by Lauren Oyler
Walking down the street checking for dog shit and approaching pedestrians in my peripheral vision, I watched the ellipses appear to signal he was typing. He said he thought it would be good to go to the march. I said of course he could come too though the traffic would be awful and it would be hard for us to find an Airbnb at this point if he didn’t want to stay at Jeremy’s and probably the march itself would end up being underwhelming. He said no, no, he wanted to work on a “piece” he’d started recently and thought was going somewhere. I didn’t think to ask what the piece was. Sometimes he’d offer me the broad strokes of it, but lately I found myself unable to concentrate when he talked about art, either his own or someone else’s; my mind would turn to angry conversations I’d had with a friend years before, or to how I could style items of clothing I wanted to buy, or to what might happen if an editor at one of the magazines I wanted to work for “discovered” an article I wrote. I told him cool great and said we should see each other before I left. By this point I’d made it home and now you have no idea what the route from my yoga studio to my apartment looks like because I was staring at my phone for the entire walk.
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AT WORK, THAT MONDAY, I TOLD EVERYONE WHO TRIED TO MAKE small talk with me that I had decided to go to the Women’s March. “I’m a good person now,” I said, dispensing peanut butter M&M’s from the peanut butter M&M dispenser in the kitchen. “I’m also eating a healthy breakfast.” No one laughed except the intern, a long-nosed field hockey player and the only person we interviewed who knew what the Village Voice was. She told me studies show that people who talk about their goals are less likely to accomplish them than people who are humble and quiet, because talking about plans makes you feel like you have done something and then you feel less like you need to do something. I liked her; she was overfamiliar, as if unperturbed by the paranoia of social media or the precariousness of her place in the world. She also had follow-through. I asked if that was supposed to mean I wasn’t humble and quiet, and when she said yes I told her to do twenty push-ups. When she dropped in the middle of the aisle between our desks only a couple of people noticed; they watched bemused for a few seconds before silently spinning back to their computers. If it had happened in the afternoon the entire floor would have come over and cheered her on, phones in hand, live-tweeting the event to trick themselves into thinking that because our office was cool, not like other offices, we were not really working, and that being at work was in some ways actually more fun than being at home, alone, streaming a TV show we pretend is good while eating delivery we pretend to afford. In the process we would be advertising our website. We also had free beer, but we weren’t allowed to start drinking until five, even though we often had to publish the first articles of the day from home while brushing our teeth and listening to podcasts hosted by other journalists awestruck by the beautiful nuance of everything, which should have pushed five forward to at least three. At the office mornings were spent in a hunched laptop trance, scrolling through feeds, groggily yet frantically proofreading articles that had to go up before noon to optimize traffic, fielding annoying requests, and posting possibly original jokes and observations on Twitter as they materialized.
We spent all day on the internet, and especially on Twitter, ostensibly looking for stories but mainly just looking; digital media was unionizing at the time, and a recurring joke in our meetings was that we should get the company to pay for addiction treatment. People were funny. Certain employees were bafflingly loud chewers, or shouty phone interviewers; they promoted camaraderie among the rest of us. Sometimes you would catch the eye of the coworker with whom you were Gchatting and share a look or smirk, or ostentatiously cover your mouth to stifle your laughter; by the afternoon these interactions would become less surreptitious, the disorientation of spending all day on the internet leading to outbursts that welcomely disrupted the forced calm of the open-floor office. In this way, it was kind of fun. At push-up number eight the intern asked if I was Instagramming her; I said no, I didn’t want to get fired for advertising a labor violation. She said she wanted me to post a video so she could show off without having to show off herself. I said it would be feminist to post a video of herself doing push-ups, and maybe she could become a fitness influencer and leave the media behind. By twenty we were late for a pitch meeting and she was sweaty.
I was a blogger, if that wasn’t clear. I would have liked to claim a more dignified title, journalist or writer or critic or reporter, but I didn’t, because I didn’t want to contribute to the rapid deterioration of those titles; I was hoping to one day claim them and scrape off some legitimacy for myself. My job was to write two to three articles per day about “culture”—items about celebrities or suggestive studies or, lately, politics—and though that may seem like a lot it quickly became totally doable, not so bad at all. (Initially they’d told me I was supposed to write four to five articles per day.) You got used to it, and because I was often just rewording pieces other people had written and adding mean jokes, it wasn’t particularly exhausting. Once I developed my tone, a rote, pseudo-intellectual dismissiveness that could be applied to any topic so long as the worst political implications (ideally, that the thing being discussed was bad for women) were spelled out by the end of an article, I wrote fast, and I accumulated a modest but respectable number of Twitter followers, in the mid four figures. Although I didn’t feel I was doing something evil, I did feel I was participating in a system that ran on panic and distraction, in which being stupid but not too stupid, prioritizing not quite the right things according to close-but-no-cigar logic, was an asset, and perhaps because it was my job to detect the gravest possible outcome in any scenario I couldn’t deny that what I was doing was probably evil even if I knew, ultimately, it wasn’t. Office work generally requires emptying your mind so that all the dumb shit people tell you to do doesn’t meet any obstacle on its way to smooth execution, but working in online media you couldn’t be too listlessly vapid because then you would bring disaster, opprobrium, and legal obligation upon the enterprise: scandal, offense, virality on behalf of something widely agreed to be unethical. Everything you said or did was meaningless and impermanent as well as potentially hugely significant; the effect was that you were both neurotically tetchy and quietly demoralized all the time, constantly justifying your acquiescence to stupidity as relatively minor and in service of a greater aim. Unfortunately humility did not help the cause, which was to appeal to a youngish audience that assumed it was smarter than it was, that wanted seemingly complicated arguments that conformed to its associative ideas about the world, but delivered simply. It wanted to learn things that it could trick itself into believing it had always known, so you had to write as if you were like everyone else, and as if everyone else were decently intelligent.
