Living in Public and Other Modern Agonies
On growing up online and being an adult in an age of horrors.
To say I “grew up” on the internet feels kind of twee, but it's hard to beat the allegations. I was one of those 90s kids whose dad was obsessed with technology, so much so that he learned how to build a computer piece by piece. Armed with books on building PCs, we would pile into our old minivan and drive into the city to source the hardware and tools at Fry's Electronics. A computer meant the internet, and the internet meant infinite possibilities that I was at once excited by and terrified of.
I first logged onto my parents’ chunky DIY desktop PC at the age of nine or ten. Almost immediately I had a distressing encounter in a kid's chatroom that resulted in whomever I was speaking to calling my house. My tween years were spent haunting message boards and X-Men fanfiction databases. I made friends with much older people who ran their own X-Men sites and corresponded via email, lying through my teeth about being a literal child. It ended with me being blocked by a fair number of adults (and not blocked by a distressing number of adults as well, come to think of it). At the same time, I was getting kicked out of webcomic forums by other, unrelated adults for being an annoying child outright.
By thirteen, I taught myself enough basic HTML to build and run GeoCities fanshrines to my favorite anime and video game characters. Nobody could kick me out of anything anymore. In my late teens, I made my way to DeadJournal. This was the edgy version of LiveJournal for people who liked Jhonen Vasquez. I taught myself enough Photoshop to make cool gothic elements for my layout. Then, eventually, I happened upon LiveJournal proper. This was the high point of my internet career, and I mean it with complete sincerity.
I ran multiple fandom and fanfiction groups. I made user icons and graphics for websites. I hand-coded bespoke layouts. I entered graphic design and writing contests. I got into weird fights. I ended up in the middle of weirder fandom beef. I wrote Star Trek fanfics and character analyses that some people considered required reading in my corner of the internet. I met my first girlfriend through LiveJournal, which was a toxic and weird relationship that ended very poorly. I met my second girlfriend through LiveJournal as well, and we're still together, so I consider it a success. I met several good friends across several fandoms, a handful of which I still know to this day.
Through all of that, since I was a child, I've posted online. I have never not kept some kind of public diary. As soon as I was old enough to accidentally dox myself in a chatroom, I decided to share my thoughts and feelings in public. It felt…normal. Acceptable. Expected, even. Because I started going to the internet at a young age, it was as real and important as the real world I lived in during my offline hours. Getting on the internet to tell everyone everything that ever ran through my thick little skull is as natural as breathing.
Now that I'm thirty-nine and have the whole of the internet in my pocket, doing that feels stupid. It feels pathetic. It feels like an empty ritual or a destructive habit. I don't drink or do drugs or gamble, because I have a genetic predisposition to taking those kinds of behaviors to self-annihilating extremes, but it feels how I fear those things will make me feel.
Worst of all, it feels like a performance.
Gianmarco Soresi's 2025 stand-up special Thief of Joy occupies a very weird place in my brain. There's just something about Soresi's style of comedy that gets right in there, lost in the wrinkles. It's his vibe, his whole presentation. It's Magen Cubed Bait in a way I have trouble articulating.
Now, I can't really speak about stand-up comedy because I don't know much. I like it, sure, and used to watch quite a bit of it in my teens and twenties. Stand-up is more of the purview of my girlfriend Melissa, who's a connoisseur of comedians on the internet. Her social media feed includes a perfectly curated list of funny people, with highlight clips, specials, tour dates, interviews, and podcast appearances at her disposal. A digital comedian Rolodex, as it were. If she doesn't tell me about it, I neither know nor want to know.
That's how I became familiar with Soresi in the first place, long before his recently elevated profile. I've been watching clips of his club sets and crowd work in bed for about two years, which makes it strange to see him suddenly weighing in on industry controversies and speaking at Zohran Mamdani rallies. It's kind of surreal to see the guy I primarily know from a tiny screen at eight o'clock at night talking about fucked up familiy dynamics being asked about the state of, well, the state.
