Our no-fun, too-hot, bizarrely alienated summer
Why are there so few places where we can feel like we’re a part of something?
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Something felt off this summer, though I couldn’t exactly put my finger on it. Maybe it was the fact that my AC broke down in the middle of a mid-July Philadelphia heat wave. After spending four or five days trying to track down a technician who could fix it, our neurons firing sluggishly, my partner and I nearly said “yes” to a smooth-talking salesman on the other end of the line who said he could make all our problems go away in 24 hours if we agreed to fork over $13,000. Magnanimously, he made sure to let us know that the company also offered personal loans if we didn’t have the money on hand.
Hunting for a low-cost window unit to tide us over during a record-breaking 102-degree weekend, I found myself standing outside of a Walmart in South Philly, sliding on my N95 and marveling at how this fraction of a moment seemed to bring together so many of the overlapping crises of our time. And yet, the compounding economic and psychic effects of climate change, inflation, predatory capitalism, and a still-ongoing pandemic weren’t the only reason for the “summertime sadness” I’d been feeling since BBQ season began.
Lana del Rey’s song, to my ears at least, is about the season’s association with an acute, almost luxurious sensation of loss. The version of it I was feeling was probably better encapsulated by what happened later that week, when my partner and I decided to get a group of people together and drive to a giant suburban movieplex in New Jersey to see Jordan Peele’s Nope. It was our first time venturing out to the movies since early 2020, and we were looking forward to spending the hottest hours of the afternoon in the industrial-powered AC. Four days later, we got a text: At least two of the friends we met up with had tested positive for COVID-19.
We’ve entered a period where even the government is saying that we no longer need to stand six feet apart at all times. And yet — perhaps even more than at the start of the pandemic, when we texted our friends to make sure they were okay and found togetherness in our shared calamity — it can feel oddly difficult to reconnect. It’s not that we don’t want to break out of our isolation and return to “normal”; it’s just that whenever we try to, something always gets in the way.
This fall marks four years since I moved away from my hometown of New York, so I might be particularly sensitive to the way that time and distance can chip away at bonds that used to feel inviolable. But I’ve been keeping a casual tally of text conversations with old friends, and I can’t make heads or tails of what anybody says or does anymore. One moment, we’ll be spilling our guts, saying how much we miss each other, swearing that We have to resume our weekly phone calls, so much has happened since we last spoke, that would honestly mean so much to me. The next, I’ll be wondering why that friend never followed up on Tuesday about setting up a call — or worse, kicking myself because three weeks passed and I forgot to respond, despite lamenting to my partner all weekend that I’ve been feeling kind of isolated lately.
There are myriad things we can blame for this — chief among them our increasingly fragmented attention spans; work cultures that require us to be always on call; forms of uncompensated labor that we either forget to factor into our already overstuffed calendars (cleaning), or that we need to prioritize above all else (childcare); or any of the other explanations that Anne Helen Peterson likes to offer for our first-world, geriatic millennial ennui. If I’m being honest, I think for me, a lot of it just comes down to a lack of personal organization. But I’m also struck by the extent to which this endless series of missed connections feels like yet another instance of our offline lives mirroring our online ones.
In 2022, it’s hard to think of the user experience on any of the major Web2 platforms in terms of the metaphor of stepping into a room full of your friends and professional acquaintances and shouting over the din. We may have something to say to these people, but saying it on a platform like Twitter is less akin to projecting our voice in a crowd than to putting a message in a bottle and hoping that, through some combination of weather, moon phases, and other forces beyond our control, it reaches any destination at all.
The sensation of disconnect occasioned by algorithmic sorting cuts both ways: Recently, I’ve often found myself typing people’s names into the search bar, just to see if they’re still on the platform. Somehow, in its complex calculation of which Tweets would be most relevant to my interests, based on factors that nobody seems to know or understand, it has stopped showing me content from many of my friends.
The vibes have been off for a while, but they’ve been feeling especially wacky since around the time that Elon Musk started trying to buy Twitter. Up until the moment when he tried pulling out of the deal (and months before he ultimately acquired it and laid off thousands of people), there was a period where it genuinely seemed possible to imagine a future where Twitter no longer felt like the center of the online universe, at least as far as leftist politics and the media and entertainment industries were concerned. Hundreds of thousands of people deactivated their accounts; those who remained but couldn’t stomach the idea of Musk holding the keys to the castle seemed unsure what to do with themselves, as though they were standing on land that was about to be invaded. Ever since — perhaps because the idea of spending our days producing free content for a billionaire edgelord laid bare a dynamic that had been there all along — it’s been hard to shake the feeling that any semblance of “community” the platform might foster, however hollow and algorithmically determined, was basically an illusion designed to keep us there so that other people could make money. And even that could disappear in an instant.
More recently, Instagram’s decision to move further away from its core business as a photo-sharing app and start prioritizing “reels” in users’ feeds has produced a similar effect: For years, I used to log onto Instagram to see what my friends were getting up to; now, I open the app, see a familiar face or two, then fall down a confusing rabbit hole full of cat videos, targeted ads, and clips of people I’ve never seen before trying on whatever Botox-simulation face filter happens to be trending that day. (In late July, after even Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian complained about their experience on the app, Instagram announced that it would be dialing back the barrage of full-screen videos and recommended posts. But using it hasn’t gotten any less dizzying.)
Instagram’s current mission, according to its website, is to “bring you closer to the people and things you love.” But the experience it offers is beginning to feel a lot more like Tiktok, which figured out early on that it was more profitable to break with the illusion that users, by dint of choosing which accounts to follow, were actually “curating” the content that would show up on their feed. The latter’s mission statement feels like a more honest summation of what the industry’s chief value proposition, viewed in the most charitable light, has become: Not to bring people closer together, but “to inspire creativity and bring joy.” We’re no longer meant to think of ourselves as participants in a virtual public square, one that we’ve migrated to at the cost of neglecting, or being isolated from, more IRL forms of relating. Increasingly, we’re more like the atomized consumers of a form of disjointed, 24-hour TV, one that happens to be always beckoning us to join the show.
No wonder that the New York media, in a stunning about-face after years of sounding the alarm over the ways that works of art and culture were failing to live up to our best moral values, suddenly can’t get enough of the whole “Dimes Square” thing.
Sure, the idea of a group of glamorous Chloë Sevigny wannabes running around town with “dissident thinkers” like Curtis Yarvin and peppering their speech with ableist slurs possesses exactly the sort of shock value that moves the needle in our hypercompetitive information economy. But after years of being cooped up inside, there’s something undeniably intoxicating about the idea of New York once again being home to something that even remotely resembles a “scene,” in the URL, geographically localized sense.