I noticed at a house party last weekend: someone took a photo of their drunk friend doing something harmless. Everyone laughed. Then the drunk friend winked, “That’s just for us, right?” And everyone nodded. That question hung in the air like a threat. A reminder that anything we do can be fed into the internet, the negativity machine. That out there, beyond this living room, the internet is waiting to turn a private moment into public content for strangers to destroy.
We’ve taken the fun out of spontaneity.
Pre-internet, things were either spontaneous or meticulously planned and then actually followed through on.
You made plans, you showed up.
Now spontaneity is a fucking magic trick nobody can pull off because we’re all too aware.
Every episode of Seinfeld could have been solved with a cell phone.
The Chinese restaurant. The parking garage. The bubble boy. We used to get lost and figure it out. We used to have miscommunications that couldn’t be corrected instantly. We lived in that chaos and it was funny and we were happier.
The internet has become our negativity megaphone. And we’re so busy screaming into it that we can’t remember what it felt like to just enjoy something.
Take Marty Supreme.
