You don’t need to read this newsletter.

Welcome to Screensick, a newsletter about what's wrong with us from Emily Dreyfuss. First up: Redpills, antisemtism, and tattoos of televisions.

Oct 26, 2022

Hi, it’s me and my “the medium is the message” tattoo.

Screensick, adjective: The emotional and mental state you enter after spending too much time looking at screens. Screensickness is characterized by an inability to behave or think “normally,” a pronounced lack of patience, a deep feeling of dread, and a general sense of confusion coupled with misplaced certainty.

Etymology: Coined in 2020 by my first-born spawn, then aged 5, to explain why he was incapable of good behavior after playing video games or watching TV for too long.

Use in a sentence: By 2022, the American public was exhibiting signs of extreme screensickness and yet no one in any position of power had any good ideas about a cure because they, too, were screensick.

Hi, I’m Emily, a writer, editor, gesticulator, mother, and co-author of the new book Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America. And this is Screensick, a new newsletter about ~what ails us~.

Now look, you don’t need to read this. We both know that.

You didn’t ask for this to come into your feed. You didn’t ask to be a person in society during a time when the information ecosystem was splintering and exploding into newsletters and YouTube channels and TikTok algorithms.

You didn’t even ask to be born.

This life you’re living, this exact moment when electricity traveled from your brain to your hand, sending an impulse to your finger to click on a link from me – a person you may or may not know, who you may or may not like – and now you find yourself reading these words that came from who knows where in the vast and opaque repository of thoughts in the form of energy bursts and chemical connections swirling around the wet fleshy goop encased in my skull, is a moment you didn’t explicitly consent to experiencing. Just like you didn’t explicitly consent to experiencing ~anything~.

So, if you want to never read this again, don’t subscribe and you never will.

Cool, now that they are gone, hi friends and cringewatchers!!!!!!! WELCOME TO MY NEW PUBLIC DIARY!!!!

Here’s what you can expect from this free and random newsletter:

Occasional thoughts and stories from a pathological over-sharer whose life is defined by screensickness. This will include but is not limited to:

Funny kid stories and parenting tips and questions! Because I’m a grand millennial mom to two clever and hilarious emerging humans.

Journalism about technology and what it is doing to us! Because I’m a journalist with 20 begrudging years of experience writing about technology who gets her mental health advice from TikTok.

Analysis about media and politics! Because I work as a researcher at an institute that studies media, politics and public policy, and because I spent the past two years deeeeeeep down the far-right internet rabbithole and have got to let the thoughts out before they kill me.

Art! Because I am a newbie painter (Follow me on Insta at emdreyfussdoodles, if you dare) who has turned to visual art to try to stave off the feelings of horror and despair that, you know, lurk. (I wanted to use this painting I made as a header for the newsletter, but couldn’t figure out how to resize it, so let me know if you want to help with that, lol.)

Absurdism! Because Albert Camus is my philosophical hero and lol nothing matters but that’s no reason not to try and make life worth living.

Half-baked philosophical ideas! Because I was an English major who dropped the Philosophy major during undergrad because I was scared to take logic classes and didn’t want to stop smoking pot long enough to actually understand Heidegger.

Intimate stories about minor celebrities! Because I am the daughter of the guy from Jaws, and have gotten a moderate amount of therapy to help me talk about that, and sometimes remember doing weird things I have the urge to tell people about. Like I remember once standing at a hotel sink when I was 5 years old, pouring bleach inside a conch shell with Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford. I was wearing arm floaties and standing on a step stool as they gleefully brainstormed how to murder the sea creature in the shell. I believe we were on a vacation in Hawaii. Unclear.

Poems! Because I like poems.

Thoughts about science! Because my husband of 20 years is a scientist who builds things out of cells and, through osmosis, I have absorbed some scientific opinions and because science is part of how humans make meaning in the world and that’s the thing I’m most obsessed with!

Memes! Because I wrote the book Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America, along with the brilliant Joan Donovan and Brian Friedberg, and the first draft was twice as long so there's plenty of extras to get through.

