Will Lyman — Portfolio

The internet’s slippery promises of connectivity.

The vast majority of times I’ve met someone online, our encounters, and the fledgling relationship as a whole, follows a specific pattern: you connect through a dating app or over socials, there follows a string of texts or chats, perhaps a few dates. You both get excited and talk to your friends about each other. The beginning is incredibly immersive in its newness and possibility, and when you particularly like the person, this period, known online as the talking stage, is saturated with a kind of emotional technicolor: all the hope and arousal and anxiety that it won’t work out. Then there reaches a point, after you’ve gotten to know the person and they have gotten to know you, that a commitment is imminent. Now this is when there’s a quick, trigger-kick reckoning. One or both of you realize that you live separate lives, and that joining them would be a considerable effort, and in this clarity you figure––who are we kidding?––perhaps the whole time you were just a little bored. Communication flattens. There is an unspoken sag disillusionment experienced by both parties, then, radio silence. The one who is more invested feels hurt and gives the relationship more weight than it deserves, and eventually, the relationship dies off entirely and is remembered merely by a pang of bitterness or guilt, depending on the role each person played in its demise.

It was brilliant the first few times I experienced this type of short-lived connection. These abstract, ill-defined relationships are rich material for romantic contemplation, self-deprecating longing, and––most enjoyably––dissection with friends. For a while I believed these minor romantic dramas to be the thing lighting my life ablaze: giving it purpose and meaning. Having been cursed with the sex drive of a frat brother and the capacity for love of a Victorian poet, I’ve pursued dating as if it were a full-time job, using the dinner and drinks and endless conversations as a vehicle to figure out who I am and what I find attractive. Online dating constituted the necessary exploratory phase of my life. Though, eventually, I came to see that this type of discordant “situationship” wasn’t a specific alchemy of my first relationships, but a dependable courtship routine of my generation, who are bombarded with so many options, our attention-spans fried, that commitment is a risk few are willing to take. 

In the digital age, dating has become a private, compartmentalized activity carried out away from one’s social circle, by people eager to disconnect the act from their regular lives. Thus there is no social consequence to dropping someone once you feel they’re not a good fit; you will never have to see them again, so any indifference wagered towards them is negligible. This, combined with the onslaught of options presented to us––people presented on Tinder, for example, as an infinite rolodex awaiting ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ judgment––has instilled me with the belief, however unconscious, that everyone is replaceable. This destruction of empathy is the hallmark of the internet, a tool whose social promise was originally one of connectivity. In other words: Hinge isn’t the cure to your loneliness. A good case can be made that it’s the cause. 

What I’m primarily interested in, however, is not the minutiae of Gen Z’s dating life, but the way we’ve grown comfortable lying to each other, discarding each other, and robbing our language of its sincerity, so much as it constitutes the dilution of language and the erosion of trust. 

The year I lived alone––a year during which I was terribly miserable––I tried to counteract my loneliness by going on dates, so many dates, endless amounts of them. In my bachelor pad, I spent my evenings mowing through my own chat rooms––Grindr, Sniffies, Tinder, Bumble, Hinge––waiting for the moment when one conversation or one boy would pierce through the sterile interface of the app into something tender and unexpected, like throwing open a window in a stuffy room. Many times I found someone who would offer me temporary romance: drinks at the bar downstairs, hookups on rooftops, the collapsing of boundaries that came with shared states (intoxication, arousal). I was seeking the thrill and pleasure of sudden intimacy with a new person to distract me from the lack of intimacy in the rest of my life. The time I spent nurturing these online relationships I wasn’t spending with friends, or searching out opportunities that would connect me to more enduring friendships. I chose the internet simply because it was easier, like ordering delivery rather than dining in. To clarify, this is not a puritanical argument against promiscuity. Promiscuity is actually a proven agent of social cohesion, so long as it forces you to be around people not involved in the union (going with friends to a bar, apartment parties, group dates).

