Is internet culture just discourse now?

Happy Thursday. This next week is full of live music for me (starting with Beyoncé tonight). I will be at Primavera Sound in Barcelona next week if any of my Yappers are there!

I started today’s essay before I officially launched Yap Year, when I was trying to figure out what to talk about. As you might have noticed, Yap Year, like a lot of the internet right now, has focused a lot on nostalgia. This is because I’ve been struggling with the current state of internet culture, which feels like a lot of noise lately. I often look online to see what people are talking about, but the answer is everything and nothing. 

I’m curious what other people think about their online experiences right now. Feel free to reply to this email if you have any thoughts on this.

Free letter today, thanks to AdQuick. For more future Thursday letters like this, subscribe to the Yapper tier.

Modernize Out Of Home with AdQuick

AdQuick unlocks the benefits of Out Of Home (OOH) advertising in a way no one else has. Approaching the problem with eyes to performance, created for marketers and creatives with the engineering excellence you’ve come to expect for the internet.

You can learn more at www.AdQuick.com

Some thoughts I’ve had when trying to find internet culture stories of late: 1) Is anything new or notable happening in internet culture right now? and 2) Is the internet just full of a whole bunch of nothing at the moment?

I don’t mean this in the dead internet theory way. I mean the things I have seen get viral attention lately are being propelled by the most asinine discourse I’ve ever seen, making videos seem like bigger deals than they are.

The things I’ve seen go viral of late: a girl’s caveman skincare routine, a popular WLW TikTok couple’s breakup, and James Charles being a shitty friend to Kayla Malec. Drama is enough to get attention on its own — but these moments are further amplified by the most mind-numbing, chronically online takes responding to them.

One of the occupational hazards of writing about the internet has been its effects on my ability to string together a cohesive thought. Once I start getting a grasp on one topic — whether it's an inane debate, creator controversy, or news item — people have already moved on to the next one. Everyone seems to be approaching each viral topic with equal passion.

It’s hard to keep my ideas straight when the discussion moves so fast these days. I’ve never been one to fire off hot takes quickly. I consider myself a diplomatic person (I’m a Libra and a journalist). I try to consider as many perspectives as I can when drawing conclusions about something. 

But the internet does not reward slowing down and getting your thoughts in order. It’s always a cycle of: react now, think later. 

Rage bait, or content designed to elicit an angry, emotional response from users, has become king across social media algorithms. It keeps users engaged and on platforms longer. We’ve flooded the zone with so much outrage that it’s impossible to accept that people genuinely have different viewpoints than us. Even on seemingly innocuous videos, I see comments accusing the poster of creating rage bait, simply because the commenter disagrees with OP. 

My feeds are filled with a ton of half-baked, nonsensical, or downright inflammatory content — both real and fake. That makes it hard to get a read on where the culture is. 

I suppose that is an apt picture of the state of online culture: a constant state of fighting. Perhaps that is made obvious by the current political climate and social media platforms’ explicit pivot to the right. None of it is good for us, and surely it’s not helping people reach any kind of empathy or understanding toward each other. So much viral content these days is about who is in the right or wrong.

It’s hard to cut through the noise — and there is a lot of it. It seems like the only ways to respond to the current state of social media are to lock in and let your brain rot — or disengage completely. 

I can’t disengage because discourse, for better or for worse, is the backbone of internet culture reporting. The latest viral debate is the closest we have to a monoculture online these days, even though there is no guarantee that everyone is seeing it. That’s why so many of us are on the discourse explainer beat — because it’s the most likely thing that people will have seen online. 

I used to get way more invested in internet drama. It’s a part of my job, but it also had higher stakes a few years ago. My boyfriend used to ask me why I cared so much about it, and at the time, it was because people could genuinely lose it all after trending or becoming the subject of debate online. 

But after a while, online controversies seemed to become more trivial. In addition to having a cottage industry of popular gossip creators that picked up on every little piece of niche drama, another genre of creators has sprung up that specifically makes content to anger people. 

Now, it feels like we conflate every controversy — from the biggest influencer being accused of abuse to a poor unfortunate everyman who went viral for a storytime — as deserving of the same level of outrage. But if we are mad at everything, we are focusing on nothing. 

This is part of the reason why cancel culture isn’t real. The news that powerful people are doing something wrong just doesn’t stick anymore — unless their actions can be mined for content over the course of multiple days/weeks/months. If not, there’s something new to be mad at tomorrow. 

With all this outrage, it’s easy to understand why people are becoming desensitized or tuning out of the social discourse. Also, it’s hard to want to engage when discussions easily devolve into dogpiling. It feels like a shock to the system every time I log on, and it's easy to understand why people associate being online with becoming smooth brained. 

I’m trying to retrain my brain to not pay too much attention to what everyone else is saying and focus on what I actually care and think about. This is partly why Yap Year has been a bit more retrospective because those are the influencers, videos, moments I remember very well. I’ll talk about something new online when there’s actually something to say — but for now, I hope not to add on to the pile of discourse slop we all get on our own timelines.

Other things I want to share with you

• Check out Yap Year oomfie Steffi Cao profiled Chase Sui Wonders for HighSnob and it’s so good <3

• Ok so scratch a new Brockhampton from someone else I guess lol. Kevin Abstract is starting a new, nebulous group called Blush. Now I feel like the whole recent Brockhampton nostalgia was just a psyop for this new group smh. I will be seeing how this goes so watch this space.

• SABRINA CARPENTER IN MAMMA MIA 3??? This benefits me in ways you can’t even imagine.

• Elf Cosmetics is acquiring Hailey Bieber’s Rhode for $1 billion. You know what, I think Hailey deserves a big win after Justin’s comments about her last week. Maybe I should try those Rhode Peptide Lip Tints now?

• Speaking of Justin Bieber, a lot of people were worried after he came out to sing “Snooze” with SZA during the Grand National Tour stop in Los Angeles. As someone who covered the impacts of child stardom for a big chunk of last year — including the worst outcomes of it —I understand the concern.

• The concept of Beyoncé doing your gender reveal in the middle of a concert.