There’s a new kind of influencer making the rounds on TikTok and Instagram: the loneliness influencer. Most of these influencers are young women, and “loneliness” might be a slight misnomer. They claim they aren’t lonely, simply alone — no friends, no family, no kids. And they prefer it that way.

“I really wanted to convey a normal life of somebody that doesn’t have this big, great, fun social life,” one influencer, Lana Isa, told Vox. “Like, what does a life look like as someone that doesn’t really have this great big social life, is not really interested in dating and generally prefers nights in? If you were to watch a Friday night in my life, you’d essentially just watch a girl enjoying her peace.”

Isa, and influencers like her, are just one representation of a larger trend, though. The Atlantic’s Faith Hill, who recently wrote a story titled “The Strange Appeal of the Solitude Influencer,” told Today, Explained co-host Noel King that, even though you mostly hear about young men facing a loneliness epidemic, women are having a hard time, too.

“If you actually look at some of these statistics, young women are struggling a lot on a lot of these measures, and, in some cases, more than young men,” Hill said.

Hill spoke with Noel about what’s going on with young women, how their crisis looks different from men’s, and why they’re covered differently.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

In the first half of the show, we talked to a young woman who has made a name for herself as a loneliness influencer. What do you think is going on here?

My first impulse when I heard about this genre of video that people are watching is that there’s a lot of people spending a ton of time alone.

We’ve heard a lot of people talk about the loneliness epidemic, so I thought people were getting social connection through these videos from a safe distance, rather than spending time in person with people. Maybe there’s some of that going on. But, I also realized, as I was looking through these videos and reading all the comments, that a lot of the people commenting seemed to have a lot going on in their lives socially, so much so that they were busy, and exhausted, and burned out.

For some people, the appeal was actually in the fantasy of it, in the way that some people would look at influencers posting about these fabulous, exotic vacations they can’t afford to take. People have a very complicated relationship to solitude. People are working long hours. A lot of people [are] taking care of family members without much help. Many people are sort of torn between these needs for social connection and solitude.

Does that mean that this is, perhaps, not as sad as it appears on its face?

I don’t think it’s all sad. My heart goes out to people who are needing more solitude, as well as more social connection. Most people probably don’t have the perfect balance, and I can relate to that myself. I feel like I either have too many plans or not enough.

It’s not necessarily all happy, but it doesn’t mean that there are just so many people out there who are only getting social connection through these videos. I think there’s something a little more complicated going on.

We’ve all heard about the male loneliness crisis. You wrote a very interesting piece that basically said, actually, women are in crisis, as well.

I’ve just been hearing so much about men, and especially young men, being in crisis. I think there’s a lot of reasons we should take that seriously, and I do. But I felt like in those conversations, young women were kind of being flattened into a comparison point where, instead of people talking about how on some measures young men are struggling more than they used to, it got twisted into “young men are struggling more than women.”

There’s this image of the thriving girlboss, the one who is going to college, graduating college, entering the workforce on these conventional measures of success, doing so well. But if you actually look at some of these statistics, young women are struggling a lot on a lot of these measures, and in some cases, more than young men. And so, I don’t think it needs to be a suffering competition, but I did think part of the story was not coming through.

In what ways are women struggling?

Women have, for a long time, reported depression and anxiety at higher rates than men. That is getting worse. It seems like mental health on a lot of different measures — different kinds of stress and distress and suicidality — young women are reporting that at higher and higher rates. It turns out that women actually attempt suicide at higher rates than men do, on average. And the reason that more men die of suicide is that they’re more likely to use lethal means such as firearms.

A lot of times this conversation really revolves around college attendance rates, and women are attending and graduating college at higher rates than men. But a woman with a bachelor’s degree still makes less than a man with a bachelor’s degree on average, even within the same field of study.