But I get why Soresi is so popular. Watching Thief of Joy helped me wrap my head around why I find his comedy so appealing. His style is deeply personal. Vulnerable. I would say intimate, honestly. Every comedian draws on personal experience and introspection, but with Soresi, I feel like I'm watching a man work his baggage out with you. Mommy issues, daddy issues, politics, gender, identity, sex, religion, trauma. Stuff you wouldn't have gotten out of me with a gun to my head, and that's saying a lot given what I tend to put in this very newsletter.
What stuck out to me while watching Thief of Joy is that Soresi tells jokes with his entire body. The whole of him is this laughing, shaking, long-limbed bundle of neuroses. Leaping, crawling, strutting across the stage, using the mic stand, a stool, pieces of the stage itself to convey an entire emotional arc. It's funny, yes, but it's also this fully embodied experience watching a man slide down velvet curtains and strike ironically beautiful poses while talking about some frankly distressing stuff at times. I can feel the strain of performance through the juxtaposition of materials and surfaces, the redness of his cheeks, the way he catches his breath with awkward bursts of laughter.
I can't help but think back to Susan Sontag's argument for “an erotics of art” whenever I watch Soresi:
“Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there.”
If I heard a recording of his comedy without seeing him on stage, I would still laugh at most of the jokes. I would get something out of vocal delivery and content. I have already seen people take soundbytes or short clips of his comedy to contort new imposed meanings from them, especially in the political sphere. But it's the experience of watching him physically perform, the at times erotic quality of gesture and movement, that I really respond to. Divorced from the intense intimacy of his presence, the naked vulnerability of his words, even at their most cutting and boundary-pushing, don't hit the same way. There is a strange element of spectacle and visual pleasure to his comedy that I find so unique and compelling.
But it's been making me wonder:
What does it take to live so publicly through your art?
What does it mean to externalize that much of yourself for a public audience?
Why do I respect this so much?
And is that respect or…something else?
So I've been off social media for about a month.
Okay, when I say “social media,” I mean text-based microblogging platforms. It's a weird distinction, I know, but I have my reasons. I'm still on Instagram because I mostly look at art and comics. It's also where all the anarchists and mutual aid groups are, so it's where I get actual updates about stuff going on in material reality. It's difficult for the algorithm to figure out what ads to serve me because all I repost are updates about ICE rapid responders in L.A., court-watching in D.C., and food distribution in South Florida. I have to say, it's quite peaceful, really.
I left Twitter when it was still Twitter, then deleted my twelve-year-old account sometime after it became X. Twelve years is a long, long time on a website. These days, platforms spring up and die out at what seems like a near-constant pace. The internet of the 2010s was much slower. It gave you time to cultivate a whole digital life at a place like Twitter. To make friends and establish connections with other people, some of them lasting years of my life.
By the time I finally left, the whole site was overrun with dead-eyed Groypers and Elon Musk fanboys. It really didn't feel worth it to keep my account even to just squat on my name when every other post is a Nazi meme. I get why people still stayed, given that so much community infrastructure had been built there over the last decade. That made it hard to leave for a long time, torn between trying to maintain connections to long-standing communities while also feeling deeply alienated from the platform itself. I even wrote a whole essay about it, back when I had a Substack.
A Substack essay about leaving Twitter. What a cursed sentence. Wow. I hate that you had to read that.
Then at the start of October, I made the very radical decision to stop posting on Bluesky. You know Bluesky. The Twitter clone for elderly millennials, hall monitors, and shitposters who confuse being right about universal healthcare for being right about everything else. Imagine you're trying to eat lunch with your friends, and people come over to your table to announce how morally superior they are to be eating at this sandwich shop instead of the bad sandwich shop across the street. This is the only way I can describe Bluesky.
It also has a well-documented track record of suspending trans women for criticizing J.K. Rowling, Palestinians for trying to crowdfund their survival during an ongoing genocide, and anybody who wasn't mourning Charlie Kirk when he died. (I can't cite a news article or report, but it was a trip to watch mutuals get sniped in real time for even writing Kirk's name in a post, regardless of the context.) The very long story short is that we found a platform that promised to take us back to 2010s Twitter, and that was both a lie and a truth.
