moo deng & the sacred scroll
got that dog in us
There’s a famous New Yorker cartoon from 1993 which belongs in the first chapter of any future textbook about the internet:
A dog sitting in front of an old desktop computer tells a dog sitting on the floor that “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The drawing, by Peter Steiner, has since become the most reprinted New Yorker cartoon ever, and the original netted $175,000 at an auction.
These dogs speak to the powerful anonymity of the internet — the power of not having to be you. Once you log on, you are unbounded by your geography, your community, your species — you are without any identity other than what you choose in the moment. This was great in 1993, and it’s still kind of great now, because it helps you find spaces where you can freely talk, learn, and love among others. The internet offers a freedom that arrives faster and goes further than what you may find in real life.
Of course, this power of anonymity is double-sided. It permits people to be themselves, seek liberty and explore new ideas — but it also gives people a screen to hide behind as they do cruel or illicit things.
Nowadays, there is no longer actual anonymity online. They know if you are a dog. We are being tracked by dozens of corporations and several governments, getting scraped up by scores of engineers feeding insatiable AI models.
But there’s still a kind of emotional anonymity online, if not a literal one. I’ve been thinking about this recent tweet showing pictures of Moo Deng, the baby hippopotamus who has lately become a meme and global sensation. The text comes from an older meme format, a quote from a 2013 essay by Tim Kreider in The New York Times which reads “If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.” Users for years have illustrated this same quote with two contrasting images of the same thing.
Social media is sold as a machine for earning the rewards of being loved without the mortifying ordeal of being known. Emotional anonymity — the idea of being spared the “mortifying ordeal” of being understood, held accountable, judged — is still what social media platforms offer. They give you endless opportunity to judge and seek to understand other people, but (seemingly) without ever exposing yourself to them directly.
And they pet your brain the way that zookeeper’s hand is petting beneath Moo Deng’s soft, dewy chin. Algorithms handpick content to make you laugh, make you think, stir your heart. The faces of creators you’ve developed parasocial relationships with offer company and consolation. Their worries, wisdom, and wishes mingle with yours. The time we spend there — and the entities (human or mechanical) we spend it with —change us.
I do think everyone loves at least one weird thing from the internet that nobody in their actual life understands. It could be ASMR. It could be a really specific fandom site. It could be an extensive school of meme lore. It could be a political movement. There is some piece of everyone which exists on the internet, apart from who they really have to be. This part seems to be loved, whether by other people in an online community or by the ever-attentive machines themselves.
But there is a one-sidedness to parasociality. They are here for me, rendered at a moment’s notice with a few clicks, but I am not really here for them. I compare myself to people I’ve seen online, but they don’t compare themselves to me. When I think about what I like in a friend, I consider the laugh of someone on TikTok I’ve never met, the sincerity of some guy who plays guitar for Instagram, the wit of an anonymous troll on X. When I consider my political views, my tastes, my opinions on places I’ve lived and experiences I’ve had, what comes to mind are takes from strangers online.
My innermost intimate world has grown around an online profile the way ivy or kudzu grows in a green scarf around a tree trunk. I clasp and cling, growing inward as much as I am growing up. And what I’ve grown up around is indifferent to me — I am not really known by it. To the extent that I am understood by TikTok the app or the creators I love, I am understood in the abstract, as a pattern of behaviors, as data. I don’t have to be accountable to them and my association never feels anything but voluntary. This is good — it is freedom, of a kind, isn’t it? But it is also bad.
The social media platforms seek to deliver a rich social and intellectual life without the entanglements, boring moments, and moral quandaries that fill our actual lives. Often they fail at this, because users consciously seek to do activism, form bonds, and create healthy communities — to be known for who they are, actually. It takes effort to avoid the drift into cheap thrills and easy answers, and I’m always encouraged seeing that people online do make the effort.
I think about this a lot lately, now that my TikTok notifications are never dry. I am far from actually internet-famous, but I know that I can pull my phone out of my pocket at any time during the day and see new likes, new comments, new reposts. This is a part of TikTok’s business model: creators who are addicted to little spurts of gamified serotonin are creators who keep producing content.
I was already an addict, of course. And to some extent, I do think of my screen time as work, not recreational at all: I have balls in the air and bags to secure. But I still get an animal pleasure out of pulling my phone from my pocket and plugging into this online place where people say they love me. It’s a powerful force — and I’m glad I wasn’t getting this kind of online engagement ten years ago, when my prefrontal cortex wasn’t formed, because I’m sure it would have screwed me up. However, the saccharine gamification and reptile brain-stroking of social media is just one side of the phenomenon, and it’s a shame that most of our media narratives only focus on that side, and most social platforms find their profits in fueling that side — because there’s more going on.
There is something holy about that solitary, open-minded space of the scroll. It is fireside, church pew, library shelf, concert seat and bedside table wrapped into one. The scroll is among the most sacred spaces in our culture because it is where people let themselves be more curious, childish, and spiritual than they do anywhere else. I’m honored to show up there for other people because I have always been drawn to that space and to that manner of connecting. I have felt more comfortable there than anywhere else, and I think many of the people who follow me feel the same way — I check through their profiles and see the world is actually made up of thousands of people who are weird the way I am, worried the way I am, lonely the way I am. On the scroll, everybody gets to meet and commune together. On the scroll we talk about things that we don’t talk about in other places or with other people. There is a side of us that is reserved for this space.
The space of the scroll is not reality, but it is still important. It is similar to the kind of space that exists across books and films, a fantasy-world that you can dip into and out of, spend an hour resting in, learn something important from. And when you meet a person who’s loved the same movies as you, or knows the same brainrot, the conversation is great. You’re able to talk with a kind of reckless abandon. It’s like when you take the dog off-leash and it starts to gallop around the park, tongue lolling out, legs fast as pistons. I’ve got that dog in me, and you’ve got that dog in you. This is why we love the internet.
But what bothers me continually is the platforms. They try to sell people this kind of sacred space, meeting their curiosity and desire, while seeming to ask nothing in return. I don’t mean that they’re only pretending to be free because they’re sucking up your data to sell it. I mean they seem to offer the rewards of being loved without the mortifying ordeal of being known. And those rewards are hollow unless you are known.
Within some online communities, people do get to know each other, and it is a mortifying ordeal. But it seems this happens despite the platforms, not because of them. Quantity of connection is more important to TikTok, Meta, Twitter, and Substack than quality. If the kind of deeper engagement with the scroll that I’m talking about — the investment in content, creators, and community, the honoring of that sacred space — can be thought of as a form of romance, then the platforms seem to be pushing an insecure attachment style.
Moo Deng must be tickled under the chin and hoisted uncomfortably into the air — both of these actions are expressions of her sustaining bond with the zookeepers. Without the ordeal, love is flimsy.
On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog, and at first that’s good. But deep down, don’t you want others to know you’ve got that dog in you? I want social media that encourages depth and durable connection, that is structured around accountability and solidarity. I’m trying my best to make it so the spaces I participate in function that way, but it does feel like swimming against the current.
As we spend more of our time and make more of our lives within this collective dream, this fantasy-world where our every glance and like is counted by computers and then woven into the texture of future experiences, we’ve got to be thinking more mindfully about how to do well and how to be good to others.
