Touching Grass, Part I

A normie walks into a park

The week Donald Trump was re-elected, I remembered a sunny afternoon years ago at the city park in Lander, Wyoming when I met an old woman who was very afraid. I'd been sitting at a picnic table under the big cottonwoods with my laptop, trying to write but hopelessly distracted by the birds in the leaves. The woman had detoured over to me from the path and asked if I was watching the president’s announcement on my laptop. I didn't know Biden was making an announcement, I said. Since the big man was technically my boss via the U.S. Forest Service, I thought that I had better tune in to stay in the loop. The woman had been hoping to watch it herself and asked if I could pull it up on my screen. She sat next to me on the bench as I booted up my wifi hotspot and moved the laptop over so we could both see it. Biden's speech was already underway. We sat listening for a few moments until, out of nowhere, the woman said, "They're coming for all of us."

Biden was formally announcing what major news outlets had already reported earlier that day: a new mandate for federal employees to show proof of COVID vaccination. My first thought was, oh, good. But the woman looked horrified. Somewhat stupidly I asked how she felt about vaccines. What followed was a conversation I struggle to recall in its full paranoid weirdness. She talked about healthy young and middle-aged men dropping mysteriously dead after taking the vaccine. She talked about mind control, genetic engineering, and 5G. She looked particularly horrified—far from tinfoil-hatted, but more like your grandma hearing about a rock climbing trip—as she told me about the concentration camps the government had built out in the hinterlands where “people like us” would soon be imprisoned. Weirdest of all was how normal she seemed otherwise. If you didn’t speak English you’d think she was worrying about her garden.

How in the hell, I wondered, had this polite old woman gotten ahold of such crazy ideas? There could only be one explanation: the internet. This became clear as the woman interrupted herself to cite sources from the wilderness of right-wing blogs, Facebook pages, and increasingly mainstream media outlets that have been so crucial to Trump’s repeated electoral wins. The fact that I had never heard of any of them must have made me seem only less credible in her view.

Of course we’ve known since well before 2016 that the bulk of the internet leans to the right. The depressing evidence before us now suggests it’s only gotten worse. The four most popular podcasts on Spotify this year, and most of the top 15, belonged to either implicitly or explicitly right-wing hosts. More people get most of their news from social media than ever before, often from denizens of opportunistic influencers who are largely sympathetic to their frequent right-wing guests, not to mention whatever other grifters, hacks, and snake-oil salesmen they pluck from our brainless social media feeds. Trump’s new best friend Elon Musk now owns Twitter, AI drivel is rotting Facebook like a fungus, and Instagram sanitizes reactionary trad-lifers and RFK Jr.-style wellness charlatans with hypnotic aesthetic flourishes. And these are only gateways to the distressing online void that ensnared the old woman from the park. Most of us now are lucky if we’ve only lost one person to the internet’s darkest corners.

Some people have recently suggested that the solution to right-wing misinformation is to copy their playbook. “We need a liberal Joe Rogan” quickly became conventional wisdom in the hours after Trump secured the election, and just as quickly—thank god—devolved into a widely-derided meme. Like most suggestions of the pundit class this month, it was a brainless attempt to point a way forward that did not blame the feckless Democratic party and its own wilderness of exorbitantly paid strategists and professional losers.

I’m skeptical of the idea that the answer to any of our social woes lies behind a screen. Like most people on social media, experience with these platforms alone was enough to give me pause: spend even one day vaporizing your free time with memes or doomscrolling and you’re bound to wonder if the phone might be bad for you. But I quieted my doubts, as most of us do, until my season with the Forest Service in Wyoming. Working in the wilderness for long stretches, I spent more than half of those six months completely out of service. The rest of the time I lived in a government shack with no wifi or cell coverage in a canyon on the outskirts of a middle-of-nowhere town. Living like that, I found true free time again; I found boredom again. I relearned how, without much effort, our free time naturally fills up with things that have become almost aspirational when we are tied to a screen: books, crafts, games, conversation, chance encounters, impromptu adventures, dreams. In a very short time I became a true believer in the dangers of our ubiquitous digital unreality. I was several months into this offline existence when the woman approached me at the park.

