Social media

My husband came into the living room the other day as I was sitting on the couch, scrolling on my computer — doomscrolling to be more accurate. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Are you watching... war?” We laughed at the absurdity of the comment but he wasn’t wrong. That’s exactly what we had been doing for days. Watching war on social media. Needless to say, it was a challenge to focus on this piece. As the conflict escalated rapidly in Ukraine, I couldn’t tear myself away from the drama as it unfolded on Twitter. Putin seemed backed into a corner, desperate and using many of the same barbaric tactics he used in Syria. Bombing hospitals. Bombing kindergartens. Killing civilians.

Stop me if you’ve heard the one about the Ukrainian beauty queen who volunteered to fight the invading Russian forces. If you’ve been on social media these past few weeks, you’ve probably seen the striking photo of the woman clad in tactical gear and holding a rifle. “We are living in a materiel world, and I’m a materiel girl,” the stunner says to the viewer through her steely glare. Or the one about the Japanese ambassador to Ukraine kitted out in his ancestor’s samurai gear and ready to defend his adopted homeland? You’ve surely heard about the “Ghost of Kyiv,” a Ukrainian fighter pilot who has been terrorizing his Russian counterparts, accomplishing the feat — uncommon in contemporary air combat — of becoming an ace.

The sky is dull and gray, the sun obscured by clouds. The camera pans down past some desolate Soviet housing blocks. Some wintry, apocalyptic trees line a road. It could be Kyiv, it could be Bucharest, it could be any city where the residents liberally pepper their words with the -sky suffix. Suddenly, a flash of metal across the sky, a fighter plane roars into shot, then out again. The caption proudly declares, “This is the Ghost of Kyiv, the bravest fighter pilot in the Ukrainian Air Force. He has downed six Russian planes just today.” You don’t know that much about Ukrainian fighter pilots, but placed among a million other viral clips of heroic Ukrainians fighting against Goliath, you think it seems believable enough. You retweet it. You send it down group texts.

Meta is meant to be better — better than Facebook, better even than reality. In the future, a second Edward Gibbon may wonder not just whether it was a good idea for the federal government to encourage Mark Zuckerberg and a handful of talented techies to launch a Revenge of the Nerds coup against the minds and manners of America, but also what it was about reality that made us want to escape it so badly in the first place. There has never been a society more blessed than that of the United States.

Where to go these days in social media when you want to MAGA and shake off Big Tech’s shackling of free speech on woke corporate giants such as Facebook and Twitter? You have a few choices, including one just announced by Donald Trump, TRUTH Social, which is set to launch in 2022. In addition to Parler, an app favored by Dan Bongino, a prominent Trump supporter, TRUTH Social will compete with GETTR, which is run by Trump’s ex-advisor Jason Miller, who left his unofficial job with the Trump Organization to run the fledgling Twitter clone. The OG Twitter alternative is Gab.

‘Slut-shaming’, ‘sexist’, ‘garbage writing’, ‘offensive towards women’, ‘aggressively distasteful’, ‘nipple-ist’ ‘old bitch’ that I am, I stand by the article I wrote in the April issue of The Spectator about influencers and the social-media celebrities who use their looks to sell wine — despite the outrage of those who are so clearly and irreparably under the vinfluence already. My take on the new advertising powerbase that is ‘influencing’, and the media-doping tactics that are often used to gain that influence, remains the same.

The first time I saw the Instagram feed of Georgie Fenn I thought she was a model stooge. Utterly gorgeous, Fenn regularly poses in carefully picked diaphanous clothing, ‘nipple poke’ a specialty. Paid brand collaborations offer excellent returns. Her artfully shot images tagged with maxims as trite as ‘It doesn’t matter what you’re drinking as long as you’re enjoying it’ are a marketeer’s wet dream. Miss Fenn is an up-and-coming ‘vinfluencer’ — that is, she uses her considerable social media presence (31k and rising @winingawaytheweekend) to sell wine.

There's a joke about a guy who gets anxious on airplanes. The passenger next to him, trying to be helpful, suggests ways he might relax. A drink? A Xanax? A movie, or a nice nap? The anxious man shakes his head, annoyed. He can't relax. He can't lose focus. He can only sit, gripping the arm rests, staring straight ahead in a state of white-knuckled, sphincter clenching terror. Why? Because his terror is the only thing keeping the plane in the air. This notion of anxious acting-out as our sole line of defense against chaos — call it the Control Freak’s Fallacy — isn’t new, but it is certainly having a moment in the run-up to the 2020 election.