When I talk to people for this story, researchers and therapists, I heard that a lot of young women are in for a rude awakening when they graduate from school. They’ve been in this bubble where they did feel like they could grow and thrive and they were taken seriously. And then, you go out into the real world, where sexism is still very real, and a lot of women are working in workplaces where they realize they’re not taken as seriously, or the people around them who are in positions of power are all men. That’s a difficult realization.

Why, if women and men are both in crisis, did men pull focus?

Women, as an overall population, tend to be a fairly high-functioning one in this narrative. I talked to someone who had trained as a medical sociologist, and she told me a saying that they used to use in this field was, ‘Men die quicker, but women are sicker.’

Women are more likely to endure a lot of chronic illnesses and to sort of soldier on with their pain unnoticed. And we might not be taking that as seriously, because the idea that women are struggling isn’t necessarily a new one or a super surprising one to a lot of people. I think men having a hard time is more of a news story, and we have become, perhaps, kind of inert to women’s distress in this way.

I wonder, as you found yourself covering this, where do you find the hope here?

I am heartened that we’re talking about [young adults] a lot. There’s been a lot of concern lately about Gen Z, and a lot of what we’re talking about when we talk about young men struggling also applies to young women, so we’re onto some of the right things.

I wrote another piece about young adulthood a while back that was really about the idea that young adulthood actually is a really hard developmental phase. And when I published that article, I think for a lot of readers, it seemed to be somewhat of a surprise that young adults are struggling, too. Even just since I’ve written that, people have talked more about young adults struggling. So I do think people are starting to take that seriously and understand that this is an age group that might need help.

This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.

Derek Lam has more than 31,000 followers on TikTok and nearly 40,000 on X as of this writing. He is shirtless a lot, he dances a lot, and he is shirtless dancing a lot, which may explain how he got so many fans. His comments are filled with compliments (“beautiful”) in different languages (“hombre bello y sensual”) and superlatives (“this might be the finest man on the internet”) accompanied by different emoji (red hearts, crying laughing, lips). Their responses make it seem like Derek Lam is the first and only beautiful man they’ve ever seen, which may explain why he is also selling “exclusive,” seemingly adult, content. 

He is also, possibly unbeknownst to his many admirers, AI-generated. 

To be fair, there were some signs that this man was not real: Despite the multiple videos, Derek never speaks. His videos are also rather brief, just seconds long. A real hot person probably would have parlayed a following of this size into brand deals or “get ready with me” videos. And the selfies on his X account show a completely different man just three years ago. 

Still, the followers of Derek I talked to didn’t even notice he was AI because he seemed to blend in so seamlessly with the other hot men on the internet.

Derek isn’t the only AI thirst trap showing off defined abs for likes and money. He’s one of an increasing number of completely fake, AI-generated figures sinking their fangs into the real models, influencers, and porn stars who populate our feeds, sucking up their beautiful faces and bodies, and using them to profit, without a penny going to the real humans they fed from. 

When it comes to the damage AI could wreak on society, an army of Dereks tricking horny people into giving him likes — or, worst case, money and Amazon gift cards — doesn’t exactly sound like the singularity doomsday scenario that we’ve been warned about. It’s clearly unfortunate for the adult entertainers competing with deepfakes and a fraud risk for their fans, but one might believe if they don’t fall into one of these two groups, they’re relatively safe and unaffected. 

But there’s something more going on here. History shows that porn and sex drive innovation in the tech industry. The way tech platforms treat sex workers is typically a glimpse into the future, and a warning about how tech platforms will eventually treat all of us. If human desire demands the capability to steal, loot, and turn anyone and everyone into something for sale — possibly into hot Dereks — is anyone safe?

The Dereks of the internet are a bleak look at what’s happening in the real world: nothing belongs to us anymore — not our looks, our beauty, our sex, and our art. Our most human desires are slowly being synthesized, with or without our consent. And AI is making it all possible.  

Deepfake technology has gotten alarmingly good in recent years

Artificial hots like Derek are considered “deepfakes,” an umbrella term for AI-generated media (audio, video, or both) that resembles a real-life person. 

