009: On "Internet Rubbernecking"
Or, a hobby I've come to acknowledge
Good evening! It made me both happy and sad that a few people reached out last week asking if they’d missed my newsletter. Happy, because it meant that people actually looked forward to my blog posts (I must be doing something right?)… and sad, because last week’s piece just really wasn’t coming together (I was really trying!). I’ll still finish and share it at some point, but my excuse for last week’s delay is this week’s topic: seeing shit go down on the internet.
Written while drinking lots of plain, still, unflavored water. These days I’ve been enjoying both scalding hot and ice cold water. I hope it’s not a sign that my body’s breaking down.
It’s hard not to be DJ Khaled in this gif while reading the news this week:
Not to disregard the severity of recent events1—but there’s something so enrapturing about watching a massive dumpster explode into flames.
I don’t know how to describe this fascination other than rubbernecking.
“Rubbernecking” is a colloquial term for when someone stares at something of interest in passing. This is generally used to describe drivers who slow down to look at a traffic accidents while driving. There are thankfully not too many opportunities for me to rubberneck in real life, but since I’ve been doing it virtually, I suppose I’ll call it “internet rubbernecking.”
Some important premises to define regarding what I believe it means to rubberneck, both in the literal and figurative sense:
There needs to be a perceived distance, where the spectator won’t face the lingering effects of the event (nor is able to affect the aftermath). Otherwise, it’s not rubbernecking, it’s just trauma.
The response isn’t out of malice or schadenfreude. Sure, there are sadists out there, but rubberneckers aren’t. You could argue there’s a note of self-preservation, thinking thank god that’s not me, but I disagree that’s the root sentiment. I believe people more frequently think I hope nobody got hurt too badly, or are too shocked to respond.
I admit that it’s not a perfect term, but I struggle to find a better way to describe this phenomenon. I find it bizarre that I’ve gotten into the habit of keeping up with random internet drama that doesn’t concern me, especially because I hate drama in my personal relationships and have only seen a couple of reality shows.
It’s times like these where I wish I had studied liberal arts in college so I’d have a social theory to reference that would explain all this. Thank god for Wikipedia, at least.
From my subsequent dive down the sociology rabbit hole,2 20th century theorists like Guy Debord attribute our desire to rubberneck to our culture of consumerism—where we chase after information or stories from the mass media to create and represent our idea of reality. To some extent, our lives become defined by our perception of the various events that happen and how they impact us. Even if those events are far removed from our daily lives, our attention and belief in their impact allows them to become “real,” as if they happened directly to us. Given our infinite access to sensationalist content, we’re become drawn to spectacular images to make us feel alive.
Huh. I blink a few times and contemplate taking a philosophy class in the future so someone smarter can explain this all to me. I’m embarrassed at how tired my brain gets from reading such abstract concepts, so I put the heady stuff aside for now and think from my gut.
Sure, there’s a dopamine hit from anything entertaining, especially news so wild that it reads stranger than fiction. That’s hardly a unique observation. Moreover, I’d argue that what I feel toward recent news isn’t hunger for entertainment (even though the memes have been *chef’s kiss*), nor is it indignation that such an event even occurred. More than anything, I just feel.. confused? And bewildered.
Have you ever worked with someone who was so incompetent that you weren’t mad, you were just... confused? Where you don’t even know where to begin chipping away at a solution because the problem is just so mind-boggling to you. You think, “How does this even happen?” and “This can’t possibly get worse,” only to grow even more confused when it does. (The SBF fraud sounds especially hard to believe, especially given his status as a golden boy3—I wonder if this is how adults back then felt when Lehman Brothers and Enron went down?)
There’s an old article by the evolutionary psychologist Frank T. McAndrew, who claims that the desire to collect information about the individuals in their “tribe” is actually a social skill necessary for survival. He defines this as gossip—the “predilection for talking about people who are not present.”
I previously thought gossiping meant talking smack about people, a vice for only the malicious drama-sowers in our lives. The article argues this as well—that we are socialized to understand that gossiping is bad. However, McAndrew argues that it’s human nature to do it anyway.
In ancient times, knowing about each member of your tribe (and in extension, your relative social place) was critical to survival. He writes:
Our caveman ancestors had to cooperate with so-called in-group members for success against out-groups, but they also had to recognize that these same i n-group members were their main competitors when it came to dividing limited resources… The social intelligence needed for success in this environment required an ability to predict and influence the behavior of others, and an intense interest in the private dealings of other people would have been handy indeed and would have been strongly favored by natural selection. In short, people who were fascinated with the lives of others were simply more successful than those who were not, and it is the genes of those individuals that have come down to us through the ages. …
A related social skill that would have had a big payoff is the ability to remember details about the temperament, predictability and past behaviors of individuals who were personally known to you… thus, natural selection shaped a thirst for, and a memory to store information about, specific people.
In today’s digital age, information is cheap. The internet is rife with self-proclaimed pundits and oversharing bloggers that you can’t avoid. With social media, celebrities and distant acquaintances still feel like our “tribe” from how often they share personal details with the public.
In our ancestral environment, any person about whom we knew intimate details of his or her private life was, by definition, a socially important member of the in-group… evolution did not prepare us to distinguish among members of our community who have genuine effects on our life and the images and voices that we are bombarded with by the entertainment industry. Thus, the intense familiarity with celebrities provided b y the modern media trips the same gossip mechanisms that have evolved to keep up with the affairs of in-group members.
I’m still figuring out whether I agree with these social theories. My personal theory is that rubbernecking is a coping mechanism. In times of uncertainty and unfamiliarity, the only action we can take is the one that will give us more information—and we become more engrossed the more we believe there’s missing pieces to be uncovered. It’s almost like playing detective, until we complete the “mystery,” we don’t feel satisfied.
Lastly, when everything ceases to make sense, sometimes all you can do is laugh at the absurdity of it all—and it helps that the internet makes it so easy to turn to your neighbor for a laugh. Be it memes, funny tweets, or parodies—I have to say that people have been especially funny lately. I’m especially drawn to a spicy comment section where people so certainly assert their stance—especially when the topic is extra trivial. Who knew that the fallout could be more interesting than the event itself?4
Well, be it evolutionary nature or falling into consumerism, I’m here for it all. Come find me whenever you’re craving some popcorn, and we can discuss: What are your thoughts on internet rubbernecking?
When I wrote this, I was commenting specifically on the news around Elon Musk’s first week at Twitter and FTX’s collapse. This piece is not intentionally referring to the U.S. midterm elections, any mass layoffs other than Twitter’s, Russia’s missiles in Poland, or other events that may have coincidentally occurred in the past week as well.
I welcome any critical theorist or sociologist to correct me, since there’s a high chance I misinterpreted something somewhere.
What’s extra funny about this 13,000 word profile is that Sequoia (a top VC) published it in September, before the world discovered the fraud last week. If you read the whole thing, you’ll cringe so hard (“Arora locks eyes with me, and I am mesmerized.”) that you’d wonder why they didn’t delete it sooner.
Don’t Worry Darling especially comes to mind.