This is going to be self-indulgent and meandering as all fuck. Apologies in advance.
The subhead for this article could be, “How Many Times Can You Watch Evangelion Before It Stops Being About The Creator’s Depression And Just Becomes About Marginally Cool Robots?”
Sadness is a commodity that I want to run out of. So is pain, anger, frustration and a host of other emotions. As I think about my writing (a continual process) I realized something kind of shitty. I switched writing about one emotion – anger – for another – my own pain – when I switched from writing about the perceived political atrocity of the week to writing about video games. Isn’t that kind of strange?
Why am I telling you, a stranger, about my life? My pain? I don’t know you. I’m not your friend. And you aren’t mine. And what right do I have to saddle you with my bullshit? I don’t do this to strangers on the street, why would I willingly do it week in and week out on Twitter or on this website? When Austin Walker called for a history of what games feel like this is decidedly not what he meant.
The Internet is like a vast double-blind psychological experiment and we’re like its test subjects. It’s been what, 40 years at most since this tool of instant communication was invented? How can anyone claim to have a solid grasp on what it means to be “alive on the internet” when people still believe it’s a toy or something Satan made up? So, fuck, Facebook became available when I was in high school. Twitter opened up around the same time. That’s only like 15 years total that those two social networks by themselves have been around. When people first got on it, they said “oh it’s like a nicer MySpace.” And we knew MySpace, for the most part. It was a place where you could make friends and listen to music and connect with celebrities – or people you thought were celebrities – and it caused fights because you didn’t put someone in your top 8, and everyone’s fucking MySpace page had too much HTML and CSS nonsense on it and it crashed your DSL connection all the time. YouTube wasn’t big yet. The internet hadn’t consolidated.
Twitter and Facebook fucking killed the old internet. It also opened up an entirely new way of being online, one I don’t think has been fully reckoned with yet.
One of my first newspaper articles to ever get published in my college paper, the UCO Vista, was a story about Dunbar’s number. (page 4) You have likely heard of Dunbar’s number, just like you’ve heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, but maybe you’re not a hundred percent on what that’s about. Basically, you have the capacity to juggle about 150 meaningful relationships, maximum. What we’re using as a standard for “you” is unclear; for ease of reference let’s just say everyone.
Anyway, these are people you love and cherish. Your number might personally be smaller, but you really can’t go above your maximum.
But what about, I hear you asking, the other 2850 followers I have?
“I think most people know and understand – even if they don’t think about it, that of those (3000 followers), it really is just a few core ‘best’ friends, then perhaps a larger group of ‘friends,’ and finally, a bunch of people who would be better described as former friends, acquaintances, or let’s be honest, complete strangers,” Leeda Copley, a UCO sociology professor told me (aside from the parenthetical, which I changed; she actually said “350 friends”) at the time.
So now we have to reckon with all but a tiny fraction of people who “follow us” are essentially strangers. And we have to deal with the fallout of this, like explaining that parasocial relationships are fine as long as you don’t believe they’re actual social relationships (which never works) and basically all twitter drama that isn’t someone being found out to be a fucking Nazi is “I can’t deal with the parasocial nature of my relationship with this person so I’m going to make it their problem.”
And like this would be the part where I pooh-pooh the state of things and do nothing to address the fact that I benefit from it, at least in a small way.
But that’s just it. I do benefit from it. So does everyone who has a platform, I guess. But I’m benefiting from it by selling you my sadness every week, wrapped in the veneer of video games.
You know what I fuckin hate about social media? Likes. Seeing your follower/followed count. Metrics showing how popular you are minute-by-minute and over a period of time. Notifications that someone has added their two cents to your shitpost. I hate that it feels like a game, that I’m supposed to be pushing for a larger “reach” every week, that I need to get into this or that newsletter for a little push, and that I’ve somehow failed in my overall goals (of… writing about video games because I wanted to do that?) if I haven’t.
Neon Genesis Evangelion is a two-cour anime (26 episodes) from 1995 about a boy with already-severe psychological trauma being compelled to pilot a living weapon of mass destruction against incomprehensible enemies, and everyone around him is wondering aloud why every week he can’t handle his shit. The enemies are presented almost unceremoniously on the horizon in most episodes as if to normalize them more than the “good guys;” in one episode where they’re on a warship, we’re only alerted to the enemy’s presence by the destruction of other boats in the fleet. It is 13 hours of pure discomfort and by the end you’ve almost assuredly sympathized with one of the other characters in the series; either they had it worse to begin with, shit got real bad for them in ways it never got for the main character, relatively-speaking, or you inexplicably decided they were your waifu. You proceed to make memes about the main character for the next 20 years, because dunking on a child is cool.
Anyway, it’s full of spiritual iconography and armchair psychoanalysis, written by a man in the throes of his own crippling depression, and produced by a company running flat out of money by the time the last four episodes were due, necessitating some experimental animation work and even more navel gazing than before. Then a series of OVAs and movies came out, and we’re still talking about this bullshit like it’s still the most profound nonsense you’ve ever seen, and I don’t have disdain for Neon Genesis Evangelion, it’s just that the shock of seeing someone so profoundly upset get put into upsetting situations on a constant basis – and seeing yourself in them – has gotten entirely old and I just can’t give myself the space to give a fuck that the Rebuild “tetralogy” is (not) finishing in 2020.
Hideaki Anno made his pain in the winter of 1995 a commodity. He – and the studios he’s worked for – has made hundreds of millions of dollars off of it. It still gets old.
We’re going to have to learn how to use the internet in ways that don’t make us sick. And part of how we do that is to stop using Twitter and Facebook. Don’t go to Mastodon or Pillowfort. Just get off the fucking platforms. If you must be on here start a blog. Hell, Discord is healthier, but even Discord’s probably gotta go. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey is floating the idea of putting a subscription model in place – now might be the best time for a mass exodus.
But before you go, maybe get your best friends’ phone numbers and email addresses.
I need to find another way to write that doesn’t just center my pain, my feelings, my emotions for your consumption. It’s not fucking healthy to do. I don’t want to do it anymore.
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