(CW: suicide)
Last January, before the pandemic hit, I was obsessed with this French show Ad Vitam. It’s a neo-noir about a future in which humans have recently unlocked the secret of immortality, a sort of genetic/cosmetic technology developed from the DNA of jellyfish. Most adults are enthusiastic about living forever, especially people in their physical prime. Legislation is being drafted to make it routine for young people to start getting the treatments at 18. But many young people in this future — let’s call them the radical children of the already-radical Gen Z — are decidedly against the technology. Immortality has inspired so-called “death cults,” groups of youths who want to live completely organic lives, then die. Some of these groups are more extreme than others, and they’re all susceptible to coercion by opportunistic parties, which is where the show begins: with a mysterious, gruesome “mass suicide” event in which a bunch of teenagers’ bodies wash up on a beach. A very tired detective must team up with a young woman, the sole survivor of another cult’s mass suicide, to solve the case. The young woman’s dead boyfriend had this saying she keeps remembering; it echoed around in my head at the time and has only solidified further over the past year: “Seule les actes parlent. Seule les actes ne mentent pas.” Only actions speak. Only actions don’t lie.
Clearly I understand that, in context, these were the words of terrorists who use the slogan to rally children to kill themselves for effect. I get it. (Seriously, watch this show.) But out of context, the slogan works for me. It’s a sexier way of saying “show, don’t tell,” a stricter boundary being drawn that doesn’t even acknowledge the other option. To me, it says, Come back when you’re doing something about it. When you’re working to feed and clothe and house people, regardless of whether you think they deserve it. When you’re tangibly supporting your neighbors. I guarantee you’ll be too tired to soapbox or argue with fascist sympathizers who are trying to get in your way.
I’ve been thinking about that Clickhole classic, “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point.” It embodies so much of my experience in media and online. People in the industry who have behaved reprehensibly toward me and my friends often have great politics, publishing pieces and books I can’t help but wholeheartedly agree with, even enjoy. Meanwhile, people I like personally — genuine human beings who have gone out of their way to put their money where their mouths are — can often become utterly intolerable through exposure, their ideas muddled by a cult of online personality that drowns decency in a morass of follower counts.
It’s rare for media people, or just internet people, to be both good online and good IRL. (The exception is Josh Gondelman.) Sometimes I wonder how my own successes in one arena might be coming at the expense of the other. It’s an inverse relationship, certainly. My best tweets often come from a particularly nasty depression cycle, and my best writing often happens while I’m not checking in on my loved ones; similarly, I always seem to hemorrhage followers when things are going well in my personal life. (I don’t blame them. Earnest tweets from happy, well-adjusted people? Disgusting!!) Most days, like most decent people, I wish I could quit public online life, but it’s a necessary evil. And also I’m addicted to it.
The subject came up recently when a friend posted a funny quote from someone I dislike about how feminism is useless. In the past, I’d worked with this person, and they’d been rude and unprofessional and cost me hours of work. But in the case of the quote, they were right. As the friend who shared it explained, “Feminism is no longer a useful paradigm, for me or for many of my friends. I’m exhausted by its aesthetics. I hate it, I don’t find community in it anymore.” An outsider would definitely call us feminists: we both actively participate in direct aid, on weekly and sometimes daily basis; we vote radically and despise TERFs; and we both spend a lot of time identifying the many flavors of misogyny we experience.
But — and I know I’m restating the painfully basic here — what was once a word for a radical way of life is now just noise. Political frameworks are marketing. They’re “aesthetics,” a vehicle for being smart and popular online while doing absolutely fuck-all on the ground. Talking about feminism, or any sort of -ism for that matter, feels like a privilege I left behind in 2016. Of course, for many, it’s been a privilege for much, much longer than that. We’re just in a moment where pontificating about political ideology — to call the -isms by name, to argue in general terms — is a bigger red flag than ever before. It signals your lack of participation, how very far you are from its tangible parts. Wow, you have the time and the brain space for this? As that friend put it, “People use ‘feminist discourse’ as a shorthand for, like, activism? And it’s not.”
I suppose this newsletter is a follow-up to the last one, back in July (?!), where I wrote that the only thing left is to do right by the people around you. The belief has crystallized into a core value in the intervening months, if only because I never have anything to say anymore that doesn’t feel so absurd in the saying that it devolves into unhinged giggles. (Shout out to my therapist, who reads this newsletter.) So many people are experiencing the visceral effects of all these compounding, ongoing catastrophes that participating in discourse is an insult, both to those on the bleeding edge of these crises and, if you’re not one of those people, to your own energy reservoir. Twitter has always been shouting into the void, but now, for me, it has become a tool with very specific rules. It’s for making dumb jokes and bullying shitty politicians and haranguing my followers into buying soup and tarps for unhoused encampments here in LA. In-and-out stuff. Earnest threads and pithy outrage just feel like placeholders for real work, the kind of work that actually makes me feel like the world is not just chaos and cruelty and that I’ve had some small part in that fact. So the next time you see me taking Twitter seriously — like I, unfortunately, found myself doing today — just remind me: Seule les actes parlent.
P.S. Next newsletter will be back to sci-fi shitposting, I swear. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., anyone?
P.P.S. Don’t buy soups and tarps this week. Amazon workers are striking and while we may use the devil’s website for expediency’s sake, we draw the line at scabbing.