In Olivia Laing’s fascinating memoir, The Lonely City, she draws from Robert Weiss’ 1975 study Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation to explain the “perverse gratification in loneliness,” how despite the pains of the experience, the lonely assume a “self-protective isolation”––craving contact and pushing it away in the same breath (27). I responded to the lack of social structure in my life by choosing behaviors that would contribute to the problem. I chose short-term relationships because they were a quick fix, all the while I refused to do the more difficult work of building meaning into my life. Even with my attempts to escape loneliness, I chose it. Online, I was learning that relationships meant to keep me entertained would always be in great supply. Thus, I didn’t need to find that entertainment in my regular life. I could waste away online, trapped in its chamber of desires and instant gratification. 

I’d seen this contradiction outside myself, namely in the collapse of relationships around me––cheating––disengaged partners, feet halfway out the door. People who had already had relationships being lured away by the possibility of more. Being surrounded by gay men, I watched friends skirt commitment, grow bored of one partner, and turn to their usual roster of online contacts to keep them stimulated: guys on Snapchat or Grindr. I spent a miserable afternoon listening to a friend, through sobs, tell me their boyfriend was a self-diagnosed “sex addict,” despite the fact he never had sex, only jerked off with strangers on FaceTime. When my friend questioned him, the ex explained that chatting with other boys––ten or twenty at any given time––made him feel calm. It reminded him he was well-liked, just as a teenager feels compelled to maintain a Snapchat streak with their best friend: the constant reinforcement is necessary to maintain a sense of social equilibrium. Too many of us are stuck in this feedback loop, needing to be followed around by the Greek chorus of the internet to believe our own worthiness.

On a winter morning in Chelsea, I took shelter from tunneling wind inside a magazine store. There, I picked up a porn magazine––a nondescript little thing, plain orange on the cover except for the title Erotic Chatter in Chennai printed in Arial––to furnish a magazine rack I had just bought. It was part of a new resolve: to be more experimental and provocative, to fill my space with avant-garde queer zines and photographs––David Wojnarowicz prints, a neon sign of fingers in a mouth, Prince’s Lovesexy––to silently inform visitors that I was both an art appreciator and down to fuck. 

 This particular magazine followed a live camboy, screen name TheIndianBoy, and the chats he exchanged with his viewers over a single night. They plead: “show your dick please,” or “Lowr the camera,” and there is a reassuring sense in the way TheIndianBoy poses–-head resting on arm, legs splayed next to a keyboard, the vague look of boredom like a customer service representative–– that none of the words, earnest or aggressive, really affected him. Only one user draws any response from TIB: lululiksit. Over the chat, they simulate sex:  “I’m gonna kiss yu bb / kiis my dick Lulu.” Then they lapse into affection: “I missed yu so much lulu / i know bb i miss u 2 / i want you here / I’m still here bb / goodnite lulu i love u.”Behind anonymous profiles, the viewers of the chatroom were free to be blunt in their expressions of need and their hopes for contact. I found the comments charming––funny, even; the personal statements, like lulus, were confined to comical internet shorthand. “Baby” becomes “bb,” “I miss you” becomes “i miss u 2.” 

I found the magazine to capture exactly what internet intimacy was all about. Behind anonymous profiles, the viewers of the chatroom become agents of surveillance who Rear-Window-style jump from livestream to livestream to feel connected to the broadcaster, filling the comment section with statements of need and hopes for connection, but ultimately retaining their privacy. They’re horny or lonely but they give up nothing of themselves in trying to feel connected to other people. It’s the same voyeuristic impulse with which people form parasocial relationships with reality stars or instagram models. Erotic Chatter in Chennai captured the gratifying detachment of the overzealous internet interactions I knew too well: outbursts of need sanctioned by the knowledge that none of it counted, none of it would last through the hour. 

But how much of this can we blame on the internet? The term “situationship” first appeared on UrbanDictionary in 2006, describing a romantic relationship that lacks commitment and the associated norms and expectations. Its popularity has exploded over Twitter and Tiktok, as people chide about the pesky, ever present social formation. But loving without commitment is nothing new (see Flaubert, Austen, any rom com set in adolescence). However, it’s true that dating apps make interpersonal connection recreational; they present people in bright colors and send out cheerful dings when you get a new match, triggering the same dopamine receptors you might get from advancing a level in Candy Crush. Social media has greatly shortened our attention spans and made us revere instant gratification. The rise of the internet has also coincided with the commodification of public space by urban planners and the fear of contact instilled by the pandemic. We’re, no doubt, facing an epidemic of loneliness, but it would be naive to say the internet is to blame. 

