I admire the Lolcow imageboard for its down-to-earth style, the hackerish fonts and flat colours of the old web, the green and blue links, the magic trick of ‘sage’ in the email field. Influencers conspire to create refined fantasies - white walls, bright rainbows - only to find remnants pinned to Lolcow’s snowy expanse like butterflies, annotated with command-line arrows. Lolcow is where aesthetic fixation comes to die, where you might look at a pastel paradise and (in true Blue Velvet fashion) extract from it a drug addiction or sordid sex cult. It is the most browsable site, and the most bearable. Users are straightforward, stuck between guilt and an odd sort of pride: they have come to gossip. ‘Blogposting’ is an offence.
Online gossipers are often accused of arriving loaded down with jealousy or prejudice or historical, uncontained ‘hurt’. My actual hypothesis is simple: humans need narrative, social media influencers provide none, sleuths must step in to help. Gossip is only a proxy for the real pleasure of mystery-solving, of assembling a twisty past for the apparently beautiful or interesting woman who appears only in asynchronous, posed images.
Lolcow threads reach their tearing zenith when a new clue appears: evidence from a real-life friend or enemy of the subject, a conspiracy theory from a canny user. These websites should be treated not as colonies for the sick and sad, but instead as great works of collaborative storytelling. The madwoman in the attic, the Satanic ritual abuse, the single-white-female scam - every intrigue reachable, crowdsourced, available daily with exciting artefacts and subplots. Here is the room where it happened. These are the clothes she was wearing. Six or seven years ago Lolcow users tracked down and ‘busted’ dozens of anonymous teen shoplifters, their stolen bras and eyeshadow palettes laid out on carpet for Tumblr photos, or found later on Poshmark. No amount of moralising or stereotypical ‘hatred’ on those threads could possibly have matched up to the collective satisfaction in that discovery process, a twisted inversion of the YouTube haul video. The record remains, but the bras are dated.
Other websites stay uncomfortably grounded in the liberal body politic, and in the assumed humanity of their own visitors. In visiting tattle.life, a registration-only British gossip board, you might see users (for example) espouse ‘own-voices’ inclusivity rhetoric in one breath and berate young women in another. It is not uncommon to find someone announcing an engagement or pregnancy 40 pages deep into the life of an obscure web personality. Under the spectre of Covid, any sign of travel from an influencer will subsequently be met with an essay about dead old people or the overburdened NHS. Reddit communities dedicated to ‘snark’ are also dedicated to the eradication of every remaining ‘-ism’ and ‘-phobia’. This collaborative storytelling only works when it is anonymous, or performed under consensus: we are doing a bad thing. It lowers the tone to moralise.
I often see petitions which propose the eradication of gossip websites. Gossip websites, however, are essential to our current online ecosystem, which is governed by a godless and exploitative influencer class. Think of the proposed benefits of religion under capitalism, and now transfer them to bored young women in the 21st century. Things that may actually lessen the appeal of online gossip include soap operas, long Russian novels, celebrity biographies, and female bonding rituals around a campfire.