Writing
A Nasty Addiction to Going Viral
It’s got me all strung out, but now I’m going cold turkey.
It is sadly true. I have become utterly and hopelessly addicted to going viral.
It’s a nasty, nerdy little habit I picked up writing on Medium.
I’m checking and rechecking my stats like a fiend, tweeting out articles not once but thrice, and writing writing writing. No matter how many views I rack up, I always crave more. It’s the definition of addiction.
I’m in way over my head. Thankfully it’s not cocaine, I suppose.
How did it come to this? Perhaps I should try to explain.
Initially, I didn’t really know what going viral even meant, beyond grasping the basic notion that any cat video or conspiracy theory could theoretically catch fire and burn online. At that point, for reasons largely unknown to myself, that particular thing would begin to circulate widely and wildly on the internet, reaching a massive captive audience in a kind of informational thermal explosion.
So what? I wanted no part of this.
If anything, going viral sounded to me like yet another unfortunate byproduct of the internet age, a distortion of information bent by speed and reach until it becomes utterly warped and useless. Why would I want that?
I read serious history, and I generally like my information real. I prefer facts to factoids. I consider myself a person that believes in the critical importance of evidence-based reasoning, and I know it’s wrong to distort facts to fit an agenda.
I also tend to believe that the internet (and Fox News) has broken American politics, in large part because it’s allowed the easy distortion of truth by bad actors like Donald Trump.
As for my writing? I never even considered that online writing could do such a thing as go viral.
That seemed both unlikely and undesirable.
As such, when I first began writing about politics and culture on Medium last winter, I felt reasonably secure from this unfamiliar and ephemeral online phenomenon.
Virality might warp society’s information and loosen humanity’s grip on reality, but it seemed unlikely to affect me personally.
This is surely what I believed, in my absurd, childlike naiveté.
What did I know? Very little, apparently.
Who can know anything until they themselves taste virality? No one.
I was just beginning down my road through the gates of pleasure, toward that sweet narcotic produced only by the internet: fiery viral content. Yikes.
Chemistry
I have some valuable life experience regarding addictive mind altering chemicals of one kind or another.
In other words, it’s not my first rodeo, as they say in your fifth try at rehab.
I’ve been around the block a time or two. That said, having tried all the best available chemicals and combinations thereof, I figured I’d covered the relevant bases. No need for any more experimentation, as it were.
I’d put my hedonistic ways behind me to focus on other things long ago.
One of those things happened to be writing online. Who knew I’d discover a sweet pleasure molecule lurking behind my screen, hidden curled like a lovely serpent beneath my very keyboard!
As Donald Trump prepared to steal the 2020 election, and then began doing exactly that, I started writing furiously. It was intoxicating and therapeutic, at a minimum.
Trapped inside my house by a deadly viral pandemic, and watching as my country teetered on the edge of becoming a grotesque right-wing dictatorship led by an imbecile, I freely expressed myself online.
It alleviated the terrible tension and lightened the pitch blackness of those dark days.
Yet I had no inkling of what would I would discover.
Intoxication
The first article that went viral was a scathing piece about Donald Trump. And the second, and the third, too. The fourth was about Kamala Harris.
Every time this happened, I felt more than a tinge of excitement.
I felt euphoria.
It was intriguing that something I wrote was flying like a fiery comet through the internet, uncontrollable and filled with its own propulsive energy.
I was a bit surprised by the way I enjoyed this.
Because it was my writing, it was as if I or at least a piece of me was flying careening around the world, and into my readers’ living rooms and bespoke laptops.
My writing seemed to have taken off. Whereas before I had associated online virality with the manipulation of reality via lying fascist propaganda, mostly now I felt excited to watch my numbers climb. It became a kind of game, to see how many viewers I could reach in one go.
I was happy also that my writing was not adding to the aforementioned climate of lies and disinformation in America, like so much partisan political writing. I was sticking to the facts in my opinion pieces. This seemed reason enough to give myself a very small pat on the back.
Indeed, my readers seemed to enjoy what I was saying.
A good drug
At the end of the day, the reptilian part of my brain that is so stimulated by watching my views climb on my stats page has gotten me writing quite a bit more than I was before I discovered going viral. That is a good thing, surely.
I’ve always been a writer, though I had taken some time off, and abandoned a memoir I had worked on for some time in frustration. It feels lovely to be writing again, to feel the words flowing out of me.
It’s also nice to know they have some meaning. American politics desperately needs new voices.
When I began writing on Medium, I told myself that I would write because I had to somehow cope with the dire political situation, and that I would use online writing to propel me into finishing a novel or some other literary project in the near future. That seems about right.
Right now, though, I’m actually quite content writing online.
I’m glad I began when I did. A bit of literary therapy.
As for my heinous addiction to going viral, let’s just say I’ve had much worse habits.
A.
Previously published on Vocal.media
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