In Edgar Allen Poe’s story, “The Man of the Crowd,” he details the complexity of human behavior following the migration of people from rural England to London. Poe’s story, written in 1840, was the only thing I found that felt like it understood and pre-empted my troubles with online dating. In the story, the narrator ventures out into the crowd of people on the street in London, stunned at all the bodies and commotion, trying to make sense of them by lumping all the passing faces into broad categories. Finally, the narrator sees a man who defies his expectations––a man in a contradictory dress brandishing a dagger––and he follows him through the city trying to discern what is unique about him, only to realize that he can’t be understood. The man with the dagger is a “man of the crowd,” and belongs to the city. The epigraph of the story is a quote taken from The Characters of Man by the French philosopher Jean de La Bruyère. It reads “Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul.” It translates to: “this great misfortune, of not being able to be alone.”

I used this term “Man of the Crowd” to refer to any recurrent faces of gay men I saw on dating apps: ones who I believed were too far gone into the digital realm, “ran through.” When at last I would find someone who piqued my interest, relationship-potential, I would pursue them, trying to discern what they wanted and who they were. These were the “situationships,” the connections that faced endless nurturing and still turned out hollow. I found I was something of a detective like Poe, sorting through the masses, fruitless, trying to investigate the mystery of my own isolation. 

At the same time as Poe was writing in England, French poet Charles Baudelaire and French philosopher Friedrich Engels were trying to investigate this same peculiar quality of urban life. Engels, on the topic of interaction in cities, wrote: “The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each person in his private interest becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together within a limited space.” He wonders: “The hundreds of thousands of people of all classes and ranks crowding past one another-are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? … And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is a tacit one: that each should keep to his own side of the pavement?”

Drawing on the work of Baudelaire, German philosopher Walter Benjamin coined the term “flâneur.” It’s defined as an “ambivalent figure of urban affluence and modernity, representing the ability to wander detached from society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of industrialized, contemporary life.” The flâneur wanders the city as a detached observer, observing the conditions of the lives of others while dissociating himself from them. “He becomes deeply involved with them, only to relegate them to oblivion with a single glance of contempt.” 

Said plainly, the barriers to connectivity we observe on the internet are not inventions of our century, but are naturally occuring conditions of humans packed together. The only thing that differs between the industrial world and our own is that instead of being physically together in city squares, we are all crowd-wanderers of what Olivia Laing calls the “endless city of the internet.” It’s making flâneurs out of all of us, robbing us of our ability to empathize with other people and regard them as part of our own existence. 

“The brutal indifference,” as Engels puts it, is no more on display than it is on social media. The widespread success of disinformation campaigns surrounding Covid, the 2020 election, and the ongoing genocidal campaign against Palestinians have led people into echo chambers of political extremism. On top of that, videos and photos that document violence are readily available on platforms like Twitter or Facebook, desensitizing viewers until the point where everything is cannon fodder for joking dismissal. As we become more isolated in everyday life, our behavior online only reinforces the belief that other people are incomprehensible and not worthy subjects of our understanding. Gen Z, in particular, seems averse to sincerity on major issues that would have scandalized previous generations. 

The internet is a chamber of desires, and it offers us all sorts of temporary solutions: instant gratification, instant satiety, instant sex. It annihilates loneliness for only a few hopeful seconds, meanwhile it divides us and pushes us further into isolation. I was a witness to this in my own quest to date, a process whose bursts of sentimentality and lust was just the easy-way-out I’d taken to avoid doing the harder work of building enduring relationships. 

“Fear of contact is the real malaise of our age,” concludes Olivia Laing in The Lonely City. We want to live our lives with others, yet at every step we cling to our individualism––refusing to grant others the dignity we so fervently desire. The internet, with its chat rooms and feeds and comment sections, does not guarantee we will love each other any more, but rather harbors in each of us a brutal indifference to suffering, a desire to isolate, and the inability to exist without the instant doses of vice it so readily offers. The answer, perhaps, doesn’t lie in lulu’s shorthand declarations of love, nor the clandestine arrangements of a dating app, but in something much less exciting: the ordinary, everyday work of finding fulfillment in the people already around you.