clearing my internet history

a meta post about where else Clancy Steadwell has been online, being overwhelmed by notifications, and the constant urge to hit the Delete Publication button

I posted a Note a couple weekends ago about how I was feeling a bit overwhelmed and took a break from the Substack app:

A few subscribers messaged to see if I was okay. The kindness I am shown on this application is incredible, and I appreciate and thank all of you. Not to worry, though—it was a good sort of “overwhelmed”, or at least the causes of this whelming are supposedly good; at the very least, the world returning unto me what I put into it in a positive manner, for the most part.

What I mean: a few Notes and posts were getting more attention than I’m used to all at once (nothing viral but more than usual) and I felt my eyes glazing and brain fogging with the compulsory need to check and review every single little orange-encircled numeral above the bell, a sort of guilty reaction—what do people actually get from me? Imposter!—having to do with the continual amazement and novelty I feel each time I get one, let alone many.

My body has not acclimated itself to the occasions of rising engagement in the last year or two with Substack. Every notification alters my body temperature slightly and gives the same brain-feel as finding a dollar bill in the pocket of my jeans fresh from the dryer, along with a near imperceptible heart murmur.

So, I retreated for a bit. And once I did so, I felt somewhat normal again, and the urge to hover my cursor over the glorious red ‘Delete Publication’ button in the ‘Danger Zone’ of the Substack Settings page on the dashboard dissipated, like putting the gun back in the drawer.

Aren’t things going well? Why do I feel the urge to hold the internet at arm’s length? Why don’t I trust myself with it?

In a lame but particularly modern venture driven by the most vague and cliched of humanist impulse, I’ve long sought answers to these questions with a cataloging of my history on the internet, a sort of self-psychoanalysis of my online being, as if the internet were a parent I both suffered from and loved deeply in an antagonistic and impatient manner.

Is it really just ones and zeros? Here’s the latest iteration of my attempt to figure it out.

AOL Instant Messenger

I was slightly late to this by no fault of my own, mostly due to a controlling father who was—rightly, in retrospect—suspect of me doing anything online. So when I begged and begged to talk to my “new friends from school” using this AOL Instant Messenger thing, he was reluctant and only agreed because I invoked sentimentality. The truth was, I didn’t have any friends yet, but I had discerned that when I got some, AOL Instant Messenger would be key.

So we logged into the ole dial-up and my father insisted on creating my screen name and password himself, linking to his email so that I could only log in with his permission, and you can only guess what out of touch, lame, and embarrassing screen name he gave me was. Let’s just say it was something like Clancy-Steadwell-Is-The-Bomb.

Well, what happened was I went to school and casually mentioned to the wrong kid that yeah, I had a screen name. She then took it upon herself to re-create this screen name as something like ClancySteadwell-Is-The-Bomb1 (note the 1) and message the whole grade saying they were me and spread blatant hurtful falsehoods—I had sex with my sister, my dad was a crack head, insulting people etc.

I’m not sure why this happened or why this girl decided to do so, other than maybe it was one of those “make fun of the annoying new kid” fads that sometimes take third grade classrooms by storm. Very soon the other kids caught on it obviously wasn’t me, but I would never trust the me on the screen ever again.

Later on, of course, I got a new screen name without my father’s influence, and in the short period between high speed broadband and the ease of texting wrought by smart phones, AOL Instant Messenger was a real, fun and vital part of my life which helped me excel socially thanks to its focus on the written word, the arena in which I thrived. I was the absolute best at AOL Instant Messenger.

If it were still our world’s primary mode of communication, I’d probably be president.

This is one aspect of the internet I actually miss—instantaneous written communication, but anchored to a single spot in your home with a keyboard. Perfect.

If anyone wants to see if we can still download it and be buddies, I’d be down.

Myspace

Never had Myspace.

I’m not sure why, although it probably had to do with my father again—it was maybe easier to simply forgo having it than ask if I could use the computer to create one. Its fad passed before I even knew what it really was, which is actually more telling about me as a person than the time period we are dealing with here, because I found out later that MANY people I knew, including some of my best friends, had one. I guess they didn’t care to add me in their Top 5 friends or whatever the hell it was called.

Facebook

When Facebook came around, my high school girlfriend had to beg me to create a profile, but I couldn’t quite describe to her why I was so skeptical of it.