Errors! Because I am human, and I will get shit wrong. Sometimes I won’t know I got shit wrong, but when I do, I’ll try my best to be transparent about it and offer a mea culpa.

Flashes of insight and mediocrity! I am not as funny as my brother Ben, author of Calm Down, nor as good at funny voices as my father Richard, nor as loving and optimistic as my mother Jeramie, nor as patient and empathic as my brother Harry, nor as forward thinking and hirsuit as my husband Seth. I’m just a human whose way of surviving this world is to share ideas and make shit. I feel better when I’m making things, and since the things I feel compelled to make are often sentences that require readers, I thank you for helping me stay sane. I promise to try my best to share things that are interesting and useful and thought provoking and fair and entertaining, and I apologize in advance that I’ll often fail and that I write too much. Feel free to abandon me at any time! Lol.

Overshares! Because I am screensick and have long ago lost the thread on what is appropriate for others to know about me, and never had much capacity for embarrassment in the first place. Sorry sorry sorry.

So without further ado…

Screensick, volume 1

PUBLISHING YOUR ROUGH DRAFTS.

I wrote a version of this introduction two years ago when I was first laid off from Protocol, the tech news startup I co-founded in 2019, and suddenly found myself without a way to pay my bills or a platform on which to share my thoughts. Starting a Substack was, in the year 2020, the logical and popular thing to do in such a situation, so, naturally, I registered the name of this newsletter and then never published anything. And because it was 2020 and I was reeling from losing a job and suffering from severe post partum depression, I completely forgot where I saved the draft for this post.

So, fuck it. Let’s just write in the CMS and publish this shit raw.

Favorite Meme of the Week:

So mad this point hadnt been made yet when we were writing the QAnon chapter of Meme Wars.

Kid Vignette Without Context:

Emily Dreyfuss @EmilyDreyfuss

7yo: What's 2 plus 3? 3yo: 68! 7yo: Close! But instead of a 6 and an 8 it's just fffffiiiiiiiiiiiii... 3yo: Five hundwed! 7yo: Close, but - 3yo: I don't know. Sawwy, bwuver. I'm just fwee.

Actual Contribution to the Discourse

Antisemitism Is Often the Final Redpill.

1On the journey down the rabbit hole to radical racist ideologies, you encounter an Alice-in-Wonderland-like series of challenges. Like Alice when she meets the Cheshire cat or the drug-dealing caterpillar, an internet wanderer embarking on a journey down to the depths must confront specific provocations: Black people are dangerous, women are weak, Jews run the world.

These are the three foundational “hate facts” of the far-right fringe. How you react to them determines how much further into the rabbithole you go. If you reject them, you resurface into the clean air of a multicultural society. You can breathe deep. But there are highly motivated people at these important junctures to keep you from re emerging into the light. Often they present their notions as a question with genocidal answers – the Black question, the woman question, the Jewish question – answered by cherry-picked or completely fabricated hate facts. If you accept the premises of their questions and buy their arguments, you’ve swallowed a redpill, to use the parlance of the medium. Now you move down to the next level on your journey.

The classic redpills have a hierarchy. First: the racist antiBlack redpill is offered up. Think about the early days of the internet: some of the earliest sites were white supremacist forums, and at the dawn of the social media era less than a decade ago, a place like Reddit hosted a subforum literally named the N word. Anti-Black racism is so central to American culture – built, not all that long ago, off the toil of kidnapped and tortured Black people–that for many it is the easiest pill to swallow, especially when the anti-Black redpill comes coated in the sweet succor of fake crime statistics or scientific-sounding hogwash. Tastes like power.

The second redpill is the woman question, which wonders: what is the proper role of women in society. You can guess the variations of the answer. Like anti-Blackness, American culture is so steeped in misogynistic tropes and politics that this redpill goes down like a gummy vitamin. And for those who perceive themselves aggrieved by women – rejected, unloved, demeaned by having a woman boss, for instance – this redpill hits like amphetamine. It gives energy, meaning, anger, and an urge to dominate.

