I fill a significant portion of my spare time with 

dumb thoughts that strangers post online. I’ve 
been on the internet since the late-aughts, spending 
after-school screen time with Fred videos and 
Webkinz, floating from site to site on the family PC. 
The online world allowed me to be anonymous — 
even though I met “friends” on Club Penguin chats 
and GirlsGoGames comments, I was just a chaotic 
username, not Annie Rauwerda. My bubble of 
anonymity popped when my dad told me that the 
public comments I’d made on High School Musical 
videos (“Vanessa Hudgens is sooooo perfect for 
Zac,” etc.) were all associated with his name and 
that I should “please not do that.” 

I spent my middle school years under my actual 

name on Google Buzz and Facebook, poking 
and posting. By high school, the tech giants had 
hooked me on algorithmically-curated content. 
The 10-year anniversary of my Instagram account 
approaches, and I’m not sure if I should celebrate 
or mourn.

The internet hosts mazes of feverish 

connection; it takes our social incentives (to 
be liked) and disguises them as performance 
incentives (to get likes.) After I meet someone in 
real life, I search their name on the internet to get a 
read on their vibe — a habit that, when I take a step 
back, seems deranged. Why can’t my perception 
of a person be complete without knowing their 
online presence? In a digitally-mediated world, it’s 
easy to make life inextricable from social media. 
Many of the good and beautiful parts of life— the 
jokes, the inspiration, our communities and our 
families— are inseparable from the internet, too. 

People I’ll never meet are saying nothing and 

saying it all the time, and I’m frequently sucked 
into the abyss, viewing it all from my digital 
peephole. Opaque algorithms present me with 
curated content that updates every few seconds; 
apps send me FOMO-inducing push notifications 
when I haven’t logged on in a while. Occasionally, 
the trash vortex yields something useful, like 

this Chrome extension that hides pop-ups and 
long personal stories from food blogs. Other 
times, I’m absent-mindedly scrolling through 
acquaintances’ vacation pictures, wasting my 
time watching their carefully constructed lives. 

A stranger made a Rube Goldberg machine. 

Another stranger had a gender reveal at a ski 
resort (she’s a girl). More strangers had a reunion 
at an airport, and I watched until the end. I’m 
happy for them. Hong Kong now has a meme 
museum.

I become invested in the day’s happenings and 

I move to the couch to continue my scroll. 

Female octopuses throw things at males that 

are harassing them and a stranger thinks this is 
pretty hashtag girlboss. Now there’s shaved soap, 
a close-up of gloved hands popping blackheads 
and a picture of a frog that says “I live in Poland 
but the la is silent.” An ad for a bank for gay people. 
A mukbang. My brother’s ex-girlfriend did a 
Tough Mudder with her dad who has cancer and 
my high school nemesis is asking her followers to 
join her pyramid scheme. Vaccine disinformation. 
A cow got stuck in a tree. Someone changed their 
Tinder location to the Olympic Village and is 
matching with Olympians. Neat!

There’s a gif of a rapper above an Amber 

Alert above a deep-fried-meme above a notice of 
neighborhood raccoons above ASMR cooking 
tutorials above viral recipes for air-fryer tofu 
above a stranger’s açaí bowl above a 5-year-
old opening a neon slime kit. Rapper Nicki 
Minaj spreads misinformation, claiming that 
the COVID-19 vaccine caused infertility in her 
cousin’s friend, and reputable sources rush to 
correct her. My high school assistant swim coach 
marks herself safe from a minor hurricane. The 
New York Times Magazine ran an article about 
how to catch a bat, making me wonder if this is 
a skill I’ll ever need to know. There’s an ad for a 
dating app for dogs.

Rudy Giuliani is on Cameo. An influencer posted 

a picture in Cabo but when she photoshopped her 
small waist, she inadvertently made her thumb 
really fat. Timothée Chalamet was spotted eating 
a sandwich. The Daily Mail puts out another 
bizarre headline: “EXCLUSIVE: Tech bro boasts 
about hanging with ‘notable celebrities and execs’ 
at UNOFFICIAL Burning Man as rich kids bring 
their own stages, Porta Potties and DJ equipment 
to Black Rock Desert ‘Playa.’” A Russian content 
farm on Facebook asks if you can name a song that 
mentions the weather, and your parents’ next-door 
neighbor comments “It’s Raining Men.” I suppose 
she’s right, and I take a screenshot to send to my 
brother but never get around to sending it. A girl 
I met at a slumber party in eighth grade moved 
to Texas with her boyfriend. A BuzzFeed video 
shows how street lights work. Polka-dot bralettes 
are on sale. Bugs Bunny is wearing a tux and 
wishing “all darty-ers a very calm down it’s 9 in 
the morning.” A church youth pastor says that the 
new rec room has everything a teen could want: 
Blu-rays, a foosball table, a board game shelf and 
several types of potato chips. Someone posted a 
video of their “obnoxiously strong toes” and it met 
my (admittedly low) expectations. 

“Ali express is a beautiful name for a girl,” says 

a stranger. A multi-millionaire I’ve never heard of 
is quitting his job at a one-billion-dollar company 
to work at a different billion-dollar company, and 
a cat fell off the upper bowl of a stadium during 
a football game. Someone brings up the guy 
with two penises from Reddit. Someone thinks 
their chin looks like the city of Dallas. It does. 
Another meme arises based on a nostalgic form 
of children’s entertainment that people in their 
twenties enjoyed as elementary schoolers. A 
stretched, saturated stock image of Paris Hilton 
holding a massive Hello Kitty purse is overlaid by 
glowing yellow text that reads “I am so based.” It 
has 60,000 likes. Someone in a Twitter argument 
says “touch some grass,” an insult implying that 
one has lost touch with reality so entirely that they 

must interact with a plant and reflect on their 
actions. 

Like a lab rat with a lever, I wade through 

endless content in search of a meme that induces a 
strong exhale. I don’t know if the mess of content 
adds up to anything, but I do know it feels thrilling 
on good days and overwhelming on bad days. 
There are plenty of voices saying social media is 
bad — just as critics warned about TV (called a 
“vast wasteland” in 1961), or the once-newfangled 
concept of the written word, which Plato said 
would “implant forgetfulness.”

As someone who loves the way the media 

landscape always provides something new to 
learn, I don’t mean to be a Luddite. Still, when 
I don’t set limits, I find myself exhausted by 
it all. I mourn the way it can fuel hate groups, 
decimate mental health and pressure its users 
into constant performance. Huge concerts may 
have a stage in the middle surrounded by seating 
in every direction, but on social media, it’s as if the 
performers are in the stands and there’s no stage 
— we’re performing for no one but each other.

I have my gripes with the internet, of course, 

but I keep coming back to it for several reasons: 
I frequently find things I really like (like this 
101-year-old lobsterwoman) and it connects me 
to my friends. Gen Z has been dubbed “digital 
natives” because we grew up in close contact with 
the internet. The term implies the internet is my 
home country, and it sure feels like it: I speak our 
shared language of memes and phrases with a 
certain dialect, and I get a homesick longing for 
content if I go for too long without it. 

The other day, I saw in an online article linked 

from social media that ducks can learn to say 
phrases, and one said “you bloody fool.” 

“Maybe I am,” I thought, and then I scrolled to 

a tweet from user @afraidofwasps. It read: “You 
only live once — you should try to spend as much 
time on the computer as possible. After you die, 
you won’t have access to it anymore.”

Wednesday, September 22, 2021 // The Statement — 2

Design by Erin Shi

BY ANNIE RAUWERDA, 

STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT

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