Terminal Onlineness: A Curse and a Gift
Terminally online — a loaded, and particularly pointed, phrase. And a decidedly negative ascription. To be deemed terminally online means to be derided and dismissed. You spend too much time online, you do not understand the real world, you mooch off your parents, your political views are not based in real life, and you really, really should touch grass.
So, what does it actually mean to be terminally online?
Your being terminally online is, fittingly, most often up to the one throwing out the phrase. Spending plentiful amount of time plugged in is certainly a prerequisite, but this is merely where the “symptoms” stem from. More acutely, it means you are eagerly receptive to the sorts of thoughts and ideas that thrive in the spaces of the internet and absorb them quite readily. You are not merely terminally online because you spend a bit too much time online, you are terminally online because you espouse internet and meme culture in the real world, to the point where it, supposedly, is your identity.
And the targets for the phrase can be just as vast, equally dependent on the whims of its user. The typical 4Chan-browsing, right-wing incel then is equally liable for targeting as the queer, leftist furry. The culture of the internet is, after all, not homogenous. Each of its plentiful and varied subcultures carry with them their own identifiers, such as sexuality, gender, and philosophies, and thus their own unique biomes of memes.
Terminal onlineness is itself a relatively fresh notion, born in the past two decades as the internet has grown and sprouted branches that seemed near impossible to even consider some three decades ago. Its most well-known influences on wider culture are also particularly infamous, a bevy which includes conspiracies, radical politics, shootings, and even an attempted coup within the United States.
Much of these topics have also been covered at length under a spectrum of perspectives. They are well-known and, in a few short years, have drastically altered the political and cultural landscape of much of the world, let alone the United States. Why explore what already wears well-worn tread marks?
Let us instead consider something different: what of the potential positives of this terminally online culture, which has grown as dense as the Amazon. Do they even exist?
The answer, of course, is yes. The constant connection that the internet offers functions in an entirely neutral manner, devoid of any explicit morality — it simply is. True, the negative thoughts that one might have in solitude may become dangerously amplified when they are able to find a new home that shares such ideas on the interwebs. One need only look towards 4Chan to witness this in action: a space where edgey memery has collided with tormenting for fun (à la so-called “lolcows”) and radicalization.
A general propensity for the negative boosts cases like 4Chan into the limelight far easier than any potential positives. And even when unique positives do enter the limelight, say when more transgender people find the tools to understand and accept themselves, many may still decry it as the internet corrupting the youth. Transness is only one example, though a most apt one, of the disenfranchised and dissatisfied discovering a new home via the web in the face of derision everywhere else.
As someone who has spent a great deal of their life in a state of confusion at their body, at feeling like an alien in the so-called real world, and attempting, sometimes pointlessly, to fit in, I can attest that the connection the internet offers is undoubtedly lifesaving. Without it, I would likely have remained unable to untangle my issues with gender, would have never considered my oddities, and would have undoubtedly attempted to create a life that I could never fit into. It also offered me a chance to step outside my body, to pretend, however briefly, that I could be someone else than what my skin demanded of me.
It is both poisonous and nutritious, the perspectives and connection that the internet has provided. For every boy who has fallen prey to the promises of the manosphere, there is a boy or girl who has learned it truly is ok to like members of the same gender. Or, in my case, a man who discovered they are not so much a man at all, and that it really is ok to like women too, even if I want to be one.
Without connection, without awareness, the odd one out remains so from birth to death. And to remain a disparate identity in a sea of what the greater public decides is the norm becomes a lonely burden indeed. Terminal onlineness is, for far too many, an escape from that burden —an isolation and salvation from wherever may be too much for them to bear. Whether it be in the heart of a city whose culture belittles and denies them, a rural farmhouse filled with family who torment them, or the intense, chalky ennui that defines suburban life.
Freedom can be had online. Terminal onlineness can provide a connection utterly elusive otherwise. And, hopefully, one day, the ones who must struggle so for the basic connections all too often taken for granted — hopefully they too can forge a life worth living, both online and offline.
“It’s not too late to change/ And if you’re too scared to change/ Then keep living in confinement/ Who cares if you don’t like it?”
– Excerpt from “Eyes Off the Wheel, I’m a Star” by Jane Remover
