your reality is someone's content

I love living near Washington Square Park. Whenever I’m confronted with an unbearably pleasant day, I like to come sit by the jazz musicians and alternate between reading and people-watching.

On top of the jazz, the park plays its own music. The drumbeat of stoners doing skate tricks, the chorus of chanting Hare Krishnas, and the harmony of college students chattering on picnic blankets all swirl together in effervescent symphony. The air is alive with human connection.

I remember one such day a few months back, the last before everything got cold, when I was distracted from my book by a guy trying to hit on some girl. I remember looking on in amusement as she turned him down, then watching him walk back to his buddy a few benches away.

Then he took off his Meta Glasses.

It was like someone had interrupted my concert with an airhorn. The two men were clearly filming rizz content—the kind of videos that get posted with the caption GOTH BADDIE GIVES ME HER NUMBER to millions of likes and views.

As I kept watching the pair, I observed them repeat the same interaction dozens of times, with the second guy often recording from a distance on his own camera. There’s no way any of the women were told in advance that they were being filmed for social media, and I could see a few of them get uncomfortable as they realized what was happening. Others didn’t seem to suspect anything.

These videos, which have dramatically increased online in recent years, fundamentally erode the magic of places like Washington Square Park by farming real-life interactions for digital content.

I’ve written before about how there are two types of communication: the ritual kind, meant for connecting with other human beings, and the transmission kind, optimizing for distribution of information. Every new technology since the telegraph has continued to prioritize transmission at the expense of ritual. All that matters is how much you can communicate, to how many people—everything is done for views.

But ritual is what gives life meaning. There’s a reason it feels better to talk with a friend on a picnic blanket than watch your friend’s TikToks for the same length of time. Either way, you’re getting the same amount of information about your friend, but only the picnic feels special.

And yet more of our in-person moments are now being optimized for later virality. Politicians give brainrot speeches on the legislative floor, speaking not to their fellow lawmakers but to an imagined online audience. Social media influencers scream on airplanes or outside bakeries, disrupting other people for their vlogs. This rise in clip farming culture cannibalizes present moments for the future, turning our reality more transactional.

These are only the most obvious examples. I think the viral Sydney Sweeney ad last summer was another example of clip farming, just less on the nose. The real advertisement wasn’t the weird genetics joke, but the subsequent discourse around the advertisement. The purpose of the campaign was to make people uncomfortable enough to talk about it online, and now American Eagle stock is up 100%.

The more we rely on the transmission view of communication, the less incentive there is to treat other people with care. Companies like Cluely can raise millions of dollars by promoting academic dishonesty, and crypto scammers can inflate the value of their shitcoins by popularizing racist memes. If the point is distribution above connection, it’s okay to hurt other people as long as your message gets across.

I think we can fight this on an individual basis by communicating with as much intentionality as possible, preserving meaning even if you have to make a tradeoff. We should stigmatize transactional communication in the real world, and not engage with ragebait online, since the hydra will simply grow more heads.

But these are stopgap solutions for desperate times. The real problem is structural rather than individual. We should be questioning why all of our online content is distributed based on metrics that can be gamed by bad actors. I see a brighter horizon, where the internet is more like Washington Square Park, but that starts with recognizing our unquantifiable humanity and fighting for it where we can.

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Upcoming events

• January 29: Albany, NY - lecture for the New York State Writers Institute at SUNY Albany
  February 25: Boulder, CO - lecture for CU Boulder Linguistics Department
  February 26: Berkeley, CA - conversation with Nicole Holliday through the UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics, the Berkeley Forum, and the Berkeley Center for New Media

As always, if you liked this essay, please consider buying my book Algospeak, on how social media is changing language.