The one terrible tightness of feeling
If you don't know Loather, you should.
I have been lucky enough to be friends with her since the time of LiveJournal's heyday. We had mutual connections back when we both lived in Chicago, but we didn't actually meet until her going-away party1 in June 2005. Unbeknownst to me, I would soon be following in her footsteps and leaving Chicago myself, but at the time of the party, I had no clue of what my future held for me.
Since the currency of LiveJournal was your writing, it really wasn't a surprise when Loather started to write newsletters. Her latest series, "love, the nailbiter." is one you should read and subscribe, and since it's a Substack-free zone, you can do so without any guilt. The most recent newsletter from Loather starts out with a description of Facebook's desperate actions for "engagement:"
There’s no reason for me to be on Facebook, but I’m still there. It increasingly has that ghost town feel - like accidentally stumbling on a myspace page, or a website from the early internet, an artifact of an earlier time. In an effort to try to keep eyeballs engaged, and with a lack of regular posting from my “friends,” it shows me various groups and pages.
There is a new thing I keep seeing over and over: an engaging lead sentence - “My husband told me before he passed away that…” and I’m no better than anyone else, I want to know what he told you, so I read more. A long heartfelt post ensues, with a picture, but there’s something uncanny there - deep in the story is a reference to a website, and the photo, if I really look closely, isn’t there something wrong with it? And that’s when I realize it’s all fake. The husband, the photo, the story. It’s slop designed to draw me to some online store.
Loather proceeds to portray Facebook's slop as a form of "kitsch," then brilliantly weaves in to Milan Kundera's repeated description of kitsch as "shit" in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being. I won't spoil the rest of the newsletter, as by now you should be either reading it for yourself, or subscribing to future editions, or hopefully both.
The phrase "website from the early internet, an artifact of an earlier time" stuck with me and rattled about in my head for some time. Like Loather, I have also seen the flailing efforts of Meta--Facebook, Instagram, and Threads--to engage its audience, and similar to her, I have seen through their efforts and recognize it as slop. What's dawned on me recently is just how insulting these engagement efforts are, because at the core, the messages behind the forced engagement are you are not enough, your connections are insufficient, your interactions aren't cutting it anymore. It's not enough to use Meta to check in on your mates, as Prince Harry would say, or to get the latest goings-on with people whom you've built connections with online or IRL. You must be poked at, prodded, or cajoled into reacting towards something unexpected or unwanted. Somewhat related, if you were to have once shown an interest in artisanal buttplugs on a Meta site, you'll soon be shown 234,857 related groups that coincide with this buttplug interest. Most, if not all, of these 234,857 groups are clearly slop-driven. Regardless of the engagement source, you must provide a reaction that can be measured and logged for a progressively shorter period. Your engagement only matters during this brief window. Once the window closes, the cycle beings again. And again. And so on.
When old websites from the early internet fade away, they become ghost towns trapping memories of the past within them. If I were being generous to Meta's efforts, and to be clear I'm only being generous for the sake of argument, their actions are an attempt to keep these ghosts away from their sites. I get how sad old online hangouts become when they are abandoned, and given Meta's history with LiveJournal--along with MySpace and Flickr--there's a fear that what Meta did to them could be visited upon Meta. Or, instead of falling victim to the new shiny thing, Meta may simply go through an arc of ascendancy and decline.
My last days on LiveJournal and Flickr were painful and depressing. The ghosts were taking over, taunting me with entries and photos from users who have moved on elsewhere online, leaving only evidence of their past actions. I may still be interacting with these same users elsewhere, but the context would be different on, say, Twitter than LiveJournal. What had happened at these old sites at that old time, well, it was for a moment, and that moment had passed. Attempts to revive my presence on these ghost-heavy sites worked out about as well as you'd expect. My LiveJournal run was officially from January 2002 to December 2010, but I attempted a comeback in January 2012 that went nowhere. There were still a handful of people posting, but the spark had clearly gone out of the site2. Flickr lasted longer for me, but once its new owners started making changes to the site that clearly favored themselves, I started to question why I was spending my money on Pro memberships which were becoming devalued. I was able to eventually find an acceptable alternative to Flickr in Glass, but that's a story for another time.
