On Being Clavicular
And other thoughts
This is me writing more regularly to my paid subscribers. I have a lot of thoughts that don’t make sense for full essays that I’d love to share. Ostensibly, many of you are here for my thoughts. My big, juicy thoughts. Here they are.
ON BEING CLAVICULAR
My recent essay in Playboy about Clavicular is popping off. If you don’t know who that is, the essay explains. He’s the shiny new toy internet anthropologists are playing with at the moment. Chronically online writers love an e-phenomenon that makes them feel old. As for me, it was the “assignment from Playboy” of it all that drew me in. I thought it would be chic to have an essay published in Playboy, and I was right.
When you write about someone like Clavicular, you open yourself up to a specific flavor of feedback, the substance of which is: UGHHHH… As in: Why are you writing about this person? Why are you making me think about him? Just… why? Then there’s the standard: Everything I’ve learned about [Whomever], I learned against my will.
This isn’t so much a criticism as it is an expression of a preference. Fair enough! But there’s less distance IMO between the average social media user and Clavicular than said user is likely to be comfortable with. The “against my will” meme tells us something on that front. There is an element of coercion in social media, isn’t there? It really does impose itself on our psyche. It inserts its proboscis into our frontal lobe and pipes in ideas and faces that were not invited.
So we fight back. We tell ourselves our choices on social media matter. We customize the experience in such a way that it’s “healthy,” or at least less damaging. I wouldn’t call myself a total doomer on the subject, but I do think we very regularly kid ourselves re: how much control we can exert over our social media experience. Mute. Block. Go “private.” What I’m talking about goes beyond such measures.