The third and final redpill is the Jewish Question – a direct reference to the Holocaust. Often abbreviated to the JQ, this redpill is encountered last whether you’re in a rabbit hole leading toward a new conspiracy theory like QAnon, white nationalism, or Stop the Steal. The JQ is the one these groups whisper, and only ask you directly when you’ve established you are not going to claw your way back out of the rabbithole and try to destroy them. It’s kind of like the final boss of a video game. In fact, members of the far-right fringe sometimes refer to publicly expressing antisemitism as “showing your power level.” The scale in question is how based you are, aka, how many redpills you’ve swallowed and how willing you are to talk about them openly. The reason for the JQ being the most hidden of the redpills is multifold and largely has to do with the fact that the mainstream powers that be take action against over antisemitism in a way they often do not for the aniBlackness and misogyny. This likely has to do with how recently the Holocaust revealed the horrors of what antisemitism can lead to. But if you swallow the JQ redpill, too, you self actualize as a radical believer. What happens next is often chaos.

In Meme Wars, my co-authors and I explain how the internet itself went on this journey. Starting a decade ago, anti-Black hate proliferated across the social web. From Reddit to Facebook and all the forums in between, 2012 to 2014 was a time of overt and overwhelming anti-Black movement building online. White supremacists became so rampant on popular forums like 4Chan, where people came to anonymously talk about their interests and beliefs without much moderation, that 4Chan’s creator created a “containment board” to separate them from everyone else. This board became Politically Incorrect, or /pol/ for short, one of the most influential corners of the internet. The growth of this anti-Black hatred spread online through memes and targeted harassment campaigns, and inspired violent murderers like Dylan Roof, who shot to death nine Black church parishioners in South Carolina after a Google search for “Black on white crime” led him to swallow the anti-Black redpill.

From there, women became the focus of the far-right internet sphere. In a coordinated effort that came to be dubbed GamerGate extremely online men expressed their rage at women, and at the media who dared promote their videogames and ideas.

Yet still the JQ was kept deep down the tunnel. But when the redpilled right then turned its attention to electing Donald Trump, the JQ redpill became harder to suppress. Trump seemed willing to say anything, embrace anything, and be outwardly and gleefully transgressive. Many of his most fervent far-right supporters interpreted that to mean they should stop hiding their beliefs in the dark. Trump campaign supporter and Breitbart columnist Milo Yianoupolous had to order his followers to tone their anti-Jewish statements down in the days leading up to and proceeding Trump’s victory, to little success.

After Trump’s victory many on the redpilled right argued that it was time to come out about the JQ. The Unite the Right march on Charlottesville was envisioned by some in the redpilled right as the coming out moment for the JQ.

It ended in the death of a counterprotestor, the unraveling of the “alt-right” coalition, and the beginning of an era of content moderation aimed at removing these redpills from the internet. This latter twist in the web’s evolution birthed a new hate fact: the elites are trying to censor you. This turned out to be a powerful redpill of its own, as it appealed to many different antiestablishment types: people suspicious of the media, big tech, and the government especially. Censorship became a popular way to enter the rabbithole. Come for the outrage over your Facebook account being locked, stay for the racist identity politics that make you feel powerful!

Then a few weeks ago Kanye West became the flag-bearer for the JQ, and now he is being dropped by his corporate partners after concerted pressure that, notably, did not reach such cacophonous levels when he made arguably anti-Black and antiwoman statements before this. The JQ is a line too far for many. And yet. West’s embrace and amplification of the JQ says something extremely important about where we are as a culture right not. Last week, the JQ was draped over the freeway overpass in LA. It is emerging into the real world. What we are seeing before us is the redpilled internet slipping its containment and infiltrating our infrastructure, culture, and politics.

/ END OF DISCOURSE TOE-DIPPING! Whew.

Art to Cleanse Your Pallet:

artistforaweek