That day I learned that there may be more at stake than our own peace of mind when we surrender ourselves to constant internet. Have you heard the one about “normies” running into “brain-poisoned” social media users at a hipster coffee shop? (If not, blessings: you’re a normie.) The punchline invariably involves the normies walking away confused, disdainful and a little afraid. You’d think my lowered tolerance for brain poison that season would have sent me running to my car. But that wasn’t what happened. Instead—and although even typing it now makes me groan a little, there doesn’t seem to be another way to say it—we talked.

We probably talked for a good half an hour. A good portion of that time felt like banging my head against a wall. I probably shouldn’t give myself much more credit at first than having succumbed to curiosity and boredom. Still, during our talk I learned that her husband had passed away, that she had grandchildren out of state, and that she did not have any family nearby. She was worried about the distant forces that had made life harder in her town, and she didn’t believe anyone in the government was trying to help. She relied on increasingly expensive medication and didn’t really trust the doctors that prescribed it. The woman was nothing if not astute, deeply if not well-informed on a range of complex topics which she articulated clearly and in detail. I can imagine the quote-tweets and angry comments now: This woman doesn’t deserve our sympathy. She’s part of the problem. And so on. But perhaps because her words and face weren’t scrolling glibly across a screen, I could ignore those ridiculous notions. The reality was clear to see. She was an old woman in a terrifying world, and she was very afraid.

I still don’t really know how it happened, but eventually I started to make some inroads. I could agree, certainly, that the government, big pharma, Wall Street, the Democrats, and other powerful interests did not care about ordinary people. The government was absolutely putting people into concentration camps, even under Biden, but I doubted that she or I would be the ones locked in the cages. As I shared my thoughts on climate refugees she began to reconsider this fear, and conceded that Republicans didn’t care too much about us either. And I only laughed in her face once. “You young people today don’t know how bad things can get,” she said. “My generation lived through atomic bomb drills, the Cold War, political assassinations, Vietnam… There are bad people out there! Younger people just believe whatever.” Apologizing, I explained how my own childhood began with a hole in the ozone layer, a stolen election, 9/11, and a fraudulent war in Iraq, and ended with the Great Recession, bailouts to bankers, the first climate disasters, student debt, and other chaos. And then we got President Trump. Hearing this, she looked somewhat relieved.

As usually happens, our sprawling digressions eventually returned us to the original point. I urged her to consider getting vaxxed. I didn’t know exactly how they worked, and admittedly I didn’t know anyone who had died of COVID, but all of my loved ones and I were vaccinated and none of us were dead either. Vaccines, I thought, were an overly complicated way to control a population already subject to constant surveillance, propaganda, and the threat of state violence. The federal government, meanwhile, paid me very poorly, so I had no reason to lie to her. I think the last thing I said about it was that I didn’t want her to die.

I’ve thought a lot about our meeting on the picnic table under the cottonwoods, trying to figure out what worked—or whether I’m flattering myself, and nothing I said made any difference. But something seemed to. Before we parted ways, she told me I had made good points: she would get vaccinated after all. As we waved goodbye I made one last suggestion: “Stay off the internet!” Then she walked off across the grass and I never saw her again.

Whether or not she did get vaccinated, or instead went right back to the conspiracies on her computer screen, I don’t know. In any case, the authors of her paranoia are smiling right now. Trump will soon be in office, the headlines generate more fear and outrage by the minute, and the world is hotter than ever. At times like these, certainly a degree of realism about our situation and our enemies is warranted. But I think it’s no coincidence that the only time I’ve ever managed to change someone’s mind— someone whose mind truly needed changing—was after a long, healthy break from our world’s ubiquitous online simulacra. Or maybe it was just the cottonwoods.