I don’t want to be an internet person

I&#x27;m pretty sure this generalizes to everything. People who cultivate a persona in any sub-culture or domain seem to be a fish out of water when confronted in a different context. Take someone from the rave scene and plop them down in a microbrewery bar and everyone will gawk at the brightly colored fidgety person that has no idea what to order. Take a polished SV entrepreneur and deposit them in an Idaho roadhouse and observe as they struggle to communicate with patrons that don&#x27;t speak pitch-deck. Extremely online people generally don&#x27;t practice the skills necessary to communicate well in person like eye contact, conversation, or manners so you&#x27;ll get predictable results when gathering them in meat-space.<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure a bit of googling will turn up a long history of articles of this nature dating all the way back to the BBS days. Having attended BBS meetups I know that the vibe of these gatherings hasn&#x27;t changed.

&gt; I don’t want to be anything like these people. I don’t want to be an internet person.<p>I love this. I got a similar vibe from people who were &quot;too good at IRC,&quot; way back in the day. They had a constant, sarcastic, tired energy about them. They had difficulty being genuine about anything. They knew so much and yet they were so stuck in their life somehow. And that sucked the life out of them.<p>It&#x27;s like they were too tied to this vague idea of being online that they weren&#x27;t willing to sacrifice it to have a better life.<p>The Internet is a tool, not an endpoint.

I grew up a geek in a rural area, learning how to filter conversations for your audience was a critical skill.<p>Topics and conversational style amongst my D&amp;D group was very different than amongst my other high school classmates and very different than when at my summer jobs.<p>This is just an article about people who never learned that skill.<p>I&#x27;m reminded of a few moments in my life that drove this home ...<p>A coworker (60 year old railway worker) who said &quot;You shouldn&#x27;t use ten dollar words in a twenty-five cent conversation.&quot;<p>A girlfriend who described the difference as &quot;Weird is when you know you&#x27;re weird and compensate when needed, strange is when you don&#x27;t know you&#x27;re strange.&quot;

I thought this sounded familiar, and sure enough[1].<p>Edit: To make it explicit, which Palladium notably fails to do: this person is a reactionary and has a history of encouraging young girls to commit suicide.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web3isgoinggreat.com&#x2F;?id=founder-of-milady-nft-project-revealed-to-have-horrifying-history" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web3isgoinggreat.com&#x2F;?id=founder-of-milady-nft-proje...</a>

The worst thing about these people isn&#x27;t that they&#x27;re shitty edgelords spouting nonsensical gobbledygook about NFTs like they&#x27;ve discovered fire. The worst thing about them is that they&#x27;re uniformly boring in every conceivable way. Great, some submillennial has made his own version of ZooTV on a dying social network. That must be terribly exciting if you&#x27;ve never seen any media ever that came out before Gossip Girl. Yaaaaaawwwwwn.

I like the piece. The tone kinda gives me the same vibes as Neil Strauss&#x27; The Game (vibe heavy anthropology trip into the distasteful, or at least unnerving, subculture).<p>The part at the very end about the internet people winning is the part that freaks me out (and drives my own middlingly unhealthy doom-scrolling). Just the other day I saw Curtis Yarvin is now some minor Rasputin figure for Peter Thiel, and I couldn&#x27;t help but think &quot;that lunatic monarchist edgelord from years ago is now influencing where real real political money gets spent?&quot; I don&#x27;t want to be an internet person, or even pay as much attention as I do, but it feels kind of like even if you don&#x27;t believe in the internet, it believes in you and it&#x27;ll eventually show up anyways.

I found XOXO conference to be much the same way. The attendees were capable of some basic social grace, but having manifested from the context of &quot;internet people,&quot; they lacked substance in person.<p>It&#x27;s not hard to not be an internet person. You just have to decide to actually study something, anything, and to a deep level. Once you do that the grounding manifests itself and then you have more important priorities that preclude drifting around like that.

The pattern here is not the internet but these people being severely autistic and so they are probably forced to thrive online where they aren&#x27;t having to deal with eye contact or other social queues that they can&#x27;t really process. Not even sure what this was meant to be, but it should probably be rewritten to &quot;I don&#x27;t want to be an autistic person&quot; and it would have read the exact same way. Even down to the preferred drug use being a straight up dissociative...

