How The Chillest Account On Twitter Lost Its Chill
The internet is not what it was four years ago. The old internet certainly resembles the internet we have today, it just, wasn't so much all the time. There were fewer YouTubers fostering rabid fandoms. Fewer fascists who, at the time, were only pretending to whine about ethics in news coverage of video games. Back then, announcing you were going to log off was more of a joke than a necessary measure to preserve your mental health. You could argue that the internet of 2014 was, annoyances and controversies included, fun!
There is, arguably, no better example of The Internet That Once Was, than @chillsitch. Started by writer Taylor Moore in 2014, @chillsitch was promptly deemed "the chillest account on Twitter," by the Daily Dot and "the best thing on the internet," by Fast Company. It's only aim: to tweet out chill situations like this one.
You get the idea. But one day, in fact nearly three years to the day that Moore started @chillsitch, the tweets just stopped. Only until recently, when logging into Twitter daily is like wading into a hot tub that slowly poisons your mind, did I really notice the absence of @chillsitch. If there was ever a time for someone to remind us that there are indeed situations that are undeniably chill, it's now.
And @chillsitch is back, sort of. Last week, Moore released NetGuide Magazine, an attempt to identify and capture just what the pre-Trump internet was. "NetGuide is the third issue of Fortunate Horse Magazine and an incomprehensible fever dream love letter to the sublime post modern 'goof hell' of the internet," Moore writes in his description. "Specifically the American internet as it last was in early 2016, before all of… this."
If there's someone who's uniquely qualified to unpack what the internet used to be and what it has become, it's Taylor Moore.
So, naturally, I sent him a direct message on Twitter and asked him why he stopped @chillsitch. He was kind enough to respond, and we ended up talking about the exact opposite of a chill situation: the internet in 2018.
@chillsitch stopped tweeting in March of 2017, which from an outsider's perspective (mine, I guess) seems like a sort of coincidental time for the account to take a hiatus. Can you talk a little bit about the inspiration behind starting @chillsitch, and maybe more importantly, why you decided to stop?
Chillsitch had truly stopped about a year before, in April of 2016. I got hacked in March last year, and miracle of miracles, all they did was repost a couple of previous @chillsitch tweets. Which, as far as hackers go, is pretty chill.
March and April of 2016 was a real ass of a time. I just didn't feel like writing 'net jokes about oil pulling anymore. Remember that, oil pulling? I bet you knew at least three people that for a few weeks stood in their kitchen and/or bathroom and just let oil sit in their mouth. That was an actual fad that happened. But even ground as fertile as oil pulling couldn't take my mind off the political and cultural shitstorm that was beginning to form just over the horizon, like a tropical depression developing over the Atlantic. There were some terrible mass shootings around that time and everyone in my life was engaged in a vitriolic digital rending of what I had stupidly thought was a kind of social fabric.
Now look here, I know things were bad before and that the ideology of The Swift and Recent Cultural Decline is based upon a head-in-the-sand worldview that supposes we were ever in a higher place from which to decline. But 2016 was like someone turned a blacklight on in an interstate exit Super 8 motel honeymoon suite. The hidden was revealed, the subtext became the supertext, and whatever @chillsitch spell I was under broke. I have not missed it for one single second.
@chillsitch was born because I wanted a reason to write some jokes everyday and I wanted to play around in that perfectly vague Venn diagram sliver where irony and sincerity show up in equal degrees. It's a mean-spirited joke at the expense of comfortable, middle-class dinks. It's also a personal confession and an apology, as a comfortable middle-class dink is exactly what I am. I love writing as someone who is very confident about something very stupid, but also, ugh…..it me, dog.
When I was a kid I got a guitar and one of the first songs I taught myself to play was "Jolly Mon" by Jimmy Buffett. Not even "Margaritaville." I loved Jimmy Buffet so much I felt like the hits were beneath me. A 13-year-old kid getting an acoustic guitar so he can learn Jimmy Buffett deep cuts is very @chillsitch and also my literal biography. I have worn several pairs of Tevas until the rubber binding was worn through with use. I still keep two, not one, but two, travel hammocks behind the back seat of my pickup truck and if you think I won't roll down the windows and blast middle period Paul Simon b-sides the second the weather gets a little cooler in NY, then you're fucking nuts. @chillsitch was me laughing at what I love and confessing that I'm gonna love it anyway.