When deepfakes first started appearing in late 2017, they were fairly low-quality, making it easy to tell when someone had used a rudimentary app to paste a celebrity or politician’s head onto a different body. Still, it wasn’t very long until people started wielding this technology to be nasty. 

“The first set of deepfakes were actually used to create pornographic videos. They replaced the subjects in those videos with the faces of celebrities,” Siwei Lyu, a professor at the University at Buffalo who studies digital forensics, told me. 

Because the quality of those videos was bad and the content was often absurd or unrealistic, it was easy to tell they weren’t real. Those clunky apps needed a lot of data — videos, images, etc. — of real people to produce crappy videos; Lyu explained that this is why you mostly only saw deepfakes of politicians and celebrities at the time.

As the technology got better, it became less reliant on having a huge amount of data. Instead of needing a whole archive, the new versions of these apps can pretty much run on nothing. “They do not need that much data to train a model anymore. Some of the most recent algorithms just need a single picture — just a single picture of someone,” Lyu said. And the quality is better too. Lyu said that there are AI programs that can now change a person’s appearance and voice in real time, like in Facetimes and Zooms or on live broadcasts.  

Given how many of us are constantly posting photos and videos online, it is now extremely easy to create a convincing social media presence for a person who is not real, and to use it to catfish unwitting people on the internet. 

“This is the problem. It’s becoming more and more challenging to visually tell deepfakes apart,” Lyu said. “Seven years ago, when I started working in this area, checking them was not this difficult,” he added. 

Lyu is an expert in digital media forensics and machine learning, and he went through one of Derek’s videos frame by frame and pointed out some obvious AI tells. There was a distorted watchface with weird swirls instead of numbers and a moment in the video where all of Derek’s fingers on one hand were the same length. Lyu also pointed out that Derek’s chest hair fluctuates, appearing dense in one frame and then dissipating in another.

Through social media, I attempted to contact the owner of Derek Lam’s account with evidence from Lyu that these videos are artificial; I did not hear back.

During my deep dive into Derek Lam’s social media presence, I looked at the accounts he was following. I noticed that of those accounts, someone who goes by the name Vance Ford also had tens of thousands of followers and had nearly identical videos to Derek. The flexing, dances, movements, and music they were set to were all the same, but with what appeared to be a different man performing them. 

I attempted to contact Vance through DMs on social media and did not get a response. I also e-mailed two models who appear to be the actual people that the Derek and Vance AI personas were trained on, but they didn’t respond. 

I sent two of Vance’s videos to Lyu, who analyzed them manually and with AI-detection software. He confirmed that “their movements are nearly identical — consistent with generation from a shared motion source,” and noted that the Vance videos had moments of distortion, unintelligible text, and facial warping. 

 “Young Magnum PI…Tom Selleck,” commented one admirer.

What happens when real people follow fake hots 

“Wow I’m a boomer,” said Patrick, one of Derek’s followers on X, after I told him that he might be following an AI-generated thirst account. (Vox agreed to let Patrick, and Derek’s other followers, use a pseudonym so they could speak frankly about being thirsty for a fake guy.) Prior to our chat, Patrick had no idea Derek was likely a deepfake, and maintains that he didn’t even know he was following the account. Patrick is 33 years old, roughly 30 years younger than the youngest boomer, but being fooled by a hot AI man has made him feel old and vulnerable, susceptible to scams and perhaps light financial crime. 

“This was probably some smut account I followed before I moved all that over to an alt,” Patrick said, noting that in daily life, he’s only ever used AI to help organize and write emails. Wielding AI to create fake videos and photos does not thrill him, nor does the potential of seeing more of Derek. 

“A person being real, someone you could run into at a bar, is half the fun,” Patrick told me, explaining some of the accounts he follows. “AI porn is not of interest, to me, anyway.” 