A great way to test the difference between the online and offline world is to boast about something you accomplished in a family gathering, say thanksgiving.<p>&quot;I scored 3 goals in last weekend&#x27;s game&quot;.<p>That&#x27;s wonderful! (nobody truly cares, but it&#x27;s still recognized and celebrated.)<p>&quot;I got 40 likes on my last tweet&quot;<p>???<p>&quot;Wait, it gets better: 20 people watched me play a game. Had to stay up until 4AM but still, worth it.&quot;<p>???<p>Truly, nobody gives a shit. It means so little that people will not even pretend to recognize it. It&#x27;s more like a negative accomplishment that gets people worried that you have poor judgement in life.

I appreciate this article. First, it is well written. Second, it is well-versed.<p>I know many, many people who have fallen into this trap of being an Internet &quot;coolguy&quot; and are absolute boring, anxious and insecure nerds in meatspace. Ironically they often yearn to connect their irl popularity with their internet personality. It&#x27;s as if they realize the Internet moves fast with or without them.

&gt; Will people forget about me if I am not on the internet?<p>I dropped off the internet while I was in the military and deployed, the answer is yes.<p>That said, I&#x27;d like to turn this on its head. It&#x27;s normal for friends to go out of touch, reconnect in somewhat of a cycle. Some people stay constantly in touch, but not everyone. <i>That</i> isn&#x27;t normal, and to be quite honest, would be super stressful for me. It&#x27;s like juggling a dozen hot plates with pancakes being formed on them. You&#x27;re eventually going to burn one or let it all burn spectacularly. My conclusion was that losing touch with a lot of my high school and college friends wasn&#x27;t historically abnormal - staying in touch with them forever was.<p>It&#x27;s also normal to have different depths of friendships. Not everyone needs to hear your deepest inner thoughts. This kind of summarizes what I think is wrong with social media.<p>Internet culture and it&#x27;s subcultures <i>are</i> weird. That&#x27;s to say, though, that any deeply entrenched culture is kinda weird. They have their own language, memes, attitudes, etc formed and influenced by the adjacency of it&#x27;s members. That&#x27;s to say, I look at sports people the way this person looks at the weird assortment they followed to a ketamine party. If you&#x27;re going to a giant parking lot, ripping your shirt off, screaming, getting black out drunk, screaming at players, devoting precious memory to niche sports and player statistics - are you not mechanically the same as these folks? The difference being that your community is physical.

In the past being an &quot;internet person&quot; brought you into interesting sub-cultures. You had shibboleths (like quoting bash.org) that would identify you. Since the internet was small you would meet genuine often interesting people. I still have friends from the &quot;wild west&quot; days of the internet. The time period, I think, was the absolute best time to be alive and on the internet (though terminally online lamers and cry bullies demanding censorship may disagree).<p>Now, the apt term for people who are &quot;too online&quot; is &quot;terminally online&quot;. The terminally online are more like a cancer than an interesting sub-culture. Since social media has allowed them to gain some semblance of following in a hyper-niche subgroup they think they can take their absurd opinions, styles, ideas, etc into the real world and expect it to work. These people are easily identified. When placed in an uncomfortable situation they become cry bullies. You might know many of them as your current HR department.

I&#x27;m not sure if the sociological experiment that the author conducted was really immersive enough to produce a good take on the subculture. It&#x27;s fairly obvious this was intended along the lines of Hunter S. Thompson&#x27;s &quot;Hell&#x27;s Angels&quot; - which may have spawned an entire genre of sub-culture literature (I don&#x27;t know if Thompson really originated it or not, there may be earlier examples, perhaps Zora Neale Hurston). The theme is pretty consistent: a writer inserts self into subculture, gets the full experience, writes magazine articles&#x2F;books that others can gawk at.<p>Maybe this particular subculture is just fairly boring and shallow, mostly fabricated by moneyed interests (NFTs...) and there&#x27;s just not much to say about it? Kind of sad, has the USA turned into a cultural wasteland?

