at once. We do our best to make our digital selves coherent by latching onto a fixed post, a dogma, and sticking to that line. This way we can’t be terrorized by those journalists so easily–and so we also begin to think of ourselves as moralistic voices when we leave Twitter, when we talk with friends, family, strangers.
8
Maturation comes with vulnerability: we have to accept the risk of being wrong. Living in trepidation, afraid that we will be judged poorly by history, is no way to live. After all, we can’t assume that historical judgment will be any good. We have to conjure the strength to act according to our own sense of morality rather than behave as if our future descendants were watching us, as if they will read our Tweets and study us and perhaps condemn us too. We have to live for more than their eyes, for an imagined audience, when we are really not perceived at all despite the wealth of Tweets and other digital detritus that a stranger could scroll through if they were so inclined–but none ever will be, just as we are disinclined to thoroughly examine others like we hope they will for us–is this what they mean when they talk about the Singularity? I am fully aware that, throughout history, the self has always been created by our imagined audience. But this unnatural bridge to our past spells something new and inhuman about today’s relationships, something worse about tomorrow’s.