Not being able to tell the difference between the real beautiful men on the internet and the AI-generated beautiful men on the internet not only makes Patrick feel old, but also a bit “hollow.” The fact that the people we are attracted to are so unrealistically hot, so perfect, that machines can step in for them and go relatively undetected is a reflection of the current state of unattainable desire, which is just as scary as how good these programs have gotten at mimicry. 

“Black mirror shit,” Patrick said. 

The guys I DMed about Derek felt ashamed once they found out the truth. 

“It’s embarrassing and he’s not my type,” said Chris, 33. “I’ve come across several AI accounts, and this one is really good, I have to say. But you can see there’s like no life in his eyes.”

Chris made clear to me that the humiliating thing isn’t that he follows attractive men on the internet. That isn’t a big deal. 

What irks him that he got duped. Chris works in digital marketing and has seen AI used professionally to tabulate calculations for campaigns, and has used it privately for silly things like memes. “AI can do a lot of things, things we probably should not want it to do,” he told me. “I think what’s also scary…is that everybody has access to it. And yes I already unfollowed this person.”

Chris believes there’s something more nefarious afoot. He thinks that whoever is running Derek may have hijacked the username (i.e., the original person Chris was following) and then populated it with AI to drive up follower counts — a scam he’s seen online before.  

“This is super concerning and super scary because you eventually could be texting with this person,” he said, describing a hypothetical situation where unknowing users could be lured into subscribing to fake content and, ultimately, giving the account their personal information, whether that’s photos or perhaps even passwords. 

“This person could be selling your nudes,” he said, explaining one extreme end point of a possible scam. “But you were like jacking off to AI content and that’s embarrassing.”

AI deepfakes are bad for real thirst traps too

While flirting with or masturbating to a fake person is awkward but ultimately manageable and private, Cherie DeVille has an even more complicated problem with AI manipulation. If DeVille is scrolling social media, there’s usually a chance that she’s running into an AI version of herself saying things she’s never said and doing things she’s never done.   

DeVille, an adult star who calls herself “The Internet’s Stepmom,” has roughly 4.5 million followers on Instagram. But her account is often down, which she says is the work of fraudsters  that are determined to send traffic to DeVille’s AI imposters and get her actual account removed. 

“It’s almost always the fake accounts of me reporting me,” DeVille said. “They want to be the biggest me. They want to be the biggest scammer. They want to use my altered AI images to scam fans without my real account getting in the way.” 

DeVille and others I spoke to explained to me that deepfakes have been an annoying reality in the adult entertainment industry for years. The way the scam goes is that someone would fake photos or videos of DeVille (or any star), create an impostor profile, and then trick DeVille’s fans (e.g., through social media DMs) into following that copycat. Later they’d squeeze them for money, payments through Paypal, or Amazon gift cards, perhaps by offering unique content. 

“If you made a fake me and I don’t do double anal, but my AI can, they could have all kinds of ‘exclusive’ stuff,” DeVille said, explaining that double anal is grueling work. 

The lack of protections becomes even clearer when you consider that not every deepfake is a carbon copy. Some personas may borrow a face from one actress, a torso from another, or a pair of legs from a different star. This can make fakes tougher to track down and prove, and more difficult to fight from a legal aspect. 

“Who owns your face once it’s scraped into AI systems? Who profits from your digital clone? How do performers protect themselves from unauthorized replicas or manipulated content?” Rachel Steele, an adult star and the CEO of Red MILF Productions, said to me in an email. “Those questions are still very unanswered.”

Like DeVille, Steele worries about how many of the people using AI to create and consume content don’t seem to consider the artists, models, writers, performers, etc. that these engines have been trained on. It’s bad enough to watch AI slurp up and regurgitate your written work or your digital art. Some people also have to contend with LLMs that have been trained on their own faces and bodies.

