Everything at Once

I was scrolling through what people were sharing online and came across everything mixed together. There’s Emma Sulkowicz walking around with her mattress, carrying it everywhere as a statement about what happened to her and a refusal to let anyone forget. Anita Sarkeesian put out a video on feminism in games—real work, real thinking—and got death threats for it, because that’s what happens when women have opinions on the internet.

Then it’s a GoPro video from inside a volcano, which is just visually wild. An artist named Evie Cair making these clean, perfect illustrations. I saw someone called Luise in one of the photos and thought: yeah, if I lived in Munich I’d marry her. That’s what 3am scrolling does.

Coolio wrote a song about Pornhub. Someone bought an R2-D2 keyboard. There’s Minecraft soap now. A guy dressed as Batman and ran through Japan in full costume. Japanese school backpacks are design perfection. Homemade popsicles that look like they belong in a shop. Portraits that look like aliens but are just people photographed the right way. Instagram added a timelapse feature and people are doing strange things with it.

The serious and the trivial are just sitting there together—someone getting harassed for asking smart questions, someone else making a keyboard shaped like a droid. Same feed. Same moment. That’s what it’s like right now.