The Age of Collective Dissociation

Speaking to the future from the past and vice versa

The Sunday Letter #50

A formerly-incarcerated victim of abuse getting the meme treatment. A YouTuber having to clarify that she will (probably) not be giving birth to a reincarnated King Charles. Antonio Banderas’ stepdaughter saying the words, “It holds almost an entire bottle of Josh!” as she pours ironic wine into a lead-filled Stanley Cup. “It-Girl-Wife” Sofia (daughter of Lionel) Richie and her $27M backyard gender reveal: “She has all the money in the world & still chose intimate simplicity,” gushes one top-comment. Trad-wife discourse getting thrown out as soon as the JetBlue heiress/mom of 8 joins a beauty pageant. Animals going extinct. Marina Abramović’s skincare line. Today’s teens getting anxious about the future and living under an anti-vape surveillance state. The Mystery Van mandela effect. Swifties arguing that a blonde billionaire is the only woman who can save us from AI, Trump, and the existence of winter. Twenty-year olds going to bed instead of going out with friends. A TikTok video about Apple Vision Pro where one user comments, “dark times are coming,” to which another user replies, “turn on the screen, dude 🤝.” AI celebrities scamming people with Le Creuset sets. My husband asking me, “Did you hear cold medicine doesn’t actually work?”

I write down “welcome to the age of collective dissociation,” and I don’t open the draft again for weeks. 

*

Lately the world feels like it’s been turned into one giant meme. But as the hosts of Binchtopia argue in a recent episode, our dwindling attention spans depend on it. All bets are off; everything from celebrity death announcements to dating profiles to private photos are fodder for public consumption when it comes to the Online Sphere.

Virality is enthralling, offering a way to communicate with a massive amount of people all at once, even if just for a moment. As a result, the Binchtopia hosts argue, the internet has become its own mass-communication ecosystem which must consume and manipulate in order to spread, reshaping our identities to fit into it. So we narrow ourselves down, painting ourselves as tomato girls or clean girls or mob wives in order to cast our own realities into easily digestible bite-sized morsels.

The punitive industrial complex which imprisoned Gypsy-Rose, and the viral industrial complex which made her an internet star are similar institutions. Both rely on the public to crystallize a wrongdoer’s worst moment into a fixed identity with no wiggle room or nuance allowed. As one Binchtopia host remarks sardonically, “One must imagine Gypsy Rose happy.”

*

As virality must continuously reproduce itself, so too must AI. A few years ago, an animated AI Seinfeld began airing on Twitch. Apart from an infamous transphobic hiccup, the show is meant to self-generate endlessly, not unlike a roomful of monkeys and typewriters that may occasionally stumble upon a joke. The end goal of such a program can’t be described as anything but virus-like: it aims to consume the original entity and make it ‘conscious,’ capable of self-improvement but eternally trapped in the parameters of a show-about-nothing. Does AI Jerry (now called “Larry”) yearn? Can he evolve, or will he only ever devolve into the worst iteration of himself? 

*

Likewise, what happens when the improvements in our technology allow us to retreat further from ourselves and from each other? I’ve written previously about how the retreat into girlhood reinforces a retreat away from interpersonal responsibilities, and

Mina Le

’s recent YouTube video about third spaces expanded my thinking even further (highly recommend).

Arguing that wealth permits a retreat deeper and deeper into solitude, Le suggests that wealth causes people to turn their focus away from their communities. Plus, as

Mental Hellth

argues, we’re spending more and more on delivery while at the same time spending more time alone, in the company of only our phones and computers, where we don’t have to consider the cost of the exploitation built in to make it all feel so convenient.

As a result, the Online Sphere is one of the only remaining third spaces where folks can gather and live out their fantasies, which also means having a direct say in the outcomes. And as @PrettyCritical on TikTok argues, by treating celebrities and influencers as online avatars, audiences are able to live vicariously through people outside of their own orbit. The flipside is that they lose respect for the humans underneath the online avatar in the process, commanding them to behave how we want—or else. We expect that by bestowing our attention on someone, it earns us their servitude and gratitude.

Ten years ago, Monica Lewinsky wrote in Vanity Fair,

“Yes, we’re all connected now… But we’re also caught in a feedback loop of defame and shame, one in which we have become both perps and victims… The ease, the speed, and the distance that our electronic devices afford us can also make us colder, more glib, and less concerned about the consequences of our pranks and prejudice. Having lived humiliation in the most intimate possible way, I marvel at how willingly we have all signed on to this new way of being… It may surprise you to learn that I’m actually a person.”

