Tastes like horse paste. Joe Rogan has been a favorite target of media scorn for years, and for a simple reason: if he had to, he could produce his show in a garage with an 80-dollar mic and still have an audience of millions, which is honestly just annoying. He doesn’t need the resources of a multi-billion dollar media company. He doesn’t need the support of Brooklyn-based taste-making gatekeepers. He doesn’t even really need a studio. He’s just some guy, who sounds like ‘just some guy,’ with a beautiful family, more money than he could ever hope to spend, and the most popular podcast in history. The natural question is how do we destroy him? Fortunately, there’s a pandemic to exploit, half the country has discarded all notions of open discourse as a value, and Rogan made the mistake of noticing how wrong our public health “experts” have been about pretty much everything. He shared his perspective. He invited guests on his show to share their perspective. He neglected to kiss Fauci’s ring.

Not today, Satan.

The Rogan discourse has been heating up since this past summer’s drama over Ivermectin, a Nobel-prize winning antiparasitic in human use around the world with an unapproved and controversial use in Covid treatment, cynically reduced by propagandists in the press to “horse dewormer.” Rogan not only took the drug but publicly discussed it, and has been considered a danger to the nation since. Earlier this month, a few hundred random doctors, the majority of whom do not actually appear to be practicing, signed a letter demanding Rogan be deplatformed for his crimes against “the science,” as defined by opinions with which this select group of people agree. The letter made headline news around the world, and provoked 76-year-old ex-relevant musician Neil Young to issue Spotify an ultimatum. If the company refused to cancel the most popular podcast on the planet, Young would pull his music from the platform. Spotify declined to comply with Young’s demands, and the artist pulled the trigger. 78-year-old ex-relevant musician Joni Mitchell followed Young. 70-year-old ex-relevant musician Nils Hilmer Lofgren (I literally had to google this person) followed Mitchell. Hunter Walk, a tech person with a moderately popular Twitter presence, wrote a “yay censorship” blog post.

The rights conversation is admittedly complex. Most people in favor of authoritarianism will even tell you platform censorship has nothing to do with “free speech.” Giant companies erasing crimethink creators from the internet is equivalent to a man kicking an obnoxious guest out of his house. Property rights are sacred, now, according to left-wing influencers who also want socialism. “Free speech,” according to free speech detractors, is a constitutional thing with no bearing on tech companies. But this is only accurate in the narrowest, most tedious possible sense.

Yes, a private company is allowed to censor, but just because it’s a company doing the censorship doesn’t make the behavior not censorship. All of the usual questions still stand: are you personally in favor of censorship? In which cases? Public health danger? Hatred? How are we defining these things, and who do we trust to exercise this power? How do we reconcile a pro-censorship worldview with the fact that many of the voices supported by our censors keep getting things dangerously wrong? Then, with these new laws governing every person in our country of over 300 million, and billions more outside the States, is the comparison to a small house party legitimate?

We’ve all been down this road before, and while the censorship conversation is interesting — in particular the question of how one should act in a world of normalized censorship (piece on this coming) — the Rogan controversy calls to mind a different thing for me. Namely, does this man seem tired to anyone else? Because this man seems tired to me, and how could he not? Our national rage-apology cycle is endless. I’m getting tired just thinking about it. How do people live with this kind of pressure?

The popular expectation single influencers never be wrong about anything, ever, even when they publicly own their natural human fallibility, as Rogan has done repeatedly and again this week in a kind of soft apology tour, is unprecedented. I mean this literally. We’ve never expected so much from celebrities, and sure, our celebrities have also never been this influential. Minting celebrities at our current clip, and at this current scale, has given single voices constant, outsized mindshare over millions or even hundreds of millions of people, which is something we’ve just never seen before. But while we often consider the potential negative impact of this phenomenon on society, we don’t often discuss the personal piece. Dumb question maybe, but are any of these influencers happy?

Today, close to a quarter of young people want to be professionally famous on social media. The question of what that job will do to them matters.

Too hype. In 1959’s “It’s A Good Life,” an old episode of The Twilight Zone my dad insanely allowed me to watch as a child, a little boy with god-like powers seals his town off from the rest of the universe, then sets about his primary interest in life, which is of course to play. When townspeople refuse to join him in his games, he banishes them to a creepy cornfield hell dimension, or turns them into toys — people forget that television was once a thing of quality. Adults in the young god’s life are thus reduced to a state of puppetry, smiling through their misery so as not to offend the tiny monster that holds their fate in his tiny little hands. The boy in turn believes he’s loved, even while his family wishes he were dead, and in the end, when he summons a snow that starves the town, his father smiles and tells him that the snow is good. Anything not to evoke the supernatural rage of his puppet master. “Tomorrow,” he says, “will be a real good day.”

End credits. Horrifying. Literally still disturbed.

