They tell me that my new job is to chisel a deep and lasting crack into the foundation of American democracy.
They tell me that my new job is to chisel a deep and lasting crack into the foundation of American democracy—salting the wounds of discord, driving spikes into the hearts of community, turning brother against brother.
Maybe they don’t say this in so many words.
On my first day working for Россия, they show me to my office. It is the size of two bathtubs pushed together. My qualifications must not be as impressive as I imagined. My mother may be proud, but my mother country? Harder to please, it seems. Green paint, a desk, a computer, a rickety heater for my feet. It could be worse, I think. The work (the pay) is what matters.
I sit at the computer and they stand behind me, pointing to where I should click, grunting affirmation. A list is provided to me—Tumblr blogs. You will learn to be like them now, they say. Then, they leave.
The first blog on the list is run by the user sw33t-babby-grl and feels like a boudoir with satin cushions and trays of cosmetics on a rococo vanity. Curly fonts, pink background, ~ to end sentences instead of periods. I don’t think that sw33t-babby-grl likes men. She reblogs posts saying things like “✿ ~if men are so great why does every single one of them look and act like a pile of swamp slime~ ✿”
Next, there is mayonayo. He told his blog followers that if they voted for a white person, they would go to hell. But mayonayo is a white person. I know because he posted a picture of himself with a caption that said his depression wasn’t so bad some days.
I go through the list: a blog titled “Women are Trash,” one that posts pictures of Democratic US congressmen with grotesquely photoshopped faces, another specializing in creative insults to call police officers to their faces. They are not always saying that America is a cesspit; they also post things that they like: cats wearing nun’s clothing, memes of TV shows from their childhoods, confessions of their anxiety.
The vitriol doesn’t surprise me, I suppose. Everyone wants a scapegoat, wants a group to belong to. I think hard about my first username and settle on sweater-morning, so that I will seem comforting and warm.
They do not suffer grey areas and my job is to tell them that they are right and that they should fear their neighbor. So, I decide to join the side of sw33t-babby-grl and mayonayo; there are more of them on Tumblr, and if you’re building a monster you rob the largest graveyard where you will find more parts.
For inspiration, I stroll down the blog of mewnwitch. I find posts that say you should hex your enemies with emoji spells, and has the phrase “all men oppress” emblazoned on a scroll over drawings of women baring armpit hair and flower crowns. As I learn the style, I scroll with decreasing attention until I am stopped by an image.
An illustration of a beach, in a wobbly-line style. A few puffs of sea oats on a dune, the moon behind them, the dark ocean and the purple-black sky. “sometimes i miss my mother,” the caption says. So do I.
I’m surprised when the workday is over so soon.
*
In a day, my blog has attracted twenty followers, by virtue of who I have followed. I don’t start by making posts of my own. No one knows sweater-morning. To incite a crowd to riot, the first thing you have to do is join it. I’m told I need to run thirty blogs.
To incite a crowd to riot, the first thing you have to do is join it.
I develop a method for how best to amplify the voices that divide. If (i) is a pretty image, (m) is a meme, and (p) is a politically divisive and over-generalized argument, here is the sequence: 4i 1p 2m 2p 1i 3p 1i 2m. This will repeat indefinitely, every third repetition either reversing the sequence or splitting it in half so the pattern will not be noticed.
But as I work I can’t forget the dunes, the ocean, the moon. I don’t know if my mother has ever seen the ocean.
After two months, I have 20,196 followers. There will be an election soon, so the higher-ups come to me more frequently for reports. Now, I make my own posts. I find news stories to blame on every breathing heterosexual, tell white men they are ugly, and for fun, I have started a meme from a stock photo model hesitant to enter a room, and a discourse on macaroni and cheese. People send me messages. They tell me about how they ostracized their classmate, cut ties with a friend, shouted down a grandparent; they want my approval. On my posts, they say, “sweater’s the realest” and “sweater is a cinnamon roll.” But they also stack up onto my most hateful posts. “You are right,” they say, “people should be silenced for my convenience.” It’s easy to convince them and I want to clutch my head because of it. I reblogged the illustration of the beach to sweater-morning twice, because the first post got buried too far under other things for me to find.
I remember that it was mewnwitch whose blog it was on and I message her. “I miss my mother too.” I think we’ll become friends.
She responds, “um wat?”
Eventually, the site finds out about the democracy chiseling we’re doing, shuts all the blogs down, and denounces us publicly. The ones in charge shrug and say we’ll find another way. sweater-morning is taken from me, but I make morning-mist for myself and decorate it with the beach and my thoughts and photos of the macaroni and cheese I asked my mother to make. There is no need to litter the space with venom and petulance. No one has to know about it.
Merle Kinney is a writer living in Jackson, Mississippi. They like to write about virtual spaces, gender, and work.