“Real creators are competing against characters that can be flawless in every image, never age, never have bad lighting, never get tired, and can appear available 24/7,” Raissa Bellini, an OnlyFans creator who touts gymnastics and firebreathing among her unique skills, told me of the impossibility of keeping up with a machine. She explained to me that she’s seen people create AI-generated personas with the looks of popular models or influencers, only tweaking small details like hair color or eye color. 

A spokesperson for OnlyFans told Vox via email that the company’s terms of service prohibit deceptive or inappropriate content, and said that all content posted on OnlyFans must belong to a verified 18+ OnlyFans content creator: “This means that you can only share content which has been generated, altered or enhanced by AI if it clearly features the verified OnlyFans creator and the user can tell that the content has been generated, altered or enhanced by AI.”

Bellini explained to me that while OnlyFans has measures to protect its creators, some smaller subscription and adult-content platforms do not have the same kind of guardrails. She also noted that most social media sites do not have strict rules or enforcement when it comes to AI, and that she’s seen the algorithm appear to favor AI over human creators.   

“AI raises questions not only about competition, but also about likeness rights, authenticity, audience expectations, and what happens when fans can no longer easily tell the difference between a real person and a generated character,” Bellini added. 

What’s stopping a stranger from creating an AI thirst trap of you? Nothing, really. 

For Deville, Steele, Bellini, their cohort, and even you and I, there are minimal protections stopping someone creating an AI us and making money off of these fake variants. 

According to Jason Schultz, a law professor and director of NYU’s Technology Law & Policy Clinic, humans have, for the last couple of centuries, generally been protected by copyright and right of publicity laws. 

AI obviously didn’t exist when these laws were written, and courts now have to interpret the laws in the context of all of this new technology, in combination with other existing rights (like free speech). Schultz told me that there are more than 100 current cases pending about training AI with copyrighted material. 

He also explained the difficulty of determining whether or not an AI-generated persona constitutes a violation of someone’s right of publicity. It’s more clear-cut when the human involved is a celebrity, because their public persona and appearance is so distinct. It gets murkier when the humans aren’t well known, and the AI creates a persona that’s more of an amalgam than a one-to-one copy. 

“It would raise this question of whether these avatars are based on a particular entertainer, or are they more of an aggregate?” Schultz explained to me. But even if courts side with the humans whose likenesses are being used to create fake personas, Schultz cautions that the technology will always accelerate faster than court decisions are handed down. “I think that the thing that worries me a little is we’re going to get these sets of decisions in two years, but we’ll be dealing with the next three generations of technologies,” he said.  

DeVille, who has been working in the industry for nearly two decades, told me that without better legal protection, she isn’t hopeful for the future of porn or, more broadly, any type of art.

“If my income started tanking and their theft was at the point where I couldn’t compete with literally myself, there might be no choice but to retire,” DeVille said. 

But she also wants to make it extremely clear that she isn’t against AI; she would just like to be in control of it. That means being able to own her likeness, her voice, her image, and the ability to choose whatever she wanted to do with it — or at least get some compensation or have some legal protection if someone’s using Cherie DeVille without her permission. 

“It would be a beautiful way to extend my career beyond what my knees can take,” DeVille told me. But, she added, “if someone’s making an AI of me doing double anal, I should be making the money.” 

I hate generative AI. I hate how it’s destroying writing pedagogy and giving students even more excuses not to read (because they can just read a “summary”). I hate how whiny and defensive AI users are about the pathetic little ways they’ve integrated it into their lives. If I could push a button and permanently delete it from existence, I would. If I could go back in time and prevent it from being invented, I would.

The reason I hate it is not just that its output is mediocre bullshit. It’s that it is an active attack on everything I value — literacy, analysis, thought. I find the thought that I would use ChatGPT actively degrading and humiliating. I have never touched it, not even as a joke, not even to prove it sucks, not even — as Beatrice has been doing — to see what it’s showing my students. I admit that this is somewhat irresponsible of me, to indulge my revulsion in this way. This technology — which is unimaginably expensive and resource-intensive and which has not developed anything approaching a plausible profit model — is of course inevitable, “here to stay.” Nothing could interrupt the progress of a technology that requires hundreds of billions of dollars to be shovelled into the furnace year after year after year without returning anything. (Can you tell I’m angry? Can you tell I’m sick of hearing these thoughtless clichés?)