Once she explained why it was so imperative I do so, I realized my reluctance had to do with personhood; if I did not have a Facebook, it was therefore as if I did not exist. It was the first social media site to really cleave our personhood in two. There was no longer one of us—there was you and the you that is online.

For that was her argument: if we were dating, she needed proof to others that her boyfriend was real, as if my corporeal being were not enough.

We didn’t date for long, and I didn’t maintain Facebook for long afterward, clumsily stumbling through it with webcam pictures and banal status updates, like anyone my age did. It was deleted in college and I only came back around to it when trying to date in early adulthood (it’s apparently really, really important for people to be able to see you online before dating), and almost never scrolled the feed.

Facebook, most of all, came to make me sad. I showed me the state of people I grew up with—people who, although I only knew many of them tangentially, I presumed were good, wholesome people—in all states of duress and with questionable political leanings. It made me cynical.

I deleted mine a few years ago, after having not logged in for ages.

Instagram

By contrast, Instagram served to make me covetous and envious, precursors to self-hatred. Rather than make me doubt, it showed me truths I wished I didn’t know.

I got an Instagram in college, but didn’t really understand how to use it. Something about its image-based nature belied an underbelly of vapidity that failed to hold my attention, no matter what people I followed.

The only thing it was good for was making me feel like I was not enough. Everyone was either beautiful or buff, doing things or going places I didn’t have the time or money to do, accomplishing things in life I never could or eating food I’d never seen or heard of.

Nor did I understand how to participate in this world of superficiality with which I had nothing in common. I probably only posted a couple dozen times. When I posted selfies, they were always with my eyes closed, a weird, ironic quirk I affected as an obvious defense mechanism disguised as self-branding. You could see me, but I could not see you, nor did I want to.

It was also where I discovered most that authenticity on the Internet mattered, and where I came to accept that if that people desired to see the real me, the real me would forever have very little to offer.

My Instagram has been deleted since 2016 and I have never ever gone back.

Tumblr

I had a Tumblr to follow girls I liked, which makes sense if you profile me hard enough.

If you step back and look at the ‘success’ I have on Substack in relation to Tumblr and what it was in the early 2010s, it kind of seems like I should have been ‘good’ at it, but I was the opposite.

Ever wonder if Clancy Steadwell can write poetry? If you could dig up some I posted to Tumblr in this time under my real name, you’d know the answer is: no. And the girls I liked didn’t think so either.

I also tried to ‘blog’, but at the time I had very little to offer in terms of original thought (and hey, I probably still don’t, despite being good at writing) and everything I posted was stuff like ‘Hey, the Beatles were a pretty good band, weren’t they?’ and shit like that.

In a way, maybe my embarrassing Tumblr failures were kind of a learning ground for Substack.

After some particularly harsh feedback on some poetry I posted (it was a BIG phase for me), I deleted the whole endeavor.

Medium

I took a creative writing class in college, the only sort of formal fiction writing instruction I ever received. After I turned in my first short story, the professor emailed me to come see her for some private one-on-one office hours where she asked, “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” to which my answer was “yes, but only for myself and not for others.” She then proceeded to praise my piece and also offer some of the most helpful critique I’ve ever gotten. I wish I remembered her name, it’s a tragedy I don’t, likely because my brain was quite drug-addled at the time.

But the story was (and probably still is, I think I have it somewhere) one of the better short stories I’ve ever written because it had to do with whatever personal depth my pathetic life had to offer up to that point, and I was really excited to have been praised for it.

Where to let others read it, then? I discovered Medium.

Medium, I suppose, like Substack, was not and is not a place for fiction. I posted anyway, under my real, actual name.

My mom read it and loved it. I think I am still writing for her today, even though she doesn’t know Clancy Steadwell.

I deleted it, eventually. I’m not sure why.

But not before I posted the link to it on my Twitter, where a few of my friends retweeted it and read and commented on it, probably putting me on the road to believing in myself enough to post to Substack like I do now. Which brings us to...

Twitter

Twitter was a big drug for me, the first internet thing that really stuck, an app I couldn’t get away from. Its text-based nature was far more conducive to my brain than Instagram, the curation of the feed beyond just people I knew far more alluring than Facebook. Music, soccer, news, humor, politics. All of it was there for me in a constant torrent, there was never too much.

