I literally can’t read another word about Elon or his hostile takeover of Twitter, so instead, I’m showing up with some content that, for the most part, has nothing to do with either.
In the past few weeks, my interest has been piqued by fake halloween costumes, horror that plays on a creeping mistrust of strangers, and the notion that, amid mass alienation, nothing is scarier than our fellow earthlings 👽
Scroll to the end for some quick links and maybe just *one* tweet about Elon.
‘Influencer from upper class background.’ ‘Conservative guy scared of cities.’ ‘Venture capitalist.’ ‘Twitter writer.’ Nestled amid the usual halloween content feed of elaborate celebrity costumes, DIY Euphoria get-ups, and nostalgic movie montages with titles like ‘Halloween costume idea ✨ for hot girls ✨’, many of this year’s costumes seemed to be inspired by the most horrifying theme of all: other people.
This was the 2022 Halloween meme du jour: the fake Spirit Halloween costume. The format features an image of a notoriously nightmarish type of person, photoshopped onto costume packaging from US halloween retailer Spirit, and accompanied by a caption to explain what kind of contemporary horror the image represents. While, according to Know Your Meme, the earliest iteration of this format dates back to a Facebook Group in 2019, Halloween this year saw it blow up, as people (predominantly on Twitter), clamored to get in on some extra scary social commentary.
Beyond fake costumes, real costumes toyed with similar themes – to similar fanfare. One PhD student dressed as her supervisor's feedback on her thesis (‘No!’ ‘Unclear!’). In Japan, ‘mundane halloween’ is an excellent resource of hilarity for the global internet (E.g. ‘People who wore the same outfit and now feel awkward’). Meanwhile, in the UK, one survey suggested that one of this year’s favourite costumes was Boris Johnson: not exactly an everyday person, but arguably an example of the horrors of the human condition none-the-less.
Reality is the original source material for scary stories.
Emotive storytelling across formats and genres has long used the anxieties of the real world as source material. During the pandemic, contagion movies were wildly successful, while thrillers that double as thinly-veiled warnings relating to the climate crisis are commonplace at this point. Movies like Antebellum (2020) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out – the most profitable film of 2017 – have harnessed horror to comment on the insidiousness of liberal racism. If we look even further back, analysis suggests that the widespread success of Bram Stoker’s Dracula – published in 1897 – may also have found resonance due to growing tensions around xenophobia and immigration in a globalising world.
In recent years, some commentators have also suggested there’s a heightened need for media that can act as catharsis for the bleakness of the modern world. “We’ve all been psychologically carrying a much heavier burden these last couple of decades,” says Mary Wild, a lecturer at Freud Museum London. “It’s impossible to eliminate distressing emotions like fear just through positive thinking. If we don’t make space for what troubles us, we’re just repressing it. We either repress or process.” Perhaps that’s why horror as an overall genre is thriving, among younger audiences in particular: two-thirds of US Gen Zers and almost half of Millennials have watched a horror movie in cinemas in the past year.
Interpersonal horrors to reflect interpersonal fears.
A lot of recent horror movies also seem to be looking to uniquely modern interactions – and the ambiguity attached to them – to inspire fear. Spree (2020) is literally a film about a rideshare driver with lofty ambitions for his social media presence. We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021) is about an isolated teen and her obsession with an online RPG. Even A24’s critically acclaimed X (2022), while set in the ‘70s, draws on themes that resonate in a society that is simultaneously fascinated with, and repulsed by, the notion of the young and Extremely Online as fame-hungry exhibitionists.
Meanwhile, ‘Airbnb horror’ is an entire subgenre that’s piqued interest off the back of breakout indie flick Barbarian: one that seems to point explicitly to the anxiety attached to our relationships with others post-digitisation. Our online landscape is littered with a broad spectrum of potential social interactions with strangers gone awry. From predatory Uber drivers and Tinder scammers to inaccurate Airbnb listings and catfishers, digital platforms have connected us in a way that invites whole new dimensions of mistrust among our fellow humans: just 30% of people globally agree that ‘most people can be trusted’. In this context, an untrustworthy Airbnb host proving fundamental to the premise of a horror movie seems pretty fitting.
All this tallies with a broader shift in the collective mood that’s been accelerated amid the pandemic. A third of college students in the US report feeling ‘alienated and anxious’, correlating with a study that shows a 50% increase in mental health issues among this group between 2013 and 2021. The disruption and emotional strain of the last couple of years hasn’t just seen productivity decline or burnouts rise, either: it’s also changed our personalities, apparently for the worse. A study published by scientific journal PLOS ONE and reported on by the NYT suggests that not only did the pandemic fracture social spaces and relationships, but it may also have made us “less extroverted, creative, agreeable and conscientious.” Cool!
He’s a 10, but he’s also a human man.
A diminishing ability to understand, or even tolerate, what we don’t appreciate in humanity doesn’t always play out in the dramatic context of fear and horror. It informs what we find entertaining, too, and the granularities of this phenomenon are increasingly visible online. Since 2020, ‘the ick’ has become a catch-all term for behaviours that transform a worthy romantic partner into someone who’s inexplicably (and irredeemably) grotesque. This year, that same phenomenon took on new garb in the form of ‘He’s a 10 but…’ – a meme format that allows people to explain behaviours or personality traits that lower someone’s apparent physical appeal, because of what they symbolise about a persons values, beliefs or social context.
While these examples don’t necessarily correlate with fear, they indicate a dehumanisation of, and alienation from, each other. The fake Spirit Halloween costume memes similarly act as a vehicle for this phenomena: a Halloween-themed version of an ick, or a starter pack meme, this format is designed to exhibit disdain for the everyday alien by reducing them to caricatures of their most despicable traits.