But one must eventually face it. One must eventually give it some thought. Beatrice has been helping, in her Substack posts and in our continual chat thread. She also pointed me to the work of Jan Mullen on AI as externalized attention, which takes the kind of insanely overambitious long view of AI that I find appealling as an aficionado of political theology-style genealogies. Mullen compares the rise of AI to the rise of literacy and notes that the latter was, for most of its history, primarily a tool of state control. In a wide-ranging interview, Mullen wonders aloud whether the form of control AI is creating will line up with our idea of “the state” — but is absolutely clear that the purpose of generative AI is to manipulate and control us, to take away our power and agency, the power and agency that humanity somehow managed to wring out of the technologies of literacy.

I was particularly interested in a moment where Mullen postulates that the new model of control “will be distinctly post-literate — and, as a result, post-legal.” This triggered my political theology instincts and I immediately asked: does that mean it will also be post-monotheistic? Long-time readers know I love Jan Assmann’s theory of monotheism. For Assmann, what monotheism does is not primarily or most importantly to reduce the number of gods, but to introduce a new kind of god — an exclusive God, one in relation to whom all other gods are false. A crucial technology for stabilizing the claims of this exclusive God is of course the written scriptural text, which remains a durable deposit even as day-to-day religious practice inevitably drifts away from the strict demands of the original revelation. The monotheistic God, in contrast to previous pantheons with their loosey-goosey translatability and porosity and their ever-shifting body of mythical tales, is a God of the letter because he is a God of law.

So if ChatGPT destroys literacy and law, then ChatGPT is going to kill God. By this I don’t mean that the bearded guy in the sky is going to be found dead of a gunshot wound to the chest, but that monotheistic religion as we have traditionally understood it will not be able to function in a post-literacy regime.

Note that I am not claiming that ChatGPT will take away people’s ability to read in the sense of deciphering letters — obviously its functioning depends on that. But it is killing the notion of a stable, permanent, authoritative text and undercutting the skills needed to engage with that kind of text. Note also that I am well aware that the vast majority of monotheistic believers throughout history were illiterate (in either the “can’t decipher letters” or “can’t make sense of a complex text” sense). But the elite leaders definitely were fully literate, and in fact that was the source of their authority. One cannot say the same of the type of religious leaders who are most thriving in the meme-ified, Trumpified bastard child of Christianity that sets the tone for American religious practice today. Compared to even a generation ago, literal knowledge of what the Bible says at all has been radically set aside. Some combination of personal charisma and “vibes” — above all, opposition to what they imagine progressivism to be — are the source of authority, leading to obvious absurdities like the rejection of compassion as a Christian virtue.

I am a harsh critic of the dumbed down “seeker-sensitive” model of Christianity I was raised in. But in comparison with what passes for Christian teaching today, it is intellectually sophisticated and morally demanding. This is not to say it was simply “better” (after all, it paved the way for what’s happening now) or that the answer is to get back to the Bible. It’s just to mark how far we’ve fallen. What seemed like a vacuous, popified version of Christianity at the time now seems like a robust theological ethos. The haphazard methods of “Bible study” now seem fit for a graduate seminar.

Speaking of the evangelical milieu, I’ve always resisted Luhrmann’s thesis (in When God Talks Back) that evangelicals cultivate an internal voice that they identify with God. When I was growing up, I didn’t know what people meant when they said that Jesus was their best friend or that God was telling them to do something — and I assumed they didn’t know either, that it was just a weird kind of in-group signalling. For my part, Jesus was not my best friend and God didn’t tell me even one single thing. I was all alone up there in my head, always, and I assumed that everyone else was, too. The thought that everyone I grew up around was suffering from a low-grade self-induced psychosis is difficult to cope with.