Last week, I realized this is also basically the plot of Hype House, a new Netflix documentary that follows a handful of massive, young social media celebrities as they grapple with love, friendship, and the impact of internet fame on their lives. Long-story short, it really seems to suck.

The relentlessly-measured status of social media (follower counts, shares, engagement), corresponding almost one-to-one with the ability of social media influencers to earn money, has metastasized in an age of cancel culture, and reduced most of these people to a perpetual state of anxious misery. Our new celebrities are puppets, capable only of sharing the pieces of their lives the public finds acceptable. If they cross their fans, they lose everything — not just followers but money, contracts, “friends” — in a storm of fandom fury they can witness now in real time as the hatred populates their social feeds by comments in the thousands, a shame that lives recorded on the internet forever.

We tend to think of influencers as people with power, but the audience pulls their puppet strings with likes and shares and comments, and the celebrity feedback cycle lives on the phone in their pockets. They’re connected to it. We’re all connected to it. Yes, we can turn it off. Yes, we can give it all up and go for a walk and be “healthy,” sure, whatever. But the scale of social media now permeates our entire social world. Both culturally and psychologically this is a new way of existing.

That child actors are negatively impacted by their profession is something of a truism. Are crazy people attracted to celebrity, or does celebrity make people crazy? Until recently, this was just a kind of sad, interesting question. But never before has celebrity, or micro-celebrity, been so easy to attain. With a plummet in the cost of computing has come a plummet in the price of attention. It’s maybe hard to find sympathy for a bunch of hot young people who courted fame and now regret it, even while they refuse to loosen their death grip on the golden ring that’s drowning them. But it’s also worth remembering not everyone on the internet is asking for attention. Sometimes a random ass furniture store employee simply dates the wrong girl.

A couple weeks ago we saw another glimpse of unintended infamy and its consequences. A man who was, allegedly, a kind of shitty guy to date was mobbed into the stratosphere, and doxx’d, his face now plastered across the internet. His new name is West Elm Caleb. A sample of the TikTok clips that generated the mob below:

The public dissection of Caleb mostly occurred on TikTok, where young women shared, to an audience of millions, their stories about a young man who had not been until this moment in any meaningful way “public.” In comments, calls for a more moderated approach to discussing the topic were likened to rape-apologetics, odd considering, to the best of my knowledge, no one has yet actually accused this man of rape. Mostly there were accusations of “love-bombing” (showering dates with too much love as a form of mental abuse, or something), ghosting (abruptly ceasing communication with dates), and seeing — *gasp* — multiple people at once in the very early stages of a relationship.

I don’t want to get stuck in the weeds here. The story is a kaleidoscopic maze of TikTok meltdowns, YouTube rants, and more than one argument positing perhaps the entire thing was a hoax? The element of interest is how the mob reacted, which was first and characteristically completely untethered, and then ultimately, after the damage was done, repentant.

From the shitty media men list, a public spreadsheet for anonymously ripping “shitty” men in media apart, to Lulu, the short-lived app that infamously allowed people to rate their bad dates, we’ve seen this kind of low-key psychotic behavior before, and to some degree it almost seems we’re finally building antibodies to the behavior. As if 2017’s year of the witch burning simply never happened, media consensus reversed course on prior positions and seemed to agree, in the case of West Elm Caleb, that a single person on a few dates about which we know practically nothing should not be held accountable for the abstract crimes of All Men. But the glee with which the mob attacked, in the sort of carnival-like atmosphere of TikTok, was nonetheless jarring.

Are we stuck in a house with an angry little god? Stupid question, we know we are. Next question, what do we do about it?

It’s obvious we need social media tools designed for different social outcomes, but we also need new social technology. The internet used to be a thing we occasionally entered, like an amusement park. Now it’s a digital world we live inside that shapes our physical reality. What is the new social code of conduct for this new world? Sharing stories about a bad date to your five best friends over brunch seems fine. Sharing stories about a bad date to the entire country? No one wants to live like this.

Our “free speech” debate is perhaps more interesting in the context of a new social code than it is in the context of our quagmire legal conversation. What we are technically allowed to do to people with whom we disagree, or don’t like, is not the question. That’s never been the question. Please stop pretending that’s the question. If no law existed, what behavior would be morally acceptable?

I’d never be so arrogant as to claim I have the answer to our entire future morality, in its totality, for sure. But ground-floor I’m thinking if you’re in someone’s comments telling him to kill himself because he ghosted a random ass person you don’t even know, it’s worth considering you might not be the good guy. And if you ever demanded “misinformation” be banned that we now consider acceptable or even settled science — cloth masks don’t work, the beach is safe, vaccinated individuals can get and spread the virus, this shit probably came from the Wuhan coronavirus factory who are we kidding — maybe just attempt a little humility for a minute, and leave the witch burning to the experts.

(There are no experts)

Long live Rogan.

-SOLANA