For me, Bluesky felt exactly like Twitter. Functioned like Twitter. Let me tell all the same little jokes as Twitter. Offered the same perverse incentives as Twitter. Created the same deep anxieties as Twitter. It scratched the itch put there after a decade on a platform where I was on the receiving end of harassment, stalking, and cruelty. You don't know how social media is going to cook your brain until it's already done. Serial bullies and grifters in the publishing world, serial stalkers and abusers in leftist circles. People who cozy up to you so they can launder their reputations through new names. Other people who have made you the avatar of everything wrong in their lives and want to tear you apart for crimes they imagined, hoped, you committed.
By the end of it, you're jumping at shadows and afraid that all it would take is for one accusation, one screencapped post taken out of context, to turn everyone against you. So you can't log off, because then you won't see what they’re saying about you. You have to stay on and make sure your story is accurate and you're innocent beyond the shadow of a doubt. As long as you control the situation, no one can hurt you again.
That's what I mean about text-based platforms. We don't get on very well.
Back in early 2024, after a few upsetting encounters on the site, I deleted my Bluesky account. I washed my hands of the whole failed experiment and walked away, sure that I had made the right decision. Of course, I got bored of talking to myself after a few months. I'm a relic from an older internet and I like having my little text-based websites within reach. They're familiar to me, as if an extension of my brain in 240 characters. So I decided to start a new Bluesky account in fall of 2024. By then, improved moderation tools made it easier to limit interactions outside of mutuals and just talk to my friends.
It made existing there less awful, so I could justify spending time there again.
But after another year of posting, I started to feel that itch. The desire to be there no longer outweighed the creeping sense of anxiety. It was time to leave. The platform was openly antagonistic to many of my long-time online friends and employed a downright dangerous moderation scheme rife with abuses. It suppressed my friends in Gaza, like Adham Madi and Najwa Ishaq, for the crime of existing. None of this is worth it.
So I left.
That lasted about a month.
I popped in and started posting again, because Dick Cheney just died and I wanted to tell a little joke. Like letting out a sigh of relief, I went back to posting silly things, sharing my newsletter, and talking to my friends. Sharing fundraisers and survival funds, too, of course, because it's hard and scary out there and getting harder and scarier all the time. If I can help get some people fed and sheltered, it's worth it.
For now, I mean. For a few weeks, maybe a few months. Until I wake up feeling too sick to open the website again, and I leave with my tail between my legs.
I'm being flippant, of course. As an American wringing my hands over my emotional attachment to platforms and services, I need to be able to see how farcical this entire arrangement truly is. But when I say all of this -- that joining social media, using it, and inevitably leaving it -- has caused me untold psychic pain, I absolutely mean it. And, like, why? Why does this cause me so much strife? Why does using it hurt so much, and why do I keep going back? To Twitter, to Bluesky? To whatever garbage platform comes next?
Why am I like this?
Horror Vanguard, the leftist horror film criticism podcast, recently did an episode on Pascal Plante's 2023 film Red Rooms. During their conversation about the internet and social media, ghosts (I mean hosts) Jon Greenaway and Kyle Kern discuss the primary effects of the internet.
From Greenaway's eloquently upsetting precis:
“All of these apps are, for the most part, deeply boring. [...] A consolidation and flattening of architecture has meant that we're all from the internet now, all probably from the same parts. We're all bored. We're permanently online. A giant network, so much just levers and dials to be turned by algorithmic forces.
To borrow a thought from Adam C. Jones’ excellent book The New Flesh, we are the thing being produced by the web. A thesis: The internet is a machine for the production of sadism, because the only response permissible to boredom is transgression.”
I think about this a lot. Like, every day a lot. Because it's true. We all know it's true. Deep down in my bones, I can feel this knowledge chewing away at me. The internet used to be a place that you could go. Now it's the only place to go.
