From Bubble to Bubble

Screens are not real

When the 2024 United States elections were approaching, I was very invested in the American political circus. I was watching clips from Trump’s and Harris’s campaign appearances on brainrot feeds like TikTok everyday, my browser knew that when I typed ‘five’ I wanted to see the newest polls on fivethirtyeight.com, and my arsenal of irrelevant trivia of course included the fact that this number, the total number of electors in US presidential elections, is derived from each state getting one elector for each Representative they send to the House, so four-thirty-five, and one for each Senator, so add a hundred to that (and D.C. gets three, the minimum number).

I was anticipating this vote like some sort of apocalypse, or maybe an event that would precipitate one (and maybe it has). Everyone on Twitter seemed to be talking about this and only this. I knew more Congressmen than members of my own country’s parliament.

There is a very large dissonance here. An entire ocean separates me from the United States, and though the decisions of the United States president do affect me indirectly, my monitoring of the developing political situation, of course, had no effect whatsoever. But in that configuration of my Twitter feed, for example, it seemed that America was closer to me than my own country, for as long as I didn’t leave the house or look out of window or read a local paper.

Even more glaring does that dissonance created by shelter sought in online bubbles seem now that my interests have shifted: I don’t really care about politics these days, even though there is a lot happening. I mostly get fitness, literature, and meme content these days. And now I think everybody is obsessed with fitness, and how potatoes stack up against other carbs and how many grams of protein per pound of body weight is ideal.

That is a whole ‘nother can of worms, and also yet another misconception: my friends neither know who Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is nor what new training approach Jeff Nippard is pushing. The circle of people that do and who propagate their opinions in those bubbles is incredibly diverse and dispersed around the world. The internet enables us to interact and to create a space where our niche interests are front and center, the suns of those small solar systems. There, those irrelevant considerations and inside jokes seem incredibly important, and your thoughts stay there.

It comes down to the old joke: when you made a habit of pissing in toasters way back when, you were the village simpleton; nowadays, you go to the r/toasterpissers subreddit, and find a society where your habit is an explicit requirement for entry.

The problem I am finally coming to recognize is this: when you allow yourself to become stuck in these bubbles, the problems that those bubbles emphasize take up, as the bubbles themselves, a place in your life disproportionate to their objective importance. When it was politics, I thought America was supposed to be this Valhalla of liberalism that was threatened to be destroyed by heathens, and consequently ascribed a sort of religious importance to a Democratic victory.

Now I can’t even really bring myself to much care about Trump’s actions in Iran, even though they directly increase gas prices and thus substantially worsen my quality of life, beyond profound sadness at the state of the world. The fitness bubble has me thinking subconsciously that not having a sixpack is a sign of weakness and not normal—actually, the majority of people in my country are overweight.

Neither my body or American politics are at this point huge problems in my life, but it could feel like everyone is talking about them. This phenomenon could take much more dangerous shapes: a friend of mine is stuck in the Epstein-theory bubble, other people spend their days on edtwt (“eating disorder Twitter”).

I just took a walk out in the fields on this the most sunny day in the year so far. None of that was happening. Nobody was talking about swing states, there was no opportunity to pull up your shirt before a mirror. When we share a reality, our “bubble” is defined by what we see around us, by the discussions circumstances force us to have. When we each have access to our own handpicked (via Meta, X, etc.) interlocutors, our realities are each shaped by our own insecurities and unhealthy obsessions; we are surrounding ourselves with mirrors into the dark depths of our souls, and the people who share passions and problems that actually matter—i.e., the people you actually know—disappear into their own smoke shows.

But maybe this perception, too, is only the result of my own very acute chronic onlineness, and I am projecting my proclivity to get lost in unreality onto other people. But I know at least a few people are with me on this, because this is the internet, and there are at least twenty thousand people for every strange affliction.