I was very active in my local dial-up BBS scene in the mid-late 1990s, when I was a teenager. I even ran a dial-up BBS. Outside of school, I estimate that I probably spent more time online than socializing with my friends IRL. (In real life.)<p>BUT: I have much more vivid memories, and better bonds, with my friends. This is partially because we spent a lot of time together in school, and because we actually bonded.<p>Although I had online friends, and I took the time to meet some other BBS people IRL, I never developed any real bonds with them. One of my very active BBS users attended the same college as me. We met a few times, but never rekindled our online bond.<p>This made me realize that my online bonds are more like a hobby than a real lifelong friendship; much like at-work friendships that fizzle out after a job change.<p>Needless to say, a few years ago I generally dropped out of Facebook; the hobby (Facebook) was getting in the way of my relationships. The people I care about either don&#x27;t post on Facebook, or Facebook seems to make me angry at them.

I don&#x27;t want to be a Stanford art major who describes people they meet in passive-aggressive terms like, &quot;clear skin and dead, vacant eyes&quot;.

&quot;All my friends are online. Will people forget about me if I am not on the internet?&quot;<p>Yes. But they really weren&#x27;t your friends to begin with, so it doesn&#x27;t matter.

This article has been eye opening for me, I too spent a lot of my time on the internet but thankfully never came across the deep end. Made me realize that there&#x27;s no point in keeping up with memes and stuff and made me think about what actually matters

I went down the rabbit hole after reading this, as I love sub cultures and yearn to see some new ones. Some learnings:<p>Now there is a certain avant garde playing with the narrative thing going on, which is part of it, so the story that you can find out about the thing is changed at the time its going on and after its happened. The lore is recorded by people within the culture and they are in on it. Certain of the interactions with the author and the characters she met were on the whole staged, or intentional trolling of the author. &quot;some young writer is coming so let&#x27;s tease her&quot;.<p>The trolling, anti-cancel culture, the pro-autism always-online which may have come from the chans is almost 100% opposite from the &quot;white pilled&quot;, positive, almost over the top caring messages that the subculture is putting out. But it&#x27;s not the same as the we are all going to make it greed-optimism of crypto.<p>As we see in these fellow comments, most people who have encountered internet people have found them to be nihilistic, anti-social, maladjusted and negative. This sub culture is trying to be the opposite of it, but it exists along side a kind of schizoid-side - it&#x27;s very odd.<p>Compared to other NFT young people meet ups (the author previously wrote a popular article about the Bored Yacht Club parties) - this subculture appears to have more women.<p>Compared to other NFT projects, this art project does not prioritize holding or purchasing an actual NFT image, and seems to value a kind of plagiarism, &quot;just download the png&quot; or anti ownership in a way. It reminds of of plunderphonics&#x2F;vaporwave from last decade.<p>The traditional and social politics of the founders seem at odds with a rave and taking drugs. puzzling to me! Someone here says that the drug - Ketamine is apparently chosen as reduced social anxiety?

&quot;I Don’t Want to Be an Internet Person&quot;<p>&quot;Ginevra Davis studied Symbolic Systems at Stanford and now works in art and design. She writes about technology and youth culture.&quot;<p>One step would be to stop using your state-issued name on the internet. &quot;Cr4zyBoy4eva&quot; is a bit better than the Facebook&#x2F;LinkedIn-mandated &quot;real name&quot;, but rather childish, hence why an arbitrary UUID string might be a better fit. &quot;There are no girls on the internet&quot; and &quot;on the internet men are men, women are also men, and children are FBI agents&quot; point to a deeper truth, which will only be amplified by the post-Turing test chatbots, beyond ChatGPT: the internet is not for humans, there are no humans on the internet, don&#x27;t be a human on the internet.

&gt; You hear it all the time—“the internet is horrible, but.” But I can learn so much. I need it for work. All my friends are online<p>But these are not the Internet&#x27;s problem, rather edge forums&#x2F;social media problems, however I recognize that for many people, the internet is just social media at this point.<p>A true internet person should be one who uses it frequently, that would probably be a software developer, yet most of the time they aren&#x27;t as crazy as these people.<p>&gt; He slouched in his chair and told me, unprompted, that he doesn’t have many friends<p>Wow.<p>These people are just mentally ill at this point, its impressive that they were able to attract girls to this shitshow.<p>Also how do they make money? Do they all just sell NFTs ?<p>&gt; I don’t want to be anything like these people. I don’t want to be an internet person.<p>Amen.