Avenues for socializing and community have been systematically closed across the United States since the Reagan administration. Wages have stagnated while the costs of existing have skyrocketed. Public spaces have been optimized for profit. Car culture has made most of our towns and cities too dangerous to walk. Green spaces are being paved over for luxury housing nobody can afford and the police prowl around in tanks.
Work, play, shopping, socializing, and administrative tasks have been moved to the internet. Entertainment and advertising are beamed into our faces twenty-four hours a day. We've watched the websites and platforms that replaced our every outlet become malignant tumors on the face of humanity. Apps serve you a steady stream of rage and grief and fear to keep you from logging off. Everything you do or say or think or feel is used to algorithmically serve you an ad. All the while, that harvested data is used to achieve political aims you never agreed to and don't support but have no say over because you don't own any of the platforms you live on.
So all we can do is tear each other apart, because there's nothing else better to do.
And yet.
And yet.
And yet.
I can't live like that.
Yes, I know it's true. These apps are evil. This isn't the internet of the 90s, 2000s, or even the 2010s. The internet of today makes my skin crawl. Everyone is so cruel and dead inside. We're all just logging on to joke about dying because being alive feels impossible. And the world is terrible, so we're all terrible to each other so we can feel like we control some part of it, have some say in it, only to affirm that it's all a nightmare.
And yet I can't believe that this is all the internet can be. I can't think that this is all we, you and I, can be. Just pieces of meat ground between the gears and teeth of machines. I can't think that and remain alive.
On a recent visit to Orlando, as me, Melissa, and her mom are known to take on weekends, I saw a guy at Florida Mall. He looked to be about my age, a pretty average white brunette thirty- or forty-something guy. I wouldn't normally have noticed someone like that at all, dressed in a black ballcap, camouflage cargo shorts, and sneakers.
Then I saw his t-shirt. It read: No Liking, No Posting, Just Living.
At that moment, I heaved an involuntary sigh at the tedious impulse to put that on a t-shirt. How annoying it is to make your lack of social media account a statement that you simply must wear. It's just one more boring little thing to put on a shirt so everyone knows how special you are.
Then I remembered that I wrote a Substack essay about leaving Twitter. And I make these big dramatic statements about websites I'm on and off again, so everyone knows my disdain for them. Logging on, but shaking my head so everyone knows I don't like it.
Suddenly, the embarrassment, the tedium of it all, was shared. I went back to looking at shop windows and bit my tongue.
These are the three indisputable truths about me that I think everyone needs to understand if we're going to get anywhere in this conversation:
1. I grew up on the internet.
2. I like the internet. I think the internet is neat.
3. The two unspoken, unspeaking passengers along for this ride right now are C-PTSD and autism.
Before my panic disorder changed the way I perceived the world, autism had already begun closing windows and locking doors. I can see that quite clearly now. It wasn't until this year that I started down the path toward an autism diagnosis and all the uncomfortable realizations that it brought along with it. Autism made sense of the things that other conditions couldn't, filled in many of the gaps that remained in my history. It wasn't a neat or tidy explanation, but it made a lot of sense, providing a useful framework for understanding my thoughts, feelings, and experiences throughout my life.
No matter how many diagnoses and frameworks I apply to my brain, I can't make it compatible with the internet in 2025. Nor can I make it compatible with the material world as it exists today. I react to specific things negatively because of past experiences. I misinterpret people's words or intentions. While I've gotten better, I still struggle in social settings or situations where I feel that I have no control. To put it as plainly as possible, I feel things very deeply and in ways other people probably don't, and that makes it hard to be chill about them.
None of this changes the fact that I enjoy living publicly. Through blogging, through social media, through stories and essays. I have an innate desire to be present online. Long before algorithms and marketing incentives, my impulse as a young person was to share what I made and experienced with others. Yes, it's hard for me to do these things in real life. It's hard to write an essay on some deeply felt thing and get people to care. It's hard to be taken seriously. It's also just hard to make friends when your own brain creates obstacles that you will wrestle with for the rest of your life.
