montage #35: Some notes on the strangers in our phones
wigwagmag.substack.com
It’s becoming increasingly clear that 2024 will go down as the Year of the Insane Online Essay. Obviously, people have been writing insane online essays since Xanga pivoted from unsuccessful book review website to fully customizable personal blog platform, prompting me to print out my friends’ Xanga posts so I could re-read them as much as I wanted to on the bus ride to school while listening to my beloved Sublime greatest hits CD (the thrills of early internet). People love and will always love to do a weird thing then admit that they did it in hopes that other weirdos will tell them it’s ok, actually, what they did, anyone would do that, don’t worry 👍🏼. One time in an undergrad nonfiction class, someone wrote an essay about their secret crippling addiction to The Sims and as they read it aloud to the rest of us, each sentence felt more and more like something we should not be listening to. “Hmm,” I remember thinking. “This seems…personal.” That essay as far as I know was never published online, but had it been it would have found a great home at The Cut, where everyone would have acted totally normal about it and definitely not shared their fully rational opinions on Twitter.
montage #35: Some notes on the strangers in our phones
montage #35: Some notes on the strangers in…
montage #35: Some notes on the strangers in our phones
It’s becoming increasingly clear that 2024 will go down as the Year of the Insane Online Essay. Obviously, people have been writing insane online essays since Xanga pivoted from unsuccessful book review website to fully customizable personal blog platform, prompting me to print out my friends’ Xanga posts so I could re-read them as much as I wanted to on the bus ride to school while listening to my beloved Sublime greatest hits CD (the thrills of early internet). People love and will always love to do a weird thing then admit that they did it in hopes that other weirdos will tell them it’s ok, actually, what they did, anyone would do that, don’t worry 👍🏼. One time in an undergrad nonfiction class, someone wrote an essay about their secret crippling addiction to The Sims and as they read it aloud to the rest of us, each sentence felt more and more like something we should not be listening to. “Hmm,” I remember thinking. “This seems…personal.” That essay as far as I know was never published online, but had it been it would have found a great home at The Cut, where everyone would have acted totally normal about it and definitely not shared their fully rational opinions on Twitter.