I&#x27;m a bit perplexed by the title. The article distinguishes between an early, anonymous, unregulated internet culture -- which the NFT club seems to resemble -- and contemporary internet people who &quot;decided to make the internet boring.&quot;<p>As cartoonish as it is, I buy that distinction. But usually, when people make it, they&#x27;re making a plea for the old internet. The writer of this article, however, doesn&#x27;t seem to be doing that. The milady community feels, &quot;a little bit, like that internet from 1995&quot;; it is unlike social media communities where you are &quot;constantly performing your personality&quot; and &quot;Liking is a personal endorsement.&quot; Again, when people make that distinction, they&#x27;re usually writing against likes, personality, and &quot;iPhone photography of yourself.&quot;<p>So regarding the title: does she not want to be <i>either</i> type of internet person? Or is &quot;normie&quot; social media engagement ok?

Author seems a little too close? For me, the big takeaway is how it represents the superficiality that happens here? Like, this whole thing <i>wants</i> to be genuinely cool&#x2F;Gibson-ish, but I can&#x27;t get over the banality of it all.<p>I was poking around some of the content and it&#x27;s just so blah, in terms of how they&#x27;re just taking a laundry list of <i>every</i> hot button issue and then asking, &quot;okay, how can I troll it?&quot; -- revealing no core underneath.

Other commenters have already articulated how internet subcultures are comparable to other historical examples social subcultures. I think the first order bit is to ask the question if being an internet person produces a imminent threat to human civilization. Personally I perceive physical decay in our well being, happiness, and an overall reduction in the quality of live. I often am reminded how people use to spend their time in the physical space and wonder if we just spent 5% of the time on the internet supporting our local communities we would have a objectively better human experience. It&#x27;s not that I perceive the internet inherently bad. However, as a tool for psychological distraction, it is incredibly effective and often used against our personal best interests.

It&#x27;s fine whether or not you want to be &quot;online&quot; or &quot;offline&quot; - you just need to understand that the basic currency is different.<p>If you think being an online person is some horrible thing or a marker of being a bad person, you just value different things. The kinds of people in TFA are selected for by merit of not living up to your offline standards in one way or another.

Never heard of the guy he&#x27;s talking about, but started getting strong &quot;weirdo&quot; vibes wrt the author after the third paragraph of character assassination, largely based around this persons appearance.<p>For anyone who read all the way through - does it get anywhere close to making a point or is it mostly about how ugly people the author doesn&#x27;t like are?

I actually find that I&#x27;m more awkward online&#x2F;in chats than IRL.<p>The fact that you have longer to think about your messages and modify them before publishing, that you have to think carefully so as not to multi-text (which seems desperate), that you don&#x27;t have access to non-verbal cues for context, can&#x27;t smile etc. all contribute to this.

This article is interesting but it seems determined to reach its conclusion. I have a hard time believing that everyone seemed so cold and lifeless to those who weren&#x27;t looking through the author&#x27;s lens. I&#x27;d expect people to be a little awkward at any internet gathering. I feel like this piece seeks to &quot;expose&quot; them for not being as cool as their Twitter personalities, but we already knew that, and there are better things to criticize them for than their posture or red eyes.

Behind &quot;Creepy is the new cool&quot; lies ambivalence [1]. Author Ginevra Davis writes a voluminous 4300 words that revel in, celebrate and exalt a culture which, in her parting sentence, she reveals to be the sum of all her fears.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;psychology.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;4415&#x2F;current-theories-of-the-psychology-of-ambivalence" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;psychology.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;4415&#x2F;current-...</a>

