Everyone's very angry online right now

On one of my first work trips to Japan in 2016, I was chatting with a group of local journalists and bloggers about Japanese Twitter. I was curious what kind of memes typically went viral on their corner of the internet and I was surprised that they had such a tough time talking about it.

There were, obviously, tweets that went — and still go — very very very viral in Japan. But “mainstream” internet culture, in general, was totally different from what we were seeing in the US at the time. Especially for women, who had effectively been chased out of digital public life by 2chan users in the late 2000s. (2chan is the Japanese precursor to 4chan.) In the US, this was the peak of the America’s Funniest Home Videos vibe that defined early 2010s social media. The era of The Ellen Show industrial complex, where an endless parade of semi-photogenic middle class white children doing stupid shit in their backyards got to be famous for a week. Alex from Target was ascendant. Japanese social media, on the other hand, was heavily policed by a decentralized army of bitter trolls and ultranationalist reactionaries. Japanese bloggers and influencers blurred their own faces in posts and acted as performatively humble as possible online. And most users, again, especially women, were very careful to not reveal anything about themselves online out of fear of being dogpiled by angry losers.

Japan had entered the social media age amid deep economic stagnation and was far quicker than the US at codifying the weird subcultural effects it produced. They used the term NEET to describe those "not in education, employment, or training." The word “otaku” to describe young people gravitating towards niche hobbies and interests as a form of arrested development. And “hikikomori” to describe the young adults who completely dropped out of irl society.

Back home we had trolls, of course, and incels and Gamergaters and the first Trump campaign was in full swing, happily recruiting those guys into their cyber army of disaffected young men. But to this day, we still don’t think about the trolls that emerged at the end of 2000s as a byproduct of the Great Recession. And I remember walking away from my conversation in Tokyo thinking, “Wow, I’m so glad American social media is still fun.” But American social media is definitely not fun anymore.

The prevailing wisdom is that Twitter was never fun and that it’s doubly not fun now that it’s X. But it feels like there is a specific kind of new ugliness online. One that has political trappings, but isn’t coherently ideological. In fact in 2023, in a weird full circle moment, Japanese internet users learned about this new distinctly American online ugliness, which is especially prevalent in western fandom spaces, and coined the term “feelings yakuza,” to describe it. They use it to mean "those who turn their personal discomfort into a social evil and try to erase the target completely.” And we’re in the midst of a flurry of feelings yakuza flare-ups right now.

On X, currently, there are meltdowns happening about how women are committing “self-abuse” if their husband buys them a pink iPad, how it’s gay for men to meet women at a run club, how sharing a photo of a grilled cheese is attention whore behavior, and how your boyfriend giving you magic wand for your birthday is an “auto-pedophilic fantasy.” Oh, also, over on Bluesky, which is still very much culturally downstream of X, they’re arguing about whether or not it’s ableist to suggest that people should read books. Which happens over there like once a month.

We are also in the midst of another large-scale Chappell Roan discourse cycle, this one off the back of a news report from Brazil that Roan’s security guard was rude to soccer player Jorginho’s daughter. It’s devolved into a meme, particularly in Brazil, where users were quick to realize the whole thing was pretty silly. But Americans are still litigating it. Roan had to release a video on Instagram addressing the controversy and there is some evidence of bot accounts pushing the narrative. Also, actor Barry Keoghan opened up this week about the online abuse he suffered after he caught the attention of stan armies when he dated pop star Sabrina Carpenter.

And then, finally, there have been the endless debates over The New Atlantis “diner goth” piece. Various cultural critics have spent days arguing about whether or not it’s weird that young underemployed Americans in flyover states dress like, well, how they’ve always dressed — kinda goth nerds.

It’s enough to definitively call this a national conversation. Like we’ve all suddenly come out of a blackout and realized we don’t recognize anyone at the party anymore. But for the whole country.

For the last decade, we’ve described these kinds of controversies and micro-dramas as “the culture war,” but the culture war was won and it’s over. Plus, these incidents all touch on gender or race, or our new panic over dating and romance, which just loops back to gender and race again, but if you zoom out, I actually think we’re dealing with something much more complex. Something closer to what was happening on the Japanese internet 20 years ago. Something that falls across the political spectrum thanks to an unraveling of society driven by economic stagnation, political upheaval, slipping education standards, and access to near-infinite distractions online. Best summarized by now-suspended Twitter user @BravoCoolee’s 2017 tweet, where he wrote, "Twitter the only place where well-articulated sentences still get misinterpreted. You can say ‘I like pancakes’ and somebody will say ‘So you hate waffles?’ No bitch. Dats a whole new sentence. Wtf is you talkin about.”

Two years later, the reverse of @BravoCoolee’s tweet would be added to the canon, when user @maplecocaine tweeted, “Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it.”

There are plenty of structural problems that explain why everyone is so angry online right now. The pandemic was a mass-disabling event and clearly stunted the lives of many young people entering higher education or the workforce in 2020. Far-right agitators have spent nearly 20 years turning pop culture into an ideological battleground that even includes, apparently, Cracker Barrel’s branding decisions. And the oligarch-owned tech platforms connected virality to capital, birthing a new digital world where we can watch the ultra-wealthy live lives we can only dream about or gamble (literally now) on an algorithmic pull that might let us hop over the walled garden. It, also, might ruin our lives depending on what we end up doing out of desperation in front of a camera. We’re, also, you know, at war. Which is why I’m not blaming the average person for being angry online. Though, based on everything I’ve written above, I’m sure I will be accused of that. Instead, I am trying to explain that America has fundamentally changed and we still refuse to acknowledge it. American optimism has not survived the information age and American pessimism has proved to be far more entertaining.

Which is all to say, if people are really angry and aggressive online all of a sudden, well, that’s a recession indicator, baby.