My handwriting is weird. I was taught cursive in … third grade, I wanna say? And I hated it, all that join-up-the-words bullshit. So I chipped away the form, substituting printed letters I liked better. (My signature begins with a variation of the printed “G,” not the curlicue version I was taught as part of the cursive letter set. Come to that, I think all my handwritten sentences begin with printed letters, save for the “M.” I like that one; reminds me of the Loch Ness monster.) I used my hybrid cursive set well into my 40s, writing in hardbound journals, and I still break it out on occasion when I get the urge to write a postcard or when I have to sign something with a pen instead of my finger.
These days, my longhand is, wow. It’s not good; that’s not a good “wow.” My words break down into flattened squiggles and bad strokes halfway through a paragraph. My hand cramps up terribly—this mighty hand that once powered through six-page coffeehouse prose pieces with dumb names like “The Precipitating Year.” And I can tell you the exact day I (metaphorically) signed its death warrant: It was May 5, 2000, the day I signed up for the blogging service LiveJournal. I was among its first 3000 users, the only time in my life I got in on the basement floor of something that would get very big. Today, LiveJournal—we called it LJ—claims to have some 50 million accounts, though I imagine that only a handful of those remain active.
I signed up for LJ to comment on a friend’s post. I didn’t fully understand what I was getting myself into, though in my defense no one did; Facebook wouldn’t exist until 2004 (and wouldn’t offer open membership until 2006). Twitter was six years off; Instagram, ten. I couldn’t yet comprehend the feeling of need, of compulsion that sites like LJ would engender in me, and in nearly everyone else. In all candor, this post is an extension of that need; yet another play for unearned dopamine. I sincerely hope that you read this post and leave a comment telling me that you enjoyed it, because that’s what I like. I hope lots and lots of people leave nice comments. That’s the fucking mess I’m in.
After a slow start, during which I mostly quoted song lyrics, LiveJournal soon became my preferred “voice.” This is someone who wrote for a living going home at night to write more. Colleagues asked me why? and I didn’t have a good answer—at least, no answer I was willing to share. The shameful truth is that LJ satisfied me in ways my job never could: immediately, enthusiastically and without judgement.
To this day, for every compliment I receive about the job I’m doing, I get five pieces of shitty mail—generally complaints and criticisms, occasionally oblique threats. (More so these days, from Trump voters angry that they won.) By comparison, everything I posted to LiveJournal was met with love, love, love. Oh ho ho, such an authentic wit you possess, dear sir. It didn’t take but a year of this to convince me that my online persona—the one who spoke in pithy, staccato edit—was more likable than my daily.
My second-biggest regret is allowing my handwriting to degrade. The first is that thing I just told you. For the better part of a decade, LJ more or less altered my consciousness. It filtered my speech, chose my relationships and filled me with a changeable confidence that didn’t transfer to offline life. I could do cartwheels through a comment chain, riffing on responses and catering to everyone’s wants. Real-time, in-person social events, from parties to simple date nights, utterly confounded my ability to engage; they sapped my confidence from the get, a failing I reckon with to this day.
The funny thing is, the online realm had an answer for that, too: It tells me, over and over, that I’m an introvert and that there’s something terribly interesting and sexy about introverts. I don’t doubt that, but then again, I’m not certain of how many actual introverts I know. I can say, with some certainty, that I’m not one of them. I love the company of friends, love going to events, when I feel equipped to deal with them. I don’t enjoy disappearing into the hedge for as long as I can stand it, then storming out of the party and posting vague declarations about my state of mind. Personally and professionally, my life could be greatly improved by a firm handshake and a hearty “Geoff Carter, rush chairman. Damn glad to meet you.”
(A quick aside here: I want to stop saying things like “I feel it in my heart” or “in my bones.” Anybody who’s seen that Pixar movie knows that’s not where emotions live and work: They’re in the brain, operating buttons, switches and dials in a space-age control room. Whenever I feel angry or sad or embarrassed or inferior or lonely, it’s happening in my brain, and my brain is split. It’s less than trustworthy, with more than half of its waking resources invested in building and maintaining a false front.)
On the day after the election I sat in a tiny Laurel Canyon rental with Laura and read postmortems for American democracy. That morning, online factions began to coalesce around various factions of blame: we went too far right, we went too far left etc. I’m not much interested in doing that; sometimes, you just lose. But I am receptive to discussions of what to do next, because I’m already working that angle. I’m not likely to figure out where our democracy went wrong, but I can determine where I’ve gone wrong.
All neurosis is local. And if you put any semi-decent detective in the room with my social awkwardness, they’d crack the case within seconds: “You’re not spending enough time around actual people.”