nice. here is my idea....<p>i was online from my pre teens time. i actually had to wait a &#x27;few&#x27; years to get my own email address. back then, there was no &quot;social media&quot;, no algorithm and you were taught to not give your real &quot;A&#x2F;S&#x2F;L&quot; because people could track you down and hurt you and all that. oh the days.<p>i adopted this randomuser handle, not linking my accounts from one service with another, not reusing handles, not having google&#x2F;FB&#x2F;apple accounts, it takes time and energy.<p>anonymity on the internet is a wonderful thing really. forget the abusers and stuff, moderation is for that. when you consider the real problem of doxing, you appreciate the benefits of using anoymous handles.<p>&gt;Everyone knows, abstractly, that the internet is not real life. But you can’t picture it, not really, until you sit across from the real people behind the screen. Even the darkest online personalities are just people on their phones. It is oddly disappointing to meet the “worst person on the internet” and find that they are nothing at all.<p>we call if &quot;AFK&quot; and not &quot;IRL&quot;

If HN will permit a bit of old-man-shakes-fist-at-cloud I think the internet was better before we went and let so many <i>people</i> on it. It was small and poorly organized and weird and mostly authentic. The hyperactive and over-exaggerated always-on &#x27;youtube personality&#x27; wasn&#x27;t a thing and people talked about interesting things from time to time.

This seems quite silly. Adolescent nihilism and alienation, scatter-shot irrationality, and calculated transgressions for attention are ancient. As is cynical opportunism. They&#x27;ve been part of (mostly) youth movements for centuries.<p>The only thing changed by the Internet is accessibility. Previously people tended to know each other personally. Now they can mix it up online. This makes their presence a little more obvious and a little harder to ignore.<p>But there must be hundreds of these micro-scenes with their nano-gurus and micro-leaders, and most people will still never come across them.<p>They only become dangerous when they grow - or are grown - to the point where the groups stop being small and insignificant, and where the messaging is carefully and deliberately tailored to trigger irrationality and self-harm in mass audiences.<p>That&#x27;s not a good thing. But it&#x27;s no worse - and often less effective and less toxic - than some of the nonsense pumped out by supposedly respectable mainstream media.

Flagged the post as I don&#x27;t think a person engaging in the behaviour discussed in this[0] thread needs a greater audience or needs to be paid any attention whatsoever.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33893781" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33893781</a>

We have long since moved from notion that the internet is an opt in tool. I fondly remember when Mac OS 9 would prompt you about the internet on first boot and you could pick &quot;my computer does not connect to the internet&quot;. Looking at you Windows 11.

This was an interesting article, but I also kinda wish I hadn&#x27;t read it. Knowing people like this exist just made me a little sad.

What a boring article. Let people live how they want to live. Just because you don&#x27;t like their lifestyle&#x2F;personality&#x2F;way of living doesn&#x27;t mean you get to act like you&#x27;re better than them.

Off-topic. Does it bother anyone else this style of writing which starts by describing the physical traits of the characters? At this stage I just skip when an article starts like that.

&gt; Internet culture used to be something you engaged with in private. You have your public self, your real self, and then the part of your brain that scrolls mindlessly at the end of the day.<p>Funny, for me the internet was always where I&#x27;d let down the barriers and drop the facade, the place where you could actually find the &quot;real me&quot;. Then again I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m the type of person described by &quot;scrolls mindlessly&quot;...

&gt; To 99.9 percent of the population, Charlie is nobody.<p>So why is she writing an article about how terrifying he is that he scared her off the Internet?<p>Over half of those 99.9% of people use the Internet.<p>&gt; When I got back from New York, I logged out of my Twitter account on my computer and deleted the app from my phone.<p>And then immediately logged back in to Tweet about her article.

After reading this, I was reminded of the phrase “That way madness lies.” But I Am Old.™

&gt; As Miya’s infamy grew, the proliferation of helpers—as well as copycat accounts<p>That&#x27;s funny considering BPD_GOD already sounds like bootleg CHOBITCOIN. There is nothing new under the sun (and here&#x27;s why that&#x27;s a GOOD thing!!)

Online reality is as much real as the physical one, and as technology for io to the human body advances it&#x27;s going to increasingly dominate.<p>She feels noticeably superior to people that prefer the online reality for unclear reasons.