*

Perhaps what’s really missing from being in the Online Sphere is the feeling of anonymity. Consider 4chan and the early internet message boards, which offered the chance to scream into the void without consequence. 4chan, toxic as it is, doesn’t use metrics, and there is no central ‘profile’ through which one may follow or befriend other users. The result is an endless consciousness reflecting back at itself for infinity without the influence of ads or content creators.

Over on Twitter, it’s getting harder to tell what’s real and what’s not—not because everyone’s anonymous, but because everyone’s a bot, engineered to pass tweets back and forth until they become viral and Twitter looks like less of a ghost-town. Would it even be possible to replicate the 4chan-style anonymity elsewhere, or do TikTok exceptions like 2girls1bottl3 prove the rule? Between 4chan and Twitter, which model might be the model of the future: the one that forgoes content farming, or the one relying on AI and bots to stay afloat?

*

Lately, when I message friends on Instagram I get a prompt trying to complete my sentences, leading me to wonder how much Meta already knows about my speech patterns and texting habits—more than I do, probably.

When I visited my friend recently they mentioned that Apple’s new Journal app had encouraged them to start writing again for the first time in years. Apple’s Health app was also recently updated, now allowing users to track their emotions and mental well-being on a daily basis. 

One user calls the Journal app “my therapist on the go,” but would a therapist be able to pinpoint any day in your life and give you a dashboard of what you were listening to, thinking, feeling, seeing, and doing at any given moment?

“What is something important about yourself that hardly anyone ever knows?” the Journal app prompts, “Record an audio memo to future you. What about this time in your current life do you want to capture?” 

It wasn’t long before my friend started to feel like they were uploading their diary into the Cloud everyday so that Apple could specifically tailor their user experience to their every whim, like that episode of Black Mirror where a woman gets trapped in her own home operating system. 

“But still,” my friend remarked, “it was nice to feel so taken care of.” 

*

Two years ago, a major telecom outage in Canada caused millions of people to lose access to the internet, phone calls, and Interac (the network that allows us to use credit and debit cards). My friend told me that when it happened, they didn’t have any cash on hand at their acreage, so they went two days unable to make any purchases even as their pet food reserves began to run low. The experience made them want to seek out disaster-preparedness communities online.

The human urge to prepare for complete and utter catastrophe is also the human urge to seek consolation in community.

*

My friend and I were chatting about how social media feels like a pressure cooker these days. I mentioned that I’d been seeing more tweets than usual encouraging me to prepare for a civil war-type event. “Oh yeah, WarTok,” they said, matter-of-factly. I hadn’t heard of that corner of TikTok, but the next day a video about ‘realistic disaster prep’ came across my feed. The creator lists 100 items that disappear first during war: Generators, firewood, sugar, garbage bags, duct tape, bleach, chocolate, popcorn, tea, survival guide books. I had flashbacks to the early days of Covid-19 when I ran to the corner store for tampons only to find that all the toilet paper was gone. 

No wonder dissociation becomes preferable. Consider the man who made a big fuss about never wanting to learn the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, only to appear on a radio show two weeks later to hear the answer live on air. Or the 27-year old woman who’s spent the last ten months avoiding Eras Tour spoilers. There’s just something so human about the tendency to define ourselves so narrowly that we will go so far as to do so through negation: I am this because I am not that.

*

As I write this letter, I’m watching the Super Bowl in the background and half-listening as my husband tries to explain the rules of football to me. A tourism ad for the province of Ontario keeps playing, and I hear them tout a clean nuclear energy initiative. I recall a seminar from many years ago in which I learned about the plans for longterm nuclear waste messages, intended to warn humans away from waste sites at least 10,000 years from now.

Based on the assumption that “today’s written languages are unlikely to survive,” the project of adequately conveying the dangers of nuclear waste sites is complicated by the eventual obsolescence of the methods we may use to convey it. Specifically, a 1993 report determined that any ‘warning signs’ surrounding waste sites had to be able to universally communicate the following:

“This place is a message…and part of a system of messages…pay attention to it!”

“Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.”

“This place is not a place of honour…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here…nothing valued is here.”

“What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.”

“The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.”

*

I’ve often been interested in how the future can speak for the past, but can the past also speak into the future?

In a 2019 article about the death of an Icelandic glacier, writer Lacy M. Johnson describes a funeral scene in which a politician reads a memorial plaque:

“A letter to the future…Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”

*

Consider this tweet about the six-layers of a 30 Rock joke involving a Slingblade reference. While Slingblade jokes probably won’t register among younger audiences anymore, the general structure of the joke still holds as long as the five other layers of meaning stay true. It’s this funny little talent we humans have for imbuing meaning into the nothingness, for speaking words into a future void.

“Record an audio memo to future you. What about this time in your current life do you want to capture?”

Can the past speak into the future?

Only you will know if we did it.