I started tweeting under my real name and figured out a persona and a heavily joke-based style people seemed to like, and experienced a kind of larger-scale engagement for the first time.

One time I got into a fight with a journalist from Rolling Stone that went somewhat viral.

Another time Dane Cook (ugh, I know) retweeted one of my jokes and that also went somewhat viral.

After a particularly political Tweet got some attention of the unwanted (and wanted!) kind, I realized the truth about the algorithm we all know and have debated ad nauseum since: divisiveness breeds engagement, controversy is king, etc.

I knew if I continued down the Twitter path, I’d never have peace. I’d trade mindfulness and nuance for the brain-niggles of notifications and engagement. I’d eventually drown in them until I forgot who I was.

I quit in 2016 and never went back.

Reddit

I battled with Reddit (text-based and, even better, anonymous) as an addiction from 2016 until about 2020, when world events were too intense and it consumed me such that I had no choice but to admit its usage correlated to declinations in my mood and overall livelihood that affected the people around me in a negative manner.

Reddit has probably been far more damaging to our discourse (and personal lives) than people realize.

For example, I used to know this guy from work, let’s call him Jay.

Jay was, on every level, on the screens and off, a Redditor. This attribution to me contains the same sort of meaning Bo Burnham gives to the White Women of Instagram. I won’t outline the stereotypical Redditor in full, as I think you get the picture already, but he fell into this pattern: disc golf, esoteric music tastes, a passion for public transport and social justice causes, a tech job where he bragged about how little work he got away with doing. Not that there’s anything wrong with these interests and qualities, but these humans now exist as if churned out of a factory.

Through a combination of sleuthing and guesswork based on some profiles he had at work, I found Jay’s Reddit account, which he’s maintained since 2014.

Jay frequents a couple of dozen subreddits and leaves many comments almost every day. Every single one of them is either:

a) him being mad about something

b) him fighting with someone

I estimate that Jay must spend at least an hour a day doing one of the two above, including on Christmas Day. And I don’t think this is uncommon.

Addiction to rage, basically.

Every once in a while, when I feel myself urged to go back on Reddit, I think of Jay and how pathetic and unhappy he clearly is, and I don’t go back.

Substack

I won’t re-outline my Substack history because I have before, and if you care enough about me to be reading this, you pretty much already get the gist of my story here.

Substack works for me because I’m a reader and a writer and that’s really what it’s about.

One of the reasons I’m so active on Substack is—as you now know—I don’t go anywhere else. (Besides having no life, I guess). I get the news I need from newsletters. That’s it. There’s nowhere else that’s taking up my scrolling time on the internet.

Anyways, being “overwhelmed” by notifications is a good problem to have, but one I am uniquely unsuited to dealing with, my past never having imbued me with an immunity to its charms and traps. The deeper I get into Substack the more I become wary enough to want to leave it, of how idiosyncratic and ironic my being here is, how flown in the face of norm I am in persona and anachronistic in literature. It used to be a joke, but it’s apparent that now—mostly, I think, due to the relative strength of my writing as determined by some readers—there are people who would take me as seriously as I take myself (which is very seriously), and therefore also now those who would denigrate me as I also denigrate myself (often).

With this comes attention.

It’s not so much a fearful response to criticism online, although I do have such fears, the same as anyone. It’s a fear of the notifications becoming an addiction, the dealers of which may someday bounce and leave me with permanent withdrawals. Nearly every day I fight the impulse to flee—to quit cold turkey and save myself—as I did with these other platforms.

In this matter, I feel, the pseudonym is key, and why I’ve lasted so long. It allows me to transpose the attention to another being. It’s a sort of dual-state self-induced psychosis as a mechanism of self-preservation.

This puts me at a crossroads of the modern zeitgeist, somewhere at the intersection of cringe (an inability to handle the parasympathetic feedbacks of the internet) and wisdom (all of us concurrently agreeing that social media is bad). Paradoxically, posts like this one only hit at the former because everyone who truly believes the latter wisdom isn’t online.

It’s hard for me to stay on Substack. But the people who reached out to see if I was okay make it worth it.

I hope I make it.

P.S. I forgot Discord:

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