It's bad enough that in the Year of Our Lord 2025, Meta has a problem with slop (or kitsch, or shit) throughout its sites, but here's a thought that made me shudder: what if this technology had existed during the heydays of LiveJournal, or Flickr, or MySpace? We can somewhat imagine what the results would be using today's online experience. There wouldn't be much difference between Spotify's problem with slop and fake band profiles on MySpace. Likewise, kitsch art on Instagram or Facebook would have found a corresponding home on Flickr. Posting shit entries on Facebook would be akin to fake posters on LiveJournal. The major difference is obviously time, as 20-odd years of shit for your online diet would have had horrible long-term consequences for the online experience in particular and for internet usage as a whole.
I'm not sure I want to check back in 2045 to see how cracked people's brains are after two decades of slop exposure from today. Instead, what can be done is to look at what I'll call ancestors to slop: sock puppets and catfishing. Of all the examples given above of pre-dating slop to earlier internet times, the only one that resonates with me is linking shit entries on Facebook to fake posters on LiveJournal. This is in my wheelhouse, as I've lived through fake posters there and on BBSes, with the latter being a place where multiple people to this day can't hear the term "Navy Vet" without cringing a bit3. When comparing these two eras, you should examine scale, ease of operations, and meaning. The first two items are interrelated, and I think are easiest for a modern audience to understand. Text was the primary mode of communication online, so you had to have some skill with how your words painted a picture. You also were limited in your audience reach, especially before commercial ISP's started to exist in the early 1990s. Access to the early internet had high barriers to entry, so any consequences from sock puppetry and catfishing were confined to BBSes or Usenet or even more academic ventures like ARPANET. Nevertheless, this form of confinement didn't prevent folks from acting out in various ways, as can be seen with this list of old Usenet personalities.
The final item, with regard to meaning, is where the comparison of today's slop to yesterday's sock puppet falls apart. More so than with the posting of kitsch or shit, I can understand what motivates a catfisher or sock puppeteer. Understanding does not mean agreeing with their actions, but maybe the words I'm looking for are in the empathy or humane categories. A catfisher could be someone who legitimately enjoys manipulating and deceiving others, even when they know the consequences of their actions. A sock puppeteer could be someone so cripplingly shy or self-loathing, they feel they'll never be accepted as themselves so they spin up a whole new identity to retreat into. While these actions may be flawed and harmful, there’s a human being behind them. I can empathize with their feelings without judgment, even if I don’t support their actions. I can also see how the message behind slop--you are not enough, your connections are insufficient, your interactions aren't cutting it anymore--doesn't apply to the actions of a catfisher or sock puppeteer. These folks receive something for their actions that is recognizable as human emotions: happiness, satisfaction, relief, and so on. It's hard to quantify empathy, if not downright impossible. Human emotions are messy, and something that can't be easily quantified.
On the other hand, slop is all about the quantification. There's no human perspective to contemplate. The sole purpose of slop is to engender a reaction that can be measured. It's neat, tidy, and sidesteps those messy human emotions. Slop is both easier to understand and easier to reject. What you see with slop with what you get, and what you get is the kitsch or shit Loather mentioned earlier by way of Kundera. The message of slop can be summed up even shorter than you are not enough, your connections are insufficient, your interactions aren't cutting it anymore. Slop is simply the GIF of Rylo Ken blankly saying MORE, on repeat, forever.
There are several embarrassing photos of me and Loather and other friends attempting, and failing badly at, drinking shots of absinthe. Given the revival of older digital cameras, along with the return of late 90s/early 2000s fashions, I have often wondered if I could get away with claiming these photos were taken last month instead of 20 years ago.↩
The drama behind LiveJournal's ownership sapped the life out of that site, at least for the English-speaking world. LJ was one of many, many canaries suffocating in a coal mine.↩
The easiest way to describe Navy Vet was a years-long rolling work of fiction on a BBS I frequented. This ex-Navy man, a rare liberal ex-military man in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a man whose BBS journey carried him from recently wed to being a first-time father, was nothing more than a long story devised by a lonely woman. I never talked with her once the ruse fell apart, but from all indications, there were no real hard feelings about her actions. I'd call Navy Vet one of the nicest sock puppets that I have experienced, and to use my best Adam West voice, I hope she's now using these writing powers for good.↩