Now that people are turning to ChatGPT for spiritual insight, though, I wonder if I finally have to admit it. Obviously here again we are dealing with what seems like a quantitative change — people are using the machine to shuffle religious clichés, where previously they just half-consciously did it themselves. But the qualitative difference is that the insights of “Buddy Christ” could always be corrected against the unchanging text of Scripture. When there is no longer an external anchor like that, when the divine revelation is “customized” for each and every reader, something has changed. Again, this is not to say that what happens to be in the Bible is necessarily “better” than any given ChatGPT transcript — presumbly it’s often worse. But a point of leverage has been lost. Counterargument is no longer possible in the same way. And insofar as that point of leverage, that external source of authority, was how “God” functioned in traditional monotheism, that means God is dead.

The new regime appears to be broadly polytheistic. There is of course always the god of the uncriticizable self, who behaves with the same irritable intolerance as the monotheistic God in the face of even the faintest suggestion that one might consider behaving or thinking differently. But there are many other sites of veneration, an overlapping consensus of podcast hosts and memesters and conspiracists that each believer can mix and match to drive themselves insane in the most relevant and appealing way. Joe Rogan belongs to this pantheon, along with Jordan Peterson and any number of other luminaries whose endlessly prattling voices people love more than their own families. Donald Trump is of course a very powerful god in this polytheistic milieu, but as the boos to his vaccine advocacy and the pushback to his Epstein caginess show, he is not all-powerful, his word is not quite law. And the fact that Trump’s words lack all self-consistency means that there are many Trumps as well, that Trump can be whatever his follower imagines him to be.

I cannot see what the believers see when they look at Trump. All I can see is the most degenerate loser ever to live, the most despicable piece of shit imaginable. Maybe this is of a piece with my revulsion at ChatGPT — and indeed, my failure to develop a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I’m too hung up on facts and reality and meaning and consistency. I’m too literal. That’s why I am unsuited to the emerging world, why I reject it more forcefully than it would ever even bother to reject me. I’m just too literal.

A curious thing has been happening lately: I cannot use the popular left-leaning social networking site Bluesky for any length of time without becoming irritable and even angry. Every common trope annoys me. Most notably, if someone nitpicks a headline in the New York Times — one of the favorite forms of political activism over there — I jump down their throats. I get into pointless, hostile, endless back-and-forth exchanges where we both dig in more and more. Often one leads to the other. For instance, this morning I blocked a longtime mutual (and fellow academic) after a terrible fight about whether the NYT has appropriately used the word “mused” in a headline.

Clearly I’m part of the problem here! I could simply attempt to curate my experience more — set up lists, follow “starter packs,” and do all the many fun things that other users do to get things “just so” — but every time I do, the bullshit keeps coming back. My biggest success was blocking a major user who is obsessed with NYT nitpicking, and for a few weeks it seemed like he had been the only culprit. But it always comes back, just like the constant exhortations to block without mercy or hesitation keep coming back, just like everything keeps coming back. And that probably happens because Bluesky is, at the end of the day, a very small and insular site, whose culture of boastful hair-trigger blocking contributes to major groupthink.

The beginning of my more sustained frustration came early last week, when the entire site was aghast at a Financial Times column that said Bluesky was an echo chamber. I have been using a print subscription to the Financial Times as part of my efforts to wean myself off social media and have come to deeply respect it as a news source. Everyone was outraged at the FT’s “attack” on the site, and some journalists and editors even popped up on Bluesky to try to mediate the conflict. Multiple major accounts advocated blocking all the supposed “gaslighters” from what is, in all honesty, probably the best English-language news source on Earth.

