Satellite Your Effigy

Even though we’re using it right now, can we all agree that the internet is horrible?

(The lone exception being maybe just this Substack you’re reading? Think about it.) 

It’s been horrible for as long as I can remember, from my early teenage years on AOL to my ill-advised excursions into Usenet in college, from Friendster and MySpace to TikTok and Fter, the new social network exclusively for photos of your feet. (That last one’s fake…for now.)

To kick off his 2008 record Momofuku, Elvis Costello delivered a blast of cold reality about the internet and how it was systematically destroying almost everything worthwhile in the world. He could have written it ten years earlier; more than ten years later, it’s still relevant. 

Does the immediate availability of anything you could possibly want really improve your life? In some ways, sure. Is that stuff available in a way that provides fair, reasonable compensation for those who make the stuff, store the stuff, or throw the stuff in their 2007 Subaru to deliver it to your front door? Absolutely not. 

But EC is more focused on the “cute secrets” and “novelty” than social justice. And his attention quickly turns from the universal to the specific, and the most native of creatures on the information superhighway: The internet troll. 

Today, the trolls have won; they dominate social media, cable news shows, and Thanksgiving dinners. One of them even became president of the United States. In 2008, Costello spotted all that coming up the road and clawed out this vicious pop portrait,with an uncanny understanding of what gave trolls their power. 

A pen stabbed straight into the poisoned heart of entitled rage. 

For most trolls today, the “cloak of anonymity” has been replaced. Now they feel no need to be anonymous because their total disregard for anyone but themselves has rendered them immune to any real consequences. Far from being wrapped in any cloak, trolls like the seditionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6 are happy to revel in their newfound empowerment. After all, when the leader of the free world is himself a troll, what could possibly go wrong? 

As we covered when we talked about “Riot Act,” Costello paid a high price for his “immortal sins,” one that was totally deserved. That’s how he knows that enemy; he has a measure of sympathy for this nameless troll, because in his own way, he used to play the same game. The difference is that back then, there were plenty of places to hide–the back of a tour bus, the dark of a hotel room at 3 a.m. 

In the modern age, Costello seems to suggest that there is “no hiding place,” even though there are plenty more places to hide, from the “fetching cloak of anonymity” to a near-total disregard for humanity. He may be singing about the moment he’s reached in his own life, when he himself can’t hide his own mistakes or defects behind his own impetuous nature, or the dulling effects of drugs and alcohol. 

You can pursue infamy; you can howl in a vacuum; you can “sit in judgment and bitch.” And you can hide anywhere you want in the digital age, but you still can’t hide from yourself.