The internet provides contexts where people will care about what I write and what I have to say. People can find me, or I can find them, through the architecture of these platforms and the spaces they provide for connection. I will care for these people that I meet and they will care for me. Many of us will have known each other for years, through different seasons of life. Marriages, children, gender transitions. Break-ups, deaths, new jobs. We never would have met without the internet to bridge our physical distance. That's powerful. That's real.
All of this runs the risk of making me sound like I'm a shut-in who never leaves my house, which isn't true. I'm not the most social person in the world, given that I often like to be left alone to enjoy my rent, but I have a social life outside of the screen. Me and Melissa attend local events for art, writing, music, and crafts. We meet people in our community. But often the credibility I bring or the network of friends I've made comes from my years online making, sharing, and talking. And those new people I meet in my community? I go home, follow them on social media, and talk to them there.
Yes, these websites are evil. They're run by evil people. But they are also where I'm able to connect with people. Because I want to connect with people. Through a story, an essay, a joke, a photo of my dog, a work of art. I am desperate for connection. I am desperate to be read and understood. Not liked, per se, because liking and understanding are very separate things. I want people to know what I have to say through art and criticism. I want to invite them to listen. To live within these conversations.
Somewhere along the way, my desire to live publicly was disfigured by these platforms and turned into an ugly performative act. There's always an element of performance in these things, the voices and affects we take on to speak publicly. But the tenor of these affects profoundly changed over the decades that I've been online.
For me, the perverse incentives of the contemporary internet made me feel that this was not communication but domination. Posturing on text-based platforms, assuming unearned authority as a means to draw in an audience. Speaking on things just to speak, to be seen speaking, because hot takes were all but demanded. If you don't speak, people read your silence as complicity. If you do speak, you're doing discourse for attention.
Participating in that cooked my brain. It made the room of my life smaller and smaller. Driven by fear to leave and anguish to stay. There is a shame in that. I'm still unpacking it. The shame comes from the desire to connect in the face of industrialized cruelty for ad revenue and data. I felt that I was made low for wanting it at all. To acquiesce to these platforms and their incentives on their terms was a sign of weakness. The only way to win the game was to never play at all, and I was a loser through and through.
What I’m learning now is to separate what is real from the false. It's easy to feel panicked and despairing when you're living with an undiagnosed, untreated panic disorder. It's easy to feel that the walls are closing in when your brain has trouble parsing people's actions or intentions. The truth is I want to be present and participate in digital life. The lie is that I should feel stupid or ashamed for that.
The other truth? I don't know how to square the violent machinations of these platforms with my desire to communicate. I really don't. So I'm just going to do my best to navigate that reality. What I can't afford to do is let these platforms dictate my capacity for speaking, sharing, and loving. These billionaires and platforms don't get to unravel me. They don't get to have that much power over my life.
Even if it means nothing to anyone but me.
To close this one out, I wanted to recommend a video essay that I think goes in line with some of the junk I'm working through. It comes from filmmaker and critic Valeria Santiago.
The Trouble (?) With Reaction Videos
Here Santiago discusses the internet content genre of reaction videos. She does this by writing, shooting, and editing a video essay detailing her relationship to this content niche. Then, in the video we're watching, she critiques the video she created, her assumptions, her conclusions, and what they say about her approach to this discussion.
I think that this is a fascinating format for criticism. It lays bare the emotional and intellectual processes of engaging with art, in all their fuzziness and intangibility. Interrogating your own priorities and biases in relation to art is always really interesting to me, especially when done for things as seemingly mundane as YouTube reaction videos.
RedRedHat
If you're into scary internet stuff, you should check out Santiago's series RedRedHat. She was a young filmmaking trailblazer during the 2010s Slenderman DIY movie boom and has gone on to be a powerful voice within the scene. Here, Santiago returns to this character and world to create a wholly unique and beautifully personal version.
See you in the next one.