(HI! Welcome to Caterpillar Steps, a newsletter by the writer and photographer Corbin Smith. Two posts in a week, really impressive. Today, I wrote about reading people on the internet. I doubt I will employ subscriptions here, but if you like the newsletter and want help me buy a new camera lens, you can feel free to deposit some cheddar in my Venmo account, @BigCorbs. Also please share with anyone you think might enjoy it.)
ONE: Think of the internet as kabuki theater. Billions of people logging on day after day to perform a version of themselves, built like a mask that sits on their true face. A filter and a flattering angle on Instagram makes you seem more attractive, a flippant comment on Twitter makes you seem collected and cool, any number of political postings on any number of mediums make you seem rational and plugged in. We all do it every day, striving in this half truth to make ourselves seem reasonable, stable, normal. Even when posting about eccentricities, flaws, things we might not like about ourselves, we present a manicured version: a no makeup selfie can make you seem like someone who disregards their hang ups, a post about your dance with mental illness makes you seem collected and reasonable in the face of personal struggle. Here I am, world: I am relatable, lovable. Validation, please.
There are people on the internet who do not do this. By dint of choice or inability, their neurosis and struggles spill out on the medium. They can’t maintain the mask, or, sometimes, they just straight up choose not to. Yelling at someone over bullshit when they should have just shut up and let it pass, posting in a way that makes their insecurities visceral apparent, airing out their irl friends and family for a drop of clout. Neediness is a deeply off-putting quality on the internet, where you are supposed to be calm and relatable. And yet, watching it is… thrilling. A forbidden fruit. Kind of funny. You name it.
Watching normal, non-famous people slowly lose their shit week after week, sharing it with friends, marveling at the display of intimate feelings that most people opt to keep nice and zipped up, it’s sort of intoxicating. You know it’s wrong, you suspect that it’s maybe bad for you, to be this voyeuristic, but it’s just so easy, so interesting, that you can’t just turn away like you would seeing someone melt down on the street. You take it in, share it around, get bratty with it.
Or, I should say, hopefully you do because otherwise, I have revealed something deeply unusual and unsavory about myself, and you, the reader, are standing in judgment of me.
TWO: The tightest, cleanest, depictions of the self are the ones people post on Instagram. Something about the medium really bleeds eccentricity out of you, demands posting a version of the self that is, first and foremost, relatable. This leads me to momlife_comics, an Instagram account with little, simply drawn comics about being a mother that is clearly engineered to create a sense of relatability for the mother who is exhaustedly scanning her phone, seeking a small slice of solace from the omnipresence of parenting. The aesthetic is simple, non-offensive, pastel-colorful. The “Characters” don’t have faces, so the audience will, instead of seeing the author in the work, insert themselves into these little vignettes, place themselves in these scenarios and relate to them quickly.
The best memoir elucidates the human condition through the specifics of the author’s life and perception. Like so much shit about one’s self on the internet, momlife_comics fails at this, because it means to skip the specifics and go straight for relatability. That’s the design, here. “A content creator” is not really seeking truth with this stuff: they’re seeking relatability, the soft jostle, a person quickly filling in their own experiences in the vague haze of another’s, the brief rush of relatability without the work of reading something longer than an Instagram post.
THREE: This week, Twitter goblins, seen here in a recent post from momlife, began roasting this lady for a series of comics that depict… a strange energy about her husband. I felt bad for her, but I also like gawking at weird stuff people voluntarily post, so I didn’t think too hard about it until exactly now, when I wrote a lengthy critical take on all this for my newsletter no one reads. (Waah wahh im not popular enough! Can you see me whine? Does it fascinate you to see someone expose something that stresses them out without reservation on the internet?)
I perused momlife_comics, wondering why it was that this lady, out of the dozens of people doing shallow, relatable content meant to generate likes and light merch sales on the internet, was getting the brunt of the Twitter pigs’ ire. I think I figured it out.
What I began to see was that this person was trying to manufacture something sanitized and relatable, that had, inadvertently, become a way-too-specific, way-too-strange take on parenthood that caused a critical (In both senses of the team) reader to sense a vulnerable dissociation under the broad gestures of “momlife.” The peach, of course, is strange on its face, a person seeming to complain that they have too much love in their heart for their children, while their husband is just more self centered by his nature. She goes off on her husband… a lot, in this medium and this tone that is supposed to be light and relatable, but with so much frequency and intensity that it seems like something is… off, that he is either a lazy sack of shit or that she is storing wild resentments that she is choosing to vent out in light, breezy internet comics that other mothers are supposed to relate to by default.
In making the kind of thing everyone on Instagram is trying to make, something shallow and flattering and relatable, momlife appears to have accidentally stumbled into the kind of thing NO ONE is trying to make on the internet, something exposed, raw, strange, entirely too specific. In a way, she has written something with the qualities of a good memoir, but in a medium that demands you write with the quality of distance.
FOUR: Nabokov wrote like this, characters trying to create a universe where they are normal and just… failing, spectacularly. Humbert, explaining at length how his obsession with nymphets was actually different from being a rank pedophile, how this one weird incident at the beach was the thing that made him this way, how, actually, he was trying to restrain his creepiness, which, when you think about it, makes it fine. Kinbote insists, that a melancholy poem about the author’s dead daughter is actually a wild escapade that subtextually tells the true story of his exile from royalty*. In a time when publishing was relatively gated and highly edited, Nabakov’s work was a radical experiment in presenting someone presenting themselves and failing and thereby revealing more of themselves than if they had just told the truth. Nowadays, with publishing open to anyone with a five inch tall pocket computer, we don’t need a literary ultragenius to expose the open wounds of a person twisting in the wind, trying to justify their experience. You just log on and see it every day.
FIVE: By the time I got to this point in the post, I felt bad for momlife_comics. Maybe because analyzing my own gawking made me realize that, really, it isn’t healthy, and that she doesn’t deserve the ire of so many people, just because she made something disassociating out of her life. But that doesn’t mean everyone is off the hook.
Because no one is twisting in the wind, trying to justify their fucked up experience of the world more than the right wing, seeking to create truth from the wreckage of their lives and our society, seeking the good shallow clout. Please, I am begging you, everything they write seems to scream, please love my fake world, and make it love me back. Momlife is weirdly mad at her husband^, but like a quarter of the people in this country are weirdly mad at everyone and insist on making it everyone’s problem. You ask me, we should take this judgemental energy and really direct it where it can do some good: at your neighbor, with the bumper sticker. Key his car, the social contract demands it.
*pardon my somewhat superficial read of Pale Fire, here.
^honestly though the more I read the more I suspect that he really is kind of wack, even if she insists otherwise. Step it up bro. Sorry i am gawking again