My friend Kim Foster wrote an outstanding essay about loneliness. As you may know, Kim writes about hunger and addiction and the terrible, permanent marks they can leave on our minds. Kim also backs up her words with numbers, so here are some of my own: According to a 2018 CSU Fullerton study, as many as 10% of Americans could be addicted to social media and the dopamine hit it provides. (I believe that number is higher now. Come to that, I believe the number was higher then.) A 2021 study indicated that more than 70% of us suffer acute anxiety when deprived of our smartphones; there’s even a (somewhat unserious) name for the condition, “nomophobia.” The NIH says that some people may be on social media as much as seven hours a day, and that such prolonged usage could result in “negative mental health consequences, such as suicidality, loneliness and anxiety.”
And if you’re presently rolling your eyes and thinking, “Tell us something we don’t know,” then you’re probably neck-deep in it, like me.
The web was never supposed to be our third place. It’s not supposed to be an adjunct space for representative government, and it sure as hell isn’t a place to fall in love. It’s a piece of office equipment, strictly project-oriented. Need to have an editorial meeting, sell a couch, harass someone under cover of anonymity? That’s the web’s whole fuckin’ thing. We can get nasty with our arguments in here because there’s no gravity, no inherent threat from taking things too far.
That being the case, when pundits and billionaires insinuate that we need to absorb that flood of empty and not-so-empty threats, that we need to be on X because it’s our civic duty, I gotta ask: Do we, though?
Put it this way. I jumped on LiveJournal in 2000 because none of us yet knew where this was going, and by the time I’d begun to figure it out, a number of cute indie girls in faraway places had already told me that I was smart and handsome. It was hard to resist that kind of attention—and, frankly, why would the younger me deny himself something so pleasurable, that never seemed to run out? But posting LJ thirst traps wasn’t a compulsory thing for me, just as the small men presently shouting racist manifestos from the cabs of pickup trucks* don’t have to do what they do.
My “international man of letters” fantasy eventually disintegrated. I don’t want to be around any of those ballcap-and-sunglasses racists when their fantasy life falls apart, and I don’t have to be. I’m not obligated, by law or nature, to build bridges or mend fences with bullying, obstinate assholes I’ll never meet in the flesh. They have their problems and I have my own; they can work theirs out without trying to figure how I’m somehow responsible for their failures. I’ll just be in my own corner, posting my photos, sharing dog videos with Laura and doing the New York Times’ goddamned Connections puzzle.
What that means is that I’m parking as many of my social media accounts as I can. I’m removing all my posts and effectively hanging out a shingle that says “I’m not home.” I’ve already vacated Threads and TikTok, and my Twitter scrub-down is in progress. I haven’t yet conceived of felicitous solutions for Facebook and Instagram, where I have a good number of real-life friends I actually enjoy following, but I’ll figure them out. I’ll stay with Flickr—ooh, I love creaky old Flickr—and I’ll keep this Substack, which is a good thing because I can’t write longhand and because LiveJournal is dead.
One more thing about handwriting and, curiously, the 2024 election: Some 9,000 uncured Nevada ballots were thrown out this year due to signature-match issues. (Roughly 23,000 other ballots were cured, and the invalidated ballots wouldn’t have tipped the scale in any outstanding races.) Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar said that the signature issues were largely confined to younger voters who “rarely signed their names.” I’m not sure I’d like to know what percentage of those young voters don’t know how to make a signature, but I know it’s not zero.
What do we lose when handwriting goes away? I find I’m unable to get my head around the question because, before now, I would’ve thought it a unlikely question. But we live in unlikely times. We are unsatisfied with the speed of the machine takeover, and are taking giant, giddy steps to hasten it. It’s only too easy for me to imagine some broken, smoldering afterworld in which we don’t know how to communicate with each other without a technological buffer, and we can’t teach ourselves out of it because we’ve forgotten how to write things down.
Well, that’s dark. Fuck if I know if social media has ruined our democracy. That’s a full research topic, and I’m not willing to swim those waters to prove they can drown you. But I think it might have ruined me, and I hate that. I’m going to try to fix myself.
*Sorry to go out on a down note. Here are three of my insults for the God Bless Trump and Elon set, rated best to worst by my friend Renee:
You look like a dude who wants his wedding day catered by Hooters.
You look like a dude who has his very bestest Hurley t-shirts on hangers.
You look like a dude with provocative photos of a Cybertruck on his phone.
I’ll play myself out.
I sincerely enjoyed this. Thank you so much for your thoughtful words and I am right there with you, feeling adrift in these strange times.
“Things die for whatever reason,” but things also live in the movement of a hand across the page. Or a keyboard. Or a mix. Or a photograph. xo