Spider’s Web or Safety Net?: The Digital Ties that Bind

https://tinyletter.com/grahammoliver/letters/spider-s-web-or-safety-net-the-digital-ties-that-bind

Friends,

Two recent typhoons, Doksuri and Khanun, have affected Taiwan. There’s been some damage, including a pretty nasty mudslide in Nantou , but the silver lining is we’ve had a week’s reprieve from Taipei summer oppression. We’ve used this to our advantage, walking all over the city and sweating slightly less than we normally would. The above picture is from up on Maokong, right next to a stop on the gondola. This was our fourth trip up Maokong, a small mountain with a lot of temples and tea houses, and it’s such a great part of the city. All you have to do is travel to the end of a subway line then up a beautiful gondola ride to find this magical pocket of beauty. I’m still figuring out which tea house is my favorite, so if you have a recommendation, let me know.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to find and maintain friends lately. I don’t know about you, but twenty+ years ago, around undergrad, my social life was divided by the different groups of “IRL” friends — from university, from high school, from summer camp, and a few other pockets — and then a big group of “online friends.” Since then, my “IRL” friend categories have narrowed drastically (friends in Texas, friends in Taiwan, friends elsewhere), while my online categories have grown (friends I communicate only in memes to, friends I only talk to when playing games together, friends I only gush about books to, friends I have very intense communiques with twice a year and otherwise don’t hear from, and more). For a while, mostly during grad school, I had a wide circle of people who were a little more than acquaintances and a little less than real friends through the writing community on Twitter.

And that felt nice — like a conversation was available to me when I wanted it, but I could disappear indefinitely without hurting anyone. Then: I stopped writing as much, we moved to Taiwan, and Musk bought Twitter, all of which made me pause and consider whether Twitter was a net positive or negative in my life. And I never really unpaused. Now, there’s Threads which I’m not touching, Mastodon which seems destined to fail due to decentralization’s effects on longevity and moderation, Bluesky, and others. I’m trying to make Bluesky work, but a) I don’t even know what kind of conversation I want anymore and b) I don’t know why Bluesky won’t fall prey to the exact same problems other social media have had, especially since they’re still in the funding honeymoon stage.

Also I don’t like that they don’t capitalize the S.

I’m not sure how much better you can get than the lede on Warzel and Bogost’s diagnosis of “Zombie Twitter”: “Threads is here. It’s Twitter, but on Instagram. If that makes sense to you, we’re sorry, and also, you are the target audience for Threads: people who like to publish text posts on the internet but say they have ~worries~ (with tildes, just like that) about Elon Musk, the billionaire-king who now owns the bird app.” (Note, this was written before Threads usage effectively cratered .)

Amusingly, I regularly share Twitter links in this newsletter, but I don’t think I’ll continue. Partially for ethical reasons, partially because I’m using it a lot less, and partially because it no longer works . For example, I wanted to share a thread about Taiwanese political slang that journalist David Demes put together in preparation for the Taiwanese presidential election in a little more than one year. However, that would largely be pointless, because Twitter no longer shows replies to Tweets if you’re not signed in, so if you weren’t already on Twitter you would just see the thread’s introduction.

Another alternative is Taiwanese social media. My impressions: Facebook reigns king here, but there are a few other options. DCard seems like Facebook for young people. Plurk is for anime lovers and fan artists. And the most interesting one is PTT , an old-fashioned bulletin board that somehow retains popularity, with the most active boards being about gossip, video games, universities, and sex. There’s no images, it’s largely anonymous, and it’s organized by topic. I’d love to try to participate. I’ve already picked out the boards I might use: vegetarian, coffee, English class, baking, and NTU Fiction. But the interface + slang + etiquette is just out of my grasp. Maybe in another year.

Instagram is popular here too, with the interesting caveat that people who are not ~influencers~ often only use stories and rarely do full posts. Maybe that’s the trend in the US too; I have no idea. I’m on it, where I’ll post three times in a day then not post for a month. I like Instagram, with a healthy dose of filtering and muting some people’s stories. There’s also the benefit that Taiwan gets served fewer ads than the US. We’re very negative about social media as a society: for years I’ve been having conversations with my students where they consistently agree it makes their lives worse. But one thing I love about social media is that it lets me know that people I’ve crossed paths with in life are still out there living. Like, there are people I might not ever talk to, but their picture pops up and I get a little warm fuzzy inside due to the reminder of their existence. I’m on the record as saying that I hope the afterlife includes something like a personalized VH1’s Where Are They Now? , but until then social media is the best we’ve got. I’m still here, and so are you.

