I DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO YOU AFTER THIS
I have a confession to make. During my eight-week program with the Native American Media Alliance, I’ve fallen back into old, bad habits regarding my iPhone. I owe this, in part, to my ongoing furtive conversations with a classmate of mine. It’s a lot less obvious to pass multi-paragraph notes to one another over iMessage than to focus on the T9 keyboard getting my complaints just right.
Screenshot of 2FA calling me the F slur
With this comes a keen awareness of just how much time I spend on my iPhone, even without social media. It’s my combination camera-GPS-mp3 player-ASMR-secondhand bazaar-porno theater-telephone-group chat-food delivery service-email client-newsstand-bank account-two-factor authentication-pharmacy telehealth-library-ereader-and place to Google “Michael Madsen cause of death” “Michael Madsen Native American” “Virginia Madsen Candyman” “Virginia Madsen Native American Tribal Affiliation” or hop on TVTropes for no other reason than to fill my brain with benign, meaningless categories I might one day require for, I don’t know, reasons.
Screenshot of the author’s Facebook Marketplace suggestions
It helps, at least, that the internet has become largely intolerable. Bluesky, my last platform standing, wards me off with its peculiar blend of guilt-tripping lefties overusing the word “inherent” in posts formatted like bad poetry and the dead, automated accounts that make up the majority of my 1.6k followers. Every time I Google something, I get a shimmering pop-up window inviting me to use “AI-mode,” and God help me if I try to cook a recipe from someone’s mommy blog—the screen pinches, shrinks, and disappears until it’s nothing but an ad for the latest weight loss medication. YouTube’s begun to automatically dub over videos it perceives as being in foreign languages with the bright, obnoxious, robotic “TikTok voice.” Facebook, which most people, myself included, only use for Marketplace, has been inundated with AI-generated images and videos that run the gamut from saccharine to alarmist. See here the glossy mother and her five identical sons, standing outside a rundown Detroit house with the caption, “She took them in when nobody else would, twenty years later, they did something unbelievable!” Or comment “amen” under this video of an eagle being gored by a semi-truck, just to be saved by a white guy in a smaller, nicer truck! Also the eagle has babies! God bless!
A particular favorite among the Native elders in my life is a content farm known as “EndTimes News,” which does exactly what you’d expect, from the title. Most of these elders and aunties, who live on the reservation and have seen pre-internet evidence of the unknown with their own eyes, share every EndTimes News post without comment, a grim sense of finality hanging over their cosign. It drives me crazy. The images are obviously fake, and the captions are laughable, but here, in the undead lands of Native Facebook, they carry water. Breaking news: waterfall from the sky above a Walmart in Alberta, Canada. Breaking news: red planet appears behind the mountains of Ontario, BAFFLING scientists. Breaking news:
The news is broken.
Another story tumbles out of Rolling Stone about another man who died too young because he fell in love with a robot and the robot killed him. One of my distant relatives on Facebook talks about Trump like they’re friends, and maybe in his shattered mind, they are, but for weeks, I can’t stop thinking about his comment that “it’s funny that liberals can’t tell when Trump is joking.” The longer I’m offline, the more weird microtrends I miss, so it’s only when we’re finished shooting Better Half that I find out about the existence of the Labubu.
Quick pen sketch by the author after watching 6 hours worth of comedians on YouTube
At the top of this column, I dropped a link to a video essay by Jordan Theresa called “iPhone Face, The Personal Style Crisis, & The Digital Divide.” I initially watched the video due to her point that being offline is swiftly becoming a new status symbol, something I suspected, yet hadn’t seen many point out. Theresa’s video touches on a lot and, per her own admission, loses its way at times, but the core of her argument is that there really is something in the air right now. Social media, internet fatigue, if you will. A sense of having overstayed one’s welcome, or its opposite, a sense that you’ve got an unwelcome guest.
I’ll tease that out in a later column. I do want to note there is a class divide when it comes to being online versus offline, it’s true. I only felt safe enough to leave my social media platform when I was completely certain I didn’t “need” it, a decision that gets challenged every time someone tells me I should model again, or keep acting. But I made the right choice for my life. I, myself, do not need Instagram and have never needed TikTok. I get my best, most consistent work through word-of-mouth, through maintaining good relationships with people in the arts, through email threads and newsletters that specifically cater to writers, editors, actors and working artists. The rare times I’ve had to self-tape a video for a reel or a TikTok, I squirm, I stammer, I forget how to speak entirely. I will never develop the TikTok accent, or the particular way people on those platforms hold their head, open their eyes, emphasize the wrong syllable to get their point across in a sea of noise. When NAMA asked for a video testimonial, I sent one in at the “potato angle,” my jawline disappearing into my neck, my nostrils flared.
The draw of social media was always to connect with others. But now, looking at my distant relative’s public breakdown, at the way people I love are being duped by generative AI and fearmongering content farms, I find myself thinking: I don’t want to know what happens to you after this. Tell me in person, if it even comes up. Tell me something real. Give me the truth, a small truth. Because I guarantee you won’t be leading with the waterfall in the Walmart parking lot in Alberta. You won’t bring up the dread planet scientists are baffled by. You won’t even bring up Trump and how he’s your best buddy, how you totally know when he’s joshing you. No.
By Shaawan Francis Keahna
You’ll tell me about the weather. You’ll tell me about your brother, how he’s in the hospital again, but this time they think he’ll make a real recovery. This time he wants to live. You’ll tell me about going to the grocery store, how Cub Foods is low on everything. Supply chain issue. You’ll tell me you sunk another three thousand dollars into your car because what else are you supposed to do? You’ll tell me about your granddaughter’s new apartment, her job at Walgreens, the guy who came in and gave her some unsolicited advice on how to deal with her rosacea. There are more cops outside than you remember seeing all year, and you saw or thought you saw more of those masked men. You thought you saw them wearing patches affiliated with white supremacist groups in your area. You thought you saw them enter a building you were about to enter, so you stood in the parking lot and you waited. You look at me for a long time when you say this and you ask if I keep my tribal ID on me. You ask if I drive the speed limit. You don’t mention the red moon, the waterfall, the eagle bleeding out on the CGI road. You ask again, about my tribal ID, and you notice when I change the subject because then your follow-up question is if I own a gun.
I don’t need a thousand unemployed strangers telling me I’m right all the time if I choose to throw a tantrum in the void. I just need you, here, in your small, lovely apartment, reaching for your pistol.