Poster's Paradise

After however many years of psychic damage incurred from infinite scrolling it’s time to shit with my feet, or vote on the pot, or something.

It seems quaint to me now to think of the old gripes about social media - the facetune body dysmorphia, the beauty product hyper-consumption, the scammer-influencer complex. The apps of yore were still kind of a fun time. A normal day of looking at my phone would be seeing what my friends were up to, some light posting, maybe some spying on crushes and enemies. Those things are all still there, but the structure of the platforms and user behaviour has changed over time so that the typical 2-minute phone break is like a rigged pinball machine where you always fall through the bottom into a racist comment thread about Indian people. Everything is completely irresistible and completely insubstantial. There’s an odd jiggling rhythm that runs through things (example) which makes me immediately angry and reminds me of compulsive masturbation. It’s the rhythm of looping porn gifs (and weirdly, Pusheen). Sorry to take it to this place, but it’s all gooning to me. I’m all for literal masturbation as long as you finish up and go about your day, but I fear irreversible neuron slaughter from the infinite dopamine edging without release. What happens to a brain that’s never allowed to complete a thought?

I often tell myself that my cognitive abilities already peaked sometime in my mid-20s and that’s probably true, but if there’s any chance of regaining some ground it’s not going to happen from looking at Instagram. When I was 12 I learned HTML so I could make a website about Hello Kitty. When I was in my early 20s I had a personal blog which pretty much birthed my adult personality. A lot of other more important things have happened since, but in some ways it feels like my life is bending back to that arc, like there’s a connection outside of time between me fucking around then and me fucking around now. I’ve never wanted to be any kind of writer but it’s self-evident that there’s a lot to gain from it in terms of ordering your thoughts and developing your ideas. Which brings me to rawdogging a Google doc for the first time in over a decade. First day at the brain gym, murking myself with some 1kg free weights. I have a plan to distribute these as an email newsletter if I can keep this up. If I were a truly disciplined person I would just start a diary, but I came up through Blogger and posting has leached into all of my tissues. 

So here we are in Poster’s Purgatory. There are many topics that I want to cover, mostly personal matters of limited interest, but it doesn’t really matter if anyone’s reading. If anyone gets anything out of this I hope it’s the idea that such an endeavour could be personally fulfilling for them too. I’ve been vaguely thinking about doing this for years, but Kim Grushow’s wonderful substack really showed me the light. Maybe one day we'll post ourselves to paradise again. 

Do you long to escape the goon cave? Or is social media still worth it? Sound off below Purgies!