An extra heavy dose of further reading:

• My good friend Megan Biesele just published her memoir Once Upon a Time is Now . Megan is an incredibly accomplished anthropologist and activist, having cofounded the Kalahari Peoples Fund fifty years ago, and in this memoir she looks back at her PhD fieldwork with the Ju/’hoan San people that set her on the path she walked. It’s a brilliant book that uses her broad perspective from the present to curate and dissect her experience, using it as a lens to think about society, or more specifically, what it means to be a person constantly intertwined with other persons. Highly recommend.
• For the last month, I watched a good chunk more television than I usually do, and I have two big recommendations. The first is The Great British Pottery Throwdown is a BBC spinoff of The Great British Bake-Off that is absolutely delightful. There are pros and cons between the two — I care more about cake decoration than pottery, but Keith Brymer Jones is miles ahead in charm than Paul Hollywood, though both could do a bit better with non-British subject matter — but the spirit of extremely convivial competition is the same. If you liked one, I think you’ll like the other (apparently there’s also a a sewing show that I haven’t heard anything about). Here’s Linda Holmes on the show . The second recommendation is in the same vein of wholesomeness, but with a little more comedy. Joe Pera Talks with You is fifteen minute bursts of weird, corny, familiar Americana warmth. Sam Yellowhorse Kesler calls the titular character “Grampa Simpson and Fred Rogers — lovable and ridiculous, with a tendency to ramble but in no uncertain terms a good person,” and I’m not familiar enough with The Simpsons to 100% verify, but I binged all three seasons very quickly (but, again, 15 minute episodes) and just love it and wish there was more stuff like it. There are a few episodes/clips on YouTube, but they’re the ones that are less story-based and more one-offs ( decent sample ). Still, you can get the vibe, which I must warn you, my wife finds absolutely grating. I hope you won’t, though.
• David Foster Wallace loomed large over my late 20s and early 30s. When the news of his abuse of Mary Karr fully sank in, I kind of shelved him mentally, only revisiting a couple of his short pieces as they popped up in my teaching world (“This is Water” for rhetorical analysis, “Good Old Neon” for students working through suicidal thoughts [their own or, more often, those of people close to them], and “Forever Overhead” for PoV experimentation). My thoughts on engaging with artists who were probably bad people has long been that there are so many other artists available, why would you go out of your way for the questionable ones (which has primarily led to reading fewer hetero male writers, but that’s a digression for another time)? Patricia Lockwood’s recent LRB essay “Where be your jibes now?” brought back a lot of the rush of reading DFW (yes, I know Texas people, this really means Dallas-Fort Worth, it’s been said a million times) along with his entanglement with misogyny, mental health, and more. I’m not going to run off and grab The Pale King quite yet, but I’m working through it. Plus, the essay itself is just so good, so smart, so thorough. I need someone to curate more personally appealing literary criticism (the roughage of a reading diet?) please. (Also, if you missed it two months ago, DFW was a touchstone in another wonderful essay about the Paltrow Goop Cruise by Lauren Oyler).
• Did you read about a sharp rise in teen suicide/suicidal ideation over the last decade? A new working paper from the NBER shows that there’s a good chance simple changes in reporting, not actual increases. Note, this does not include the pandemic, during which there was a reported increase as well.
• I haven’t seen Barbie yet, but I’m excited to, especially because of the NYT ’s profile of Gerwig . Especially this line: “‘I kept thinking: Humans are the people that make dolls and then get mad at the dolls,’ Gerwig explained. ‘We create them and then they create us and we recreate them and they recreate us. We’re in constant conversation with inanimate objects.’”
• My favorite Instagram account of the month: @deadmotelsusa . Kind of crazy how browsing it for 15 minutes convinced me I should buy an abandoned hotel/motel/Holiday Inn.
• For some reason, I always assumed Japanese melonpan and Mexican conchas were related, but I was way off. Melonpan is actually the product of Armenian refugees coming to Japan 100 years ago — the history is fascinating, and you should read this thorough reporting of it from Nyri Bakkalian .
• I’m knee-deep in Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom . I’m not sure what I think about it overall — it’s a great game and I’m really having fun, but it’s got a lot of fat that I would’ve liked cut and I’m surprised just how similar it is to the previous installment. I’m going to be very happy while playing it, but I don’t think it will stick in my head like Breath of the Wild did. For a fun little read, here’s Angelica Frey on Link’s hair as signifier of the times .

I was discussing social media with a friend who uses it less to connect with friends and more to find new interests; he said he worried his social media behavior suggests he’s a sociopath. I said it’s probably slightly better that his sociopathic tendencies influence his social media usage, rather than the other way around.

When it comes to bending your will or using your will to bend what’s around you, I hope you’re doing it right.

-g