The website, which millions of people read every month, had once been good; now it had expanded its coverage so that it was, except for slight distinctions in the adjectives people used to describe it, indistinguishable from a suite of other websites that had also once been good. All these websites—in fact, most websites—also produced videos, which the company executives believed were more profitable than articles, though they cost much more to produce and it was inconceivable to me and many of my coworkers that anyone would rather watch a hand-holding tutorial about how to make macaroni and cheese with weed in it or what the Hyde Amendment was than read a short article. Facebook was widely understood to be responsible for all this and there was not much more to say about it. I had worked at the website for a few years; I liked having a paycheck, even if it was considered small, a place to go, people to talk to, and something to do that I didn’t have to come up with myself. I hated the rest, especially the separate email account, the way it constantly generated, mainly press releases for irrelevant premieres, and the way my colleagues and I, knowing it could be scoured by management and used against us at any time, tiptoed around talking to each other with platitudes and jargon. Sometimes they swit
ched out the peanut butter M&M’s for peanut M&M’s and the discovery was so crushing that I couldn’t work for the rest of the day. I occasionally got to write longreads, departing from my bratty knowingness to do what my boss called a deep dive into some surprisingly relevant but forgotten historical figure or unheralded cultural product. I usually wrote these pieces outside the office, in the mornings or on weekends, so the dive could never be that deep; they were not seen as real contributions to the website, though my boss redeemed them by saying they boosted our credibility among “smart people.” The understanding was that no one read them—I had access to the actual numbers, through a program, but I never logged in, fearing I would become obsessed, so instead I sought out people discussing my writing on social media, by searching the link to the article or my own name or any other related term, and I deduced that smart people did not bother with this website, and I didn’t blame them. Sometimes I’d notice arguments or ideas I’d written show up in more popular writers’ pieces six, eight months later, and I would say to myself: There are no original ideas! You’re just ahead of your time! And then I’d get mad, partly because I felt I had been tricked into caring about a measure of success that I did not want to care about, popularity. Yet it seemed the only way to rise above popularity was through same. I found myself wishing someone would actually plagiarize me, lift a sentence or two, so at least I could believe I was being unacknowledged and not just ignored.
The pitch meeting was, like all meetings, almost totally pointless, except that someone at the company had created a spreadsheet of contact information for employees who were going to the march and had space in their cars or accommodation for others. In a show of righteousness the company was allowing anyone who wanted to travel to D.C. to leave the office at 1 p.m. that Friday.
I arranged to get a ride with a video producer I had never met and her former camp counselor, who drove. I showed up outside an apartment in Fort Greene and we got on the road in the gray rain by Friday afternoon, only an hour after we said we wanted to. The camp counselor, gregarious and still dressed in hiking boots and the kind of sporty fleece vest intended to gain children’s trust, was now a labor lawyer working on freelance issues, with a daughter in college studying “something horrible, I don’t want to talk about it”; the video producer’s large, sad eyes reflected her years-long struggle to get a boyfriend and a full-time contract at the website. Running her hand through gauzy umber hair, unbothered by traffic signs or sudden stops, the camp counselor brought up both issues and offered her no-nonsense advice almost as soon as we got in the car, as if continuing a previous conversation. “You’re too worn down, you can’t imagine anything anymore,” she said, her voice coaching. “You need imagination to get happy, and I don’t mean it in a tech way, God, I mean that you can’t just accept what’s in front of you, and no one’s going to come up with a good alternative to what’s in front of you, because everyone is unimaginative, because they don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves. You do give a shit, that’s why you’re good. But you’re also trapped. You have to figure out how to keep giving a shit without getting covered in it.” They shared the trendy flavored seltzers they’d brought and I offered them peanut butter M&M’s I had taken from the office, which they did not accept. Everyone was feeling generous that weekend, so they refused to let me pay for gas, and though I could have I was grateful for that. In the back seat I texted with Felix and tried to think of a strategy to ease myself into an initiation of our breakup, not to break up with him then over text message but to foreshadow that all was not well; I either didn’t want him to feel totally ambushed, or I wanted him to begin to dread the realization of a back-of-mind suspicion. I typed and deleted, typed and deleted, looking for double meanings, plausible deniabilities, but there was no natural way to do it. So I just said I missed him already!!! with the multiple exclamation marks I tended to use to convey a sheepish sincerity.
