Social Media Made Me an Asshole, part 1

Feeling like a ghost in Washington, D.C. Smartphones, social isolation, a dream, and the origins of Quibble.

Part 1

In 2014, I finished my MFA in poetry at the University of Maryland and took a job in communications at the university’s College of Education, located just next door to the English building. I lucked into it, really. Starting graduate school, I was guaranteed two years of financial support on a teaching assistantship. For my third and final year, I had to find something else. The communications director at Education, Halima, took me on to write press releases and help her put together the alumni magazine. When Halima left for a job at Hewlett Packard, she recommended that I stay, full time, to fill her shoes until her replacement was found.

I’d made few friends outside my program. Now, all but a very few of the friends I did have were moving away. I went on haunting my old campus stomping grounds, but I knew fewer and fewer people there all the time. I began to feel like a ghost.

The feeling was most pronounced when I took trips on evenings and weekends into Washington, D.C. Many D.C. people are from elsewhere: they come to work in the federal government and its private auxiliaries, such as K Street lobbying firms. These folks seemed only interested in what you could do for them, in how you could advance their careers or their agendas, and in my experience, if you offered no such perks, they ditched your company in a hurry. So I turned to locals, D.C. natives, but almost none of them lived in or around College Park. I made trips on public transit to see them.

Being an easygoing, affable Southerner, I fancied I could strike up a conversation with anyone. But it proved untrue when I rode a bus or a train. People kept their eyes glued to their smartphones or, in a few cases, books. Conversation with a stranger was, I found, typically unwelcome. Even eye contact appeared to be a social faux pas: people scowled at me when I met their eyes, as if it was rude or aggressive. I knew Northern cities had different social conventions, but this one struck me as antisocial.

Of course, I was no yardstick to judge folks by. I’m a writer, and a natural trait for a writer is an insatiable curiosity about other people. Few people are really boring, if only you figure out their interests. If I had willing interlocutors, I could find ways into conversations that told me something intriguing about who they were. Yet I was constantly frustrated by an absence of willing interlocutors, by how standoffish all the people around me were. Here I was, a writer, in a city full of people where no doubt stories abounded — and I couldn’t get a lively talk with anyone!

The smartphones were clearly a big part of the problem. I hadn’t jumped on that bandwagon. Wherever I was, I wanted to be present, undistracted. “Life’s happening all around you,” the writer in me said, “so pay attention!” But didn’t this thought occur to anyone else, whether or not they had such a reason for it as mine?

For me, the company of anyone in the flesh, here and now, exceeded in quality even the most thrilling interactions I ever had online. But everyone else seemed to feel quite differently about it. People even kept their eyes on their phones while they were sitting together in a restaurant. Didn’t they think the company they had right there was better than whatever they were getting from the other end on social media? And what about the world, our environs? Wasn’t the hectic, constantly moving world of this city more stimulating than whatever was on a screen?

One day, on a bus rounding Dupont Circle, through the window I saw someone with his eyes on his phone walk out into oncoming traffic. The bus carried me on before I could see what came of it, whether he was struck. I looked at the other passengers. All their eyes were on their phones, too. That very instant, only a few hundred feet away, a person might be dying, and I was the only person there who was even aware of it.

I had a dream. Not quite a nightmare. Disturbing, all the same.

I was underground. I could see nothing, but I knew I was surrounded by people. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people, none of whom could see me, either. I moved among them, spoke to them, and touched them — and they did likewise. A great crowd of people milled around in this vast, pitch-black cavern, touching and speaking.

Then, mysteriously, song began. A chorus went up in something like Gregorian chant with call and response. I joined my voice to the others. We all sang together. It was beautiful but also eerie, unsettling. At the same time I was doing something I loved to do — singing — I felt disconnected from the other singers. I felt alienated, alone.

I woke from the dream with a word on my lips: “Within.”

We live together, I thought, but each of us lives in a private loneliness. That’s what the word “within” meant to me, at least. On its face, it was just another formulation of the idea of the Other. But my dream somehow deepened it and made it mean something more, though I didn’t know what just yet.

This sort of thing had happened before. I knew what it meant, what it asked of me, what it might promise. So I didn’t go back to sleep — that would let other dreams come and wash this one away. I got out of bed and wrote it down. I took a stab at what I thought it was all about. I posed questions, jotted them down, didn’t try to answer them yet. I knew the picture wasn’t clear enough for me to begin writing about it, so for now I was only starting the process of clarifying it.

I believed the pitch-black cavern was a relic in my memory of a cave I’d visited in Tennessee. The tour guide told everyone to turn off their phones. Then he turned off all the lights. We were now in total darkness, he said, such as we’d never experienced before. If we stayed in total darkness like this for days, our body clock would fall out of sync with the sun, disrupting our sleep-wake cycle. After several days, we’d begin to go blind from the lack of light.

I had dreamed of people living there. It was clearly a setting for a story. My dream was only a vignette, but I expected a story to come to me. Eventually, it did.

In my final weeks of graduate school, after finishing and submitting my thesis, I pivoted away from poetry. For three years, I’d swum in it — and a lot of craft theory — and I needed a break.

I began writing satiric essays in styles aping Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne. In the essays, I tried to diagnose America’s social ills and where our political rhetoric was taking us. Polarization between the Left and the Right was on the rise. Our two major parties waged ferocious assaults against each other, but these fights were all purely tactical, aimed at scoring points in the hope of peeling away a voter here and a voter there on fringe issues. There was comparative silence on enormous issues of substance — most crucially, I thought, the growing gulf between rich and poor, about which only Bernie Sanders was vocal. I wrote about how these petty squabbles and this crucial silence reflected our cultural shallowness. I predicted impending violence if things went on like this (six years later, I would be proven correct). I called this set of essays Amyricon, punning “American” and “a mere icon.”

I wrote just for myself, with no particular goal or readers in mind. Having grown up in the rural South, I had a very conservative upbringing. As an adult, I’d swung left. Now, I felt myself to be a liberal situated somewhere in the middle, exasperated by both parties. I was writing to make fresh sense of my politics.

As I wrote, I had many second thoughts about my ideas and assertions, but soon I saw it wouldn’t do to edit as I went. So instead, I wrote footnotes addressing myself as if another person was talking, and since I was quibbling with myself in these footnotes, I headed each of them with the word “Quibble.” I often talk to myself as I write — I’m sure I sound like a madman — so it wasn’t long before I began talking to the alter ego in my footnotes, and naturally I called the alter ego Quibble.

After my dream about the cave in which people lived but never saw each other, as a story began to suggest itself for that setting, I decided I’d call the protagonist Quibble and give the other characters similarly abstruse names — Quotation and the like. I abandoned the essay-writing and began work on a novel.

As I got into what would become the novel’s abandoned first version, realizing a theme I was trying to tackle was tech-induced social isolation, I called my father to talk it over with him. Dad isn’t much of an abstract thinker — he’s worked all his life with his hands and needs concreteness to wrap his mind fully around ideas — so I gave real-world examples. At some point, I said, “People are basically faceless to each other on social media, so it’s turning them into assholes.”

There followed a pause. “Son,” my father said, “it’s turning you into an asshole.”

That pronouncement floored me, but I listened attentively as Dad told me what he thought of how I often behaved on Facebook, where he kept quiet and just observed people from the sidelines. Once he’d finished his spiel, I didn’t argue. I thanked him for telling me. When we got off the phone, I was shaken to my core about who I might be. But I turned back to my manuscript but even more sure I was writing something vital, at least personally.

In part 2, I’ll unpack how I learned for myself that social media was making me an asshole, and I’ll delve into the theme of facelessness in Quibble.

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