Against my better judgement I check Reddit in the morning. I assume at the very least it can tell me if the White House blew up or aliens made first contact* or whatever the fuck major news of the day. I’m also frequently on the elliptical so I’m not looking for something that requires great brain power; rants, puff pieces, ragebait, cats, kvetching end up being a lot of what I click on and the algorithm has correctly clocked me as an overeducated urban leftist. (My Reddit feed is also mostly subreddits I chose to follow, so the algorithm doesn’t exactly have to think very hard to keep me engaged. There is a lot of genuine kvetching to be done right now in, to name one category, science as it is funded and understood and disseminated by the federal government.)

I click on a cute picture of a kitty-cat. This cat’s name is Melinoë. I think that is delightful. The poster is asking if Ms. Melinoë is a ‘standard issue cat’ (mackerel tabby). I give an utterly anodyne yet genuine message:

The Princess is a torbie. That’s a lot of orange. Which is delightful, as she is described in the Orphic hymns as “saffron-cloaked nymph of the earth”.

I am being serious. I do think it is delightful that there is a lovely torbie kitten named Melinoë and I am glad she found a loving home.

I am wondering if I have just played into giving legitimacy to a bid for attention from a bot.

I am wondering if this is a recycled picture used for karma-farming. The internet equivalent of a foot-in-the-door or establishing rapport, even though it is attached to a username at large and not a specific action.

I am becoming a person who thinks nothing ever happens and there is no whimsy in reality, that it is all staged for twee posts baiting suckers like me into likes or typing something like “I love her :3.” I am becoming a person who fears finding delight in small things because it might be bait, inorganic. The cynicism is increasingly reflected in other comments–a return of the “and then the whole bus clapped” guy in every anecdote thread, or Jonathan Frakes in Beyond Belief. I get it, because I am starting to feel paranoid as well–but I do wonder if I am doubting somebody who just wanted to share a picture of their kitty with the internet. It is related to AI paranoia in that a ‘sucker’ is the most reviled, sneered-at figure in the American consciousness. A cynic might be an asshole but they will not be suckered, which is contemptible.

Time is circle. I am regressing to the 2000s internet cynicism: everything is made up, and sincerity–believing something somebody said at face value–is the mark of a sucker. It feels like 4chan levels of distrust and hostility have become reasonable. Everything sucks, everything enjoyable is a fabrication designed to manipulate you, and naivety and sincerity are the traits of the dumbest people on the planet.

Shills and plants have always been writing columns and butting into conversations on politics and policy; none of that is remotely new, although now it can be done with ease on a global scale. You are not restricted to sending a contrarian to the company hearing on establishing a union or the town hall meeting; you can JAQ** off in the comments section of Al Jazeera or the Beeb, or the feminist or Marxist subreddits, or the Xwitter of the NOAA or NASA or NIH. Arguments are made for the people silently reading and not of realistic hope to change the mind of somebody with a strong opinion. But this–suspecting somebody is posting about something innocent like cats to curate a persona that is less clockable as a bot–hits differently.

Humans have always been a narrative-oriented species. That part hasn’t changed. Humans have always desired attention and adoration and the warm feeling that comes of delighting someone with a story–in sum, humans have always told tall tales, and this included the internet 1.0 of BBS boards and Usenet and mailing lists when the only thing you could gain from making shit up was esteem and a sense of connection. But there is now a monetary incentive to being ‘delightful’ because, in internet terms, accumulated ‘likes’ and posts and this abstract idea of ‘activity’ can be converted into money via selling the influence of that profile. An old profile with lots of stories and a ‘persona’ behind it is worth immense advertising money and can be sold or stolen.

I’m wondering why that feels worse than just somebody looking for attention. Probably because that attention-seeking person is being genuine, in their own way. Or at the very least not trying to monetize my attention; they genuinely want it. And I am haunted by the increasing sense that the rot of the ‘dead internet’ is becoming the whole organism.

——–

*Nobody is going to make first contact right now unless their primary objective is stewardship of an idiot species, of saving us from ourselves. If we’re held to the standard of showing the wisdom to be part of the intergalactic community nobody is going to be rocking up looking to meet us. Even if we hit some concrete criteria like achieving warp we’ll be approached as a liability that might become Some Other Planet’s Problem, not as kin.

**”Just Asking Questions”