In the car, listening to Bruce Springsteen once we got to New Jersey, the women would periodically bring up horrible facts about Donald Trump and when appropriate I would interject references to articles I’d read that elaborated on their worst fears about his immigration policies or ties to Russia in order to seem like I was engaged in the conversation and not texting my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend. It was always refreshing to spend time with people who weren’t online all day; it made me feel like I could one day live such a lifestyle, and in the meantime I was at least a person who really kept up with the news, who was really dialed in to what was happening in the culture, even though it was increasingly difficult to say whether society was bettered by my knowing what was going on and clear that dialed in was a quaint anachronism insufficient for describing the desperate attachment I had to the platforms that gave me my acute awareness of the culture and the news. Felix was being funny and sending me memes I pretended not to have already seen, and I wondered momentarily if maybe I was making a mistake, if he could explain, if I shouldn’t necessarily break up with him after all, depending on that hypothetical explanation. I reread an email he’d sent me while he lived in Berlin, a sweet and energetic account of his visit with a former professor that segued into a casual analysis of Our Mutual Friend that segued into a nice comment about my hip bones, and it occurred to me that the negative change in his behavior and attitude might indeed be, at least a little bit, the fault of my influence, something I ignited. But then I reassured myself that he was his own person, an agent, and that a comparison between his manipulative experiment and the laid-back acceptance with which I occupied my distasteful position as a cultural producer could only be made in bad faith. Since he claimed to eschew constant cell phone usage I’d always thought his quick responses to my messages must have been related to an eagerness to talk to me; now I realized it was because he had a secret life to manage on his phone, and my text messages happened to be there, too.
People who worked in video production always had unfathomably carefree attitudes; it truly shocked me how long this woman and her friend took at each of the two rest stops we visited. They didn’t seem to want to “get back onto the road” or “make good time” at all. Both Travel Plazas were crawling with women in groups, mothers and grandmothers and children and teenagers and many in their twenties and thirties, and a not-insignificant portion were wearing magenta- and bubblegum- and rose- and blush-colored knit hats with cat ears. I heard someone marvel that the yarn store had run out of pink. I’d not cared about the Women’s March so much that I’d had no idea the hats, dorky but because of the number of grandmas unmockable, were part of a plan before I saw them forming the laughably long line at the Delaware House Travel Plaza Starbucks.
Sitting around a table avoiding a smear of ketchup from our predecessors and eyeing the camp counselor’s curly fries I told the women I was planning on breaking up with my boyfriend when I got back on Sunday night. They responded with rehearsed sincere apologies, plus slight surprise that I was revealing something so intimate to them, though it didn’t matter if these women knew I was going to break up with my boyfriend; they didn’t know him or me and it was not something about which I needed advice, though they’d enjoy giving it. “Is that who you’ve been texting?” the producer asked. To add insult to injury the camp counselor then queried how old I was, nodding as she ate her fries. No particularly useful advice was given, though the strength of my conviction was celebrated. The producer said she was becoming fed up with dating apps because everyone she met wanted her to go to concerts with them or revealed only after the date had begun that actually they didn’t drink; all the other men posted photos of themselves next to their cars. Yes, even in New York. In the past I’d felt removed from these types of complaints, which I recognized as probably true but had never connected with. Before Felix I’d dated a series of nice-enough people I’d met at parties or who were repurposed from college; I’d never felt I should use a dating app or even really thought about them, unless I was assigned to blog about the data collected by one. Would I now
become this data? Would it not be humiliating to go from the great story of falling in love with my Berlin pub crawl tour guide to saying, “We met on Tinder”? There were people who refused to go out with anyone they didn’t meet on an app, with anyone who hadn’t been superficially vetted and categorized as possibly romantic in advance; would I become these people, distrait from a cacophonous loneliness and so eager for a prescription that I would adopt an obviously misguided rule I’d found on the internet? I told the producer she should go to a socialist meeting, where there would be a lot of politically engaged men who loved drinking. She replied, Oh, but I’m such a Hillary girl, and I knew exactly what she meant: she believed socialists were sexist. I had only been to one socialist event in New York and didn’t even vote in the primary, so maybe it was guilt that inspired me to begin to attempt to explain what Hillary girls were missing wrt the intersection of class with race and gender and sexuality, wrt I mean I grew up in . . . The women were silent as I went through all this, my eyes rarely making contact with theirs and instead looking off at the condiment-and-napkin station, so after a few gestures toward my socioeconomic background without revelation I added “but she does have to deal with a lot of shit” to make sure they didn’t abandon me at the Travel Plaza. I was offered the last curly fry. All in all it took us eight and a half hours to get to the beltway, in the rain.