I don&#x27;t really think this is a new or interesting phenomenon just because it involves the internet; since the first subculture existed, people have sought them out and&#x2F;or molded them in order to be a big fish in an incredibly tiny pond. This guy doesn&#x27;t represent &quot;online&quot; or &quot;the internet&quot; any more than Bob Smith, who rules the entire North Boise Yu-Gi-Oh community (all seven members of it) with an iron fist, represents the physical world and human interaction in it.<p>As other commenters have noted, the subject of the article is apparently also a terrible person and possibly a psychopath. Which again, runs true to type; he&#x27;s found the largest possible community where he capable of being enough of a Big Deal to abuse people with impunity. Which, as it turns out, is pretty small and esoteric.

This is possibly the most cyberpunk thing I&#x27;ve ever read

I went in not expecting much. I ended up enthralled.<p>A fascinating article.

I now know that giving my 10 yo daughter a phone for Christmas 3 years ago was a huge mistake for the exact reasons this article sites.

Reading that made me think back to all those breathy Wired article from the early&#x2F;mid 90s predicting the cultural future of cyberspace.<p>Maybe it was because the writing style seemed similar, but that this is the let down review article rather than the hyped preview articles.

&gt; The first social media platform, called SixDegrees<p>IIRC, iam.bmezine was in 1994. Granted, it was a lot more esoteric&#x2F;niche because you either had to pay or submit an image of a body modification to their gallery.

These people are exactly as pathetic as I imagined them to be.

It’s Vampire: The Masquerade for the modern rebel.

I can&#x27;t escape the belief that the Internet is now a place for junk food media consumption and fake (not IRL) friends.

The irony here is that bloggers <i>were</i> a big part of internet counterculture not so long ago, and now we&#x27;ve got these long screeds written on blogs that exude a sort of boomer-ish &quot;back in <i>my</i> day (6 years ago)...&quot;.<p>The take would be a lot more interesting if the targets weren&#x27;t so utterly, predicably, boringly safe to criticize either. I guess dissecting a counterculture that isn&#x27;t predominantly young white men into NFT&#x27;s would take a bit more courage. though.

I say let&#x27;s leave them the internet. We&#x27;ve got better things to do...

I know of a few people who will be receiving this link as a gift from me today :)

And yet, here you are.

I don&#x27;t want to be an internet person either, but I&#x27;m fascinated by them, including people like Charlie Fang. I love listening to Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog&#x27;s &quot;Blocked and Reported&quot; podcast, which covers a lot of very-online people, drama in communities you wouldn&#x27;t have expected (like knitters, or the battle between the &quot;prag libertarians&quot; and the &quot;Mises Libertarians&quot;), and how much &quot;mainstream&quot; press gets completely wrong or lazily reports.<p>I think a lot of these very-online people will come to regret it, especially because the Internet never forgets and they&#x27;ll never be able to shake the reputation they&#x27;ve established.

Damn, palladium has really fallen off, quality-wise, since their launch.

Less internet is more healthy for everyone

then don&#x27;t write an internet article

milady

TL;DR: Sounds like the title of a Ramones song!

&gt;his orthopedic sneakers couldn’t touch the floor...<p>&gt;his tiny frame perched a few feet away on an oversized leather chair...<p>&gt;a crooked smile that reveals a row of nubby teeth<p>&gt;disappointing to meet the “worst person on the internet” and find that they are <i>nothing at all</i><p>I think the author has missed the point about why Charlie is the way he is, why he has spent so much of his social life online, she did apparently reveal how this Charlie is looked upon by &quot;normal&quot; people in real life through no fault of his own.

Is this journalism?

&gt;<i>Like most online culture, it all feels so profound until you realize that he hasn’t said anything at all.</i><p>So pretty much like TFA... Which is basically a virtue signalling hit piece (the target even asks &quot;if they&#x27;re planning to write a hit piece&quot;).<p>&quot;The content of his work would repel, or simply confuse, a traditional viewer&quot;<p>... and then the author points to a screenshot of a tweet (the &quot;drop out of college, default on your student loans&quot; etc (of which the most controversial part is about not getting the covid vaccine) that would seem totally quaint under lots of pretty tame contexts (from 60s counter-culture and 70s punk fanzines all the way to modern leftists), as if the average Joe is the standard after which anything becomes scary...<p>&gt;<i>To 99.9 percent of the population, Charlie is nobody</i><p>So just like the author?