Your latest issue of Fortunate Horse is — I'm sorry for reading your own quote back to you — an "incomprehensible fever dream love letter to the sublime post-modern 'goof hell' of the internet." It's the best description of my favorite parts of the internet from the past few years, but it also increasingly feels like that part of the web being crowded out by, uh, MAGA chuds? What do you think happened to this "goof hell?"
Imagine a machine that can read your thoughts. Not just your conscious thoughts, what movies and books portray as a kind of semantically formatted internal soliloquy with reason, flow, and syntax, but all your REAL thoughts, every single fleeting sensation, image, memory, violent fantasy, flash of rage, half-memory, and simulated sexual scenario. Those are the thoughts the machine reads and records. Then it formats them, catalogs them permanently, and displays them in a real-time feed. Finally, it forces you to watch it, forever. If I built this machine and hooked you up to it, I think I'd be rightfully sent to prison for a long time. It's torture that would drive anyone insane. This is the internet in 2018.
The internet is a giant mind made of people, and it's the mind of a person who has been self-destructing for a long time. All these things we hate about it, nazis, MAGA chuds, and so on, are just our chickens coming home to roost.
I think the real horror, and it is horror in the totally literal classic sense, is now it's real in a way it never was before. The xenomorph has burst out of our chest and has grown up into a very real monster that seems to want to kill us all for reasons it's hard to understand. Like an episode of an old sci-fi anthology show, our subconscious has been brought to life by a strange new technology and is now stalking the hallways.
At the same time, the way this is happening is hilarious. Neo-Nazis chugging whole milk to own the libs? Fascist furries? The hyper-camp pageant of Nosferatus wheeling through the revolving door of the executive branch? Everyone thought the apocalypse would look like a Michael Bay movie, but it feels more like John Waters. Horror and comedy are inextricably linked, whether we like it or not. We intentionally made the creation of NetGuide as intense and fast as possible because we wanted to recreate the Id-on-display feeling of the internet. We had a team of 70 designers and writers locked in a building for almost 24 hours, churning out an entire week's worth of pure, uncut 'net. And it worked. NetGuide feels like the real internet: a monolithic torrent of the weirdest, dumbest shit humans are capable of. It makes very little sense, and yet in its size and intensity, it persists and therefore makes us feel like we're abnormal for not "getting" it. It's a very strange feeling. It is also very, very funny and makes a great gift! Buy it now at http://netguide.website
I feel like we're starting to see this nostalgia for the 2016 internet start to take shape, either because the internet has grown so toxic, or we're only now just removed enough to define its specific qualities. But how comparable is the Era of Weird Twitter with like other like minded nostalgia for other eras such as MySpace/Xanga/Livejournal/AIM, or forum culture and so on? Is this something that's truly a relic of 2012-2016, or are folks just moving on to something else, or even something more politically productive, online?
Unexamined nostalgia is poison. Nostalgia for the 2016 internet, specifically, should be cured with ice baths and electroshock. That being said, I do feel affinity with people who pine for an internet before every single interaction was mediated through giant sociopathic corporate behemoths that have all the power and humanity of Lovecraftian Elder Gods. And yet. Even way back then, the internet was always heavy with Libertarians and we can see now what those assholes turned into.
How do you see the internet getting better, if at all?
We can absolutely destroy the Id Machine and build something better. I am 100% sure of this. And we have to. The internet, like capitalism, will either explode the world or give way to something better and more sustainable. It is still possible to nudge it towards the latter. First, we have got to change the incentive structure for the people who build and maintain social platforms. These spaces should be run by diverse cooperatives of employees and stakeholders, free to make decisions outside the patently suicidal ideology of maximalism.
Second, to make the internet better, make people better. To make people better, make their lives better so they don't turn into angry, alienated trolls. Let's make it easy, aww hell, let's make it free to get an education and healthcare. I know it sounds weird, but if we took better care of each other, the internet would get better, too. Finally, and this is the most important, go to http://netguide.website and buy the book. That's probably the best thing you can do and you can do it right now.
