give me fame or give me death just don’t give me the middle

10.16.26

Happens all the time, like every goddamn game. Beautiful day, usually a Saturday, birds singing, and it’s the bottom of the third inning and the other team’s got a guy on second base and there’s a base hit to the outfield — the ball game is suddenly at full tilt.

Cut to: the outfielder picks up the ball and invariably fires the damn thing all the way to home plate trying to gun down the scoring runner, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred he over-throws the cutoff man (me, at shortstop) by ten feet, the ball sails at least fifteen feet wide of home plate and smacks the backstop and rolls all along the fence while the poor catcher, who didn’t want the ball thrown to him at all because he knows the runner is already going to score, has to corral it and pretend like we have a chance at getting the guy out which, as I’ve already told you, we don’t.

What’s so terrible — disastrous! awful! weekend-ruining! — about this play is it allows the batter to reach second base on the overthrow, putting him in scoring position, often starting the whole circus over again with the next hitter. If, instead, the outfielder didn’t try to be a damn hero and throw the ball home but rather threw to his cutoff man (me, at shortstop), the batter would stay at first base and we’d keep the double-play in order or at least protect the chance for a force-out at second base. But no, the outfielder has to try to be a hero. Every time, every softball game, ever. Watch for not even like thirty seconds the next time you’re in the park, I guarantee you it will happen. I do love softball though.

Gosh, we love the unforced error, don’t we. We love to do it. You know, like when you drive to Brooklyn as a world-famous celebrity, have a very normal interaction with a very normal antique shop and then take to the internet and talk about how unfairly you were treated and then, inevitably, be told how absolutely stupid you are by the whole world. You know, that kind of thing.

Unforced errors are everywhere online. Like the other day when that girl posted herself and her boyfriend and told the AI to make him look rich, and the AI positioned him with a much better looking woman. It all calls to mind an essay several years ago by Max Reid, the former editor-in-chief of Gawker, who reviewed the book “The Twittering Machine” by Richard Seymour. Seymour argues that we go online to self-destruct because deep down we hate being online, or we hate ourselves, or both, so we commit self-immolation — he calls it the “death drive” — so that we have excuse to simply go away.

I always liked how Reid described it:

What if the urge lurking behind our compulsive participation in the Twittering Machine is not the behavioralist pursuit of maximized pleasure, but the Freudian death drive—our latent instinct toward inorganic oblivion, destruction, self-obliteration, “the ratio”? What if we post self-sabotaging things because we want to sabotage ourselves? What if the reason we tweet is because we wish we were dead?

Read bought Seymour’s general thesis and I do too, and I still buy it now. We hate the prison and the prison guards and the prison walls and the prison food so we just take the bedsheet and manufacture a rope-like structure that can hold 165 pounds or so for at least a few minutes. All of this reminds me, too, of the great line Haruki Murakami once wrote: “Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.”

Great, and also yes, ain’t that the truth.

But I want to take this one step further because something here feels incomplete. Yes, Seymour is probably right to say that there’s part of us deep down that wants out, so, subconsciously or other, we light the match with one foot soaked in kerosene to get things started, to be canceled, shunned, banned from it all, given permission to go away, to close our social media browsers and apps and finally, once and for all, never look at it all again.

It just doesn’t feel like enough. Because there are too many similar examples of this online behavior also playing out away from screens and in real life all around us, and I don’t think there’s necessarily a death drive at play — you don’t, for instance, throw the dang ball off the dang backstop because you want to get kicked off the team (usually). And you don’t overcommit to three separate plans with friends at the same time on the same day because you want to sew chaos and lose them all as friends (usually). You don’t admit to your boss you fudged the numbers on last quarter’s sales report because you want to get fired (usually).

You do all this because you want to be the hero. You do it not for self-obliteration, but to shine, to become it (“Him”), talked about, regarded, impressive, the top of the top, the man, dawg, the fucking man who everyone wants to hang with and talk to and play ball with and fuck and listen to and dress like and be like even if that means acting like a shit or being stupid or even doing something illegal or throwing a ball when you know you shouldn’t. You want to be seen doing those things because you think it’s cool and you want others to think you’re cool.

And this IRL behavior and its psychology helps explain our conduct online. We commit these egregious unforced errors online maybe to self-destruct and self-cancel, yeah sure some of the time, but just as often if not more because we need attention, prestige, we need status, we want to break through, and we’re willing to risk vaporizing ourselves to achieve it because, after all, sometimes you stick the landing and it’s better than sex.

Because the alternative, the middle — oh, honey, there’s absolutely nothing worse than being mid, nothing worse than not being talked about, bad or good. Get rich or die trying. Get famous or get canceled because neither, life in the middle, life as a nobody, is the worst fate there is. Much of this striving, this posting, these stupid things we say and do and think and act on is dripped in arrogance and blind faith, but it’s all in pursuit of mattering, of standing out, good or bad.

But overlooked? Forgotten? Ignored? No, no, no.

I told myself I wouldn’t write the words Kelly Clarkson but here we are. Look, maybe Kelly Clarkson, deep down, posted that post because she wanted to nuke herself. But I don’t think so. KC posted it online because that day she wanted to matter, she wanted to be right, she wanted people to talk about her and think about her and lift her up. She wanted to be a hero. The long march to the middle, the regression to the mean was wrapping its slimy tentacles around her ankles, pulling her in closer, and she panicked. So she posted.

Who can’t relate? Give us everything or give us nothing.