In a cultural climate that’s seen nihilism and cynicism become the status quo, is the notion that hell really is other people really that surprising? The world is burning, the human race seems to be largely responsible, and we can’t seem to pull our shit together enough to figure out how to stop being so toxic.
“The biggest challenge of our time, that undermines our collective efforts to create more equitable futures, is our decreasing ability to think and imagine long-term, beyond ourselves,” says researcher and strategist Tamika Abaka-Wood in an interview for futures collective RADAR. “The stories we tell ourselves, or have been told inaccurately about our pasts — our lands, histories, and people — are haunting our present and our abilities to think about our futures.” This feeling is creating further conflict and polarization, rather than motivating us to connect.
Love, not snark.
Despite the bleakness of this sentiment, there is a potential silver lining (gotta find one somewhere, right?). Because while some of these parodies of influencers, union busters or modern liberals may maximise the chasms between social groups, others can also be used to virtue signal to others, and ultimately strengthen in-groups. By sharing the ‘Utah Fashion Wife’ Spirit costume, for example, you’re more likely to be indicating to other Real Housewives of Salt Lake City fans that you’re one of them, than derisively making fun of them. And by sharing the ‘Twitter Writer’ costume (probably on Twitter!), you might be expressing a love/hate relationship with the platform that so many users share, rather than hating on those that hang out there.
In this sense, these costumes could instead be reframed as a seasonal take on the evergreen memes that see petty rows erupt around online: which Chinese order is the best one, which crisp flavours are god tier, which is the right way to eat a steak. In this sense, fake Spirit Halloween costumes – and the subset of observation humour they represent – allows us to reflect upon our differences without having to alienate each other even further.
And maybe that’s not so scary after all.
Quick links + good internet:
‘Or are u a good driver?’, Twitter (November 2022)
No one except me thinks I’m a good driver.If one of Logan Roy’s children bought Twitter’, Twitter (November 2022)
Reality often seems stranger than fiction these days (in keeping w the theme of today’s newsletter, I guess?), but there’s nothing more joyful than seeing people on the internet accurately and succinctly draw parallels between the two.‘Weirdly, Taylor Swift is extremely close to creating a true metaverse’, The Atlantic (November 2022)
If you read one thing about Taylor Swift’s new album, I’d recommend this. It’s a pretty on point analysis of the way Swift has – love or hate her music – built a multi-platform fandom that’s not only highly engaged, but definitely would follow her into a 3D, immersive virtual universe. In this sense, the author boldly (though not necessarily inaccurately) claims that “she’s actually outpacing Mark Zuckerberg in the quest to build a true metaverse.”‘My biggest dream’, Tumblr
Except if you tell me to calm down, I’ll lose it.‘r/LinkedInLunatics’, Reddit
This subreddit was launched in 2019, but subscribership has skyrocketed in the past year or so, with its member count surpassing 100K a few months ago. Its ridicule of the Extremely Online Professional is in keeping with a number of notable articles that have been doing the rounds in the past year or so (like this one from Vice), the scathing response to the Crying CEO (now a meme, obv!), and the general fatigue around the idea that having any kind of job also requires you to have a personal brand. It also points to a growing polarization in attitudes to work as the global workforce – in particular, those with digitally-enabled careers – continue to reevaluate relationships with productivity, boundaries and the role that work can or should play in identity.‘The first minute of every phone call is torture now’, The Atlantic (October 2022)
A quick read about how technology – along with the petty gripes and minute joys it brings – has become so fundamental to everyday life, that it’s become a staple of small talk. “Technology is a condition. Like the weather, or the economy, or the pandemic, or traffic, or parenting,” writes author Ian Bogost. “Nothing really works, and nothing is truly broken either, but instead these miraculous machines we invented take on their own lives alongside us.”‘The Double O’, Dirt (November 2022)
Some delicious linguistic commentary unpacking how loads of pretty successful global brands have silly names that are fun to say (“Goop Poosh Noom Swoon Soothe.”)‘Your body, my choice’, N+1 (Summer 2022)
A second-hand recommendation from a recent issue of Maybe Baby, reframing the overturning of Roe vs. Wade as a matter of criminalization. “Those who wish to ban legal abortion are not ‘pro-life’; they are pro-criminalization,” writes author Dayna Tortorici. “Those who wish to protect the right to abortion are not ‘pro-choice’; they are anti-criminalization. Reframing the conflict in these terms clarifies the stakes.” This essay discusses the impact of criminalizing morally complex issues in a way that’s sensitive and insightful, but ultimately terrifying.‘Pack your bags, we’re moving to ‘Roku City’’, NYT (November 2022)
A dynamic screensaver created for streaming service Roku has been doing the rounds in the past week or so after the NYT wrote this article about it. The whole article is worth a read, but my hot take is that this feels like a 10/10 example of branded worldbuilding. Roku’s animated city cuts a perfect balance between being complex and detailed enough to evoke a recognisable mood that captures users’ attention, while being simple and open enough to form a backdrop onto which those same users can project their own fandoms, fantasies and creativity.‘Neopets in 2016’, Twitter (February 2016)
I am aware that this tweet is straight up almost seven years old, but it was resurfaced as a reference in this Substack (also about Elon and Twitter, because apparently articles about other things no longer exist). It 1. gave me a nostalgic thrill with a side of existential sadness too visceral to leave out of the newsletter and 2. sent me down a Twitter rabbit hole where Millennials everywhere are calling for a return to a better internet as we watch the current iteration burn.