I was aghast. I don’t much care for the columnist, nor did I think the column was a work of art. But everyone seemed to be mischaracterizing its point — which boiled down to “I get why liberals like Bluesky, but I miss the broader perspective Twitter had before Musk ruined it.” Again, not brilliant, but hardly a war crime. In fact, I’m pretty sure that most Bluesky users, deep in their hearts, would agree. And for “defending” the column (i.e., attempting to accurately summarize it), I was insulted and targetted for blocking. One person mused that I was trying to suck up to the columnist so I could hobknob with her wealthy friends. Another thought my response was par for the course for a “tank-adjacent contrarian.” The notion that I sincerely thought everyone was overreacting based on inaccurate information was not considered.

A big part of the problem is that we are all, of course, recovering from the trauma of late-stage Twitter. We are taking habits honed in an environment overrun by open Nazis and applying it to people whose politics are, at the end of the day, all within one standard deviation of each other. And that’s fine! There is definitely a place for people with similar politics to meet. That’s what I try to cultivate on Facebook especially, and I certainly didn’t seek out conservatives on the old Twitter. The problem is that no one is willing to admit that it’s an echo chamber. They want to imagine it’s an miscellaneous audience, that their critiques of NYT headlines can reach some reachable moderate, or that their exhortations that no one should blame North Carolina and Tennessee for the hurricane damage just because they’re red states could be heard by someone who may indeed be tempted to blame them. It’s like a “seeker-sensitive” church, always looking to convert outsiders who mostly aren’t interested and meanwhile providing nothing of substance to those who are showing up consistently.

I’ll admit that the old Twitter was often annoying in the same way. It did periodically bring out an unattractive combativeness in me. And sometimes it seemed like it could become actually life-threatening, as in my multiple waves of systematic right-wing harassment. But it had other rewards. There was much more genuine intellectual diversity among left-wing posters. There was much greater chance of stumbling across interesting links and articles or hearing about something cool. And it was funny — funny like nothing else. There was just something about the meme culture of Twitter at its prime, with its multiple layers of referentiality and irony, its nihilistic love of the absurd. Even in the late days of Twitter people were becoming more literal and less receptive to that kind of humor, but on Bluesky it’s entirely dead. The absurdist poster “dril” made a big show of switching to Bluesky and people took his nonsensical posts deadly seriously, sometimes even going so far as to report him for harmful content. I myself get a very literal response to almost every joke I post. It’s heartbreaking.

It’s as though everyone decided to take my article Jury Duty, where I said that the purpose of social media is primarily to pass judgment on each other, as an instruction manual for building out the new culture of Bluesky. The constant reminders that everyone is on a hair trigger to block every stranger exacerbate the effect, to the point where it feels like the first social network whose primary purpose is actually to cut off social contact.

When I ask myself why I let it get to me, it is probably because I am still grieving for what Twitter was. It didn’t always bring out the best in me, but it was rewarding on net, because it was so often surprising. That’s what’s so frustrating to me about the endless repetition of a handful of moves — it’s so predictable. I get angry at the NYT headline nitpickers because they’re boring, and because they’ve convinced themselves that it’s politically necessary for them to be boring. In reality, though, the recipients for the messages they insist on sending out so repetitiously are not here. I am. Or at least I was. I know I was annoying, I know I had my hangups, I know I often disagreed with the site consensus — but I am a human being, I am genuinely open to discussion, and I admit when I’m wrong much more often than anyone else I’ve ever seen online. All I wanted out of the site was some kind of halfway interesting discussions and links and jokes. I don’t think that was too much to ask.

Whether I will return again remains to be seen. As a long-time Twitter addict, I’m likely to relapse. I publicly pledged myself to take a week off, just to make it embarrassing to come back sooner. But what makes it less likely is the sense that no one will miss me. I pop into Twitter every week or so to check my replies and see if I have any DMs, and every so often I see someone saying that they miss me and wish they would return. By contrast, Bluesky has felt hostile and unwelcoming from the very start. I know that hurt people, hurt people. I’m guilty of that as well. I just wish we could all work through it and try to build something that can be more informative, more challenging, and more fun — and I’m increasingly convinced that will never happen.