Extremely Online 2.0

My name is Katherine Cross, and I am struggling with being Extremely Online.

In the wake of some of my essays that reference this caps-required phenomenon I’ve encountered some good faith criticism of the concept, suggesting that it’s ill-defined, subject to the writer’s or reader’s biases, and that—if anything—we’re all Extremely Online as wired late moderns, and therefore the term is functionally meaningless. Thus, to use it as a pejorative would be as silly as excoriating people as ‘breathers.’ 

It’s worth taking such critiques seriously, especially as many of us at Liberal Currents, myself most prominently, seek to operationalize the term in ways that suggest a definition. It’s true that ‘Extremely Online’ is one of those terms that oozes ‘know it when you see it’ ineffability like a toxin. Everyone is sure they know who’s Extremely Online and it just so happens to be everyone they hate on their social media platform of choice. The term, if one is not careful, can indeed become an in-group signifier with no referent other than one’s chosen enemies in the out-group. 

So, I think it’s time that I offered a useful definition. One that lets no one, least of all myself, off the hook, and allows us to diagnose the matter with something approaching useful precision. In the process I hope to make an argument against the core of most good faith criticism of the ‘Extremely Online’ concept: the idea that we all are Extremely Online.

Because, no, we are not. There are some Extremely Online people—mostly among the wealthy and political elite—who have wrought enormous damage to our world because they’ve become obsessed with what they see on social media. But not everyone who uses social media, much less the Internet writ large, is Extremely Online, and not all of us who struggle with Onlineness do so in the same way or with the same consequentiality. 

This essay is about how we can thread the needle between meaningful criticism of what social media does to us, and the likes of Jonathan Haidt who says social media will lead to the “decline of humanity.” It is not about Haidt’s favoured target of ‘distracted teens,’ nor about how we really need social media bans for teens (a subject for another day). It is an attempt to give some analytic heft to a concept that is too often deployed to mean “people who annoy me on <insert platform addiction of choice here>.”

We are not all Extremely Online, and fewer of us should be.

So, what are the pithy definitions we can offer? We should begin with the form of Extremely Onlineness that is most dysfunctional. Extreme Onlineness as a social problem, rather than mere familiarity with obscure internet memes or social media beefs, manifests in two complementary ways:

1. To be Extremely Online is to mistake social media’s map for the real territory.
2. To be Extremely Online is to mistake social media consensus for popular opinion.

Social media is a pinhole view of the world, showing you truths through the narrowest possible aperture, forever expanding and contracting in the precise ways that will piss you off the most at any given moment. Or, if you are so inclined, the precise ways that will confirm your biases at every available opportunity. None of us—myself included—is immune to this sort of nonsense. You do not simply risk being misinformed. You risk being destroyed.

Elon Musk’s bigoted legendarium of excessive posting is but a prime example. His platform X is microwaving brains at a record rate: in the wake of Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow victory in the Michigan primary, some of X’s reactionary centrists (and some resistlibs like Magdi Jacobs, with 45k followers) decided to blame a middling poli-stat account for Haley Stevens’ loss, alleging electoral interference because the account reported on internal polling that turned out to be wrong. Centrist writer Noah Smith (818k followers) has degenerated into a middle-aged man saying “retard” every other post just to feel something. Novelist and activist Susan Abulhawa (76k followers) has descended into the depths of Protocols-esque antisemitism. J. K. Rowling’s mind has mouldered before her reputed 13.7 million followers, as nearly all her posts speak to her ever-deepening obsession with trans women’s genitals—recently posting an upskirt image of a trans woman for all the world to see.

What links these cases to other, more sympathetic ones is that they all show the long-term effects of that pinhole perspective. It is absolutely the case, for instance, that nearly all of Rowling’s recent posts are about her endless outrage about trans equality. That’s not just a reflection of her sincerely-held bigotries, but of her timeline. She is reflecting back to the world what she has chosen to see on X, and what she sees is a clearing-house of transmisogyny and other anti-trans obsessives, spreading disinformation, mockery, and hatred. Yes, it has clearly shaped her, and now her money and influence shapes British politics in turn, forcing the British state to adapt to the screaming fantasyland she exposes herself to night after night.

That particular bleak fantasia is but one island in an archipelago of narrow fantasies that elites all over the world are exposing themselves to. It’s no coincidence that the examples I give here are billionaires, prominent activists, journalists, and writers. The epistemic and financial elite who spend all day online, exposing themselves to a pinhole view of screeching madness, and then using their power to drag that madness offline and into the lives of people who barely use social media.

To be Extremely Online is to believe that such madness is a perfect description of reality, to believe that social media is showing you the entirety of the real world—or the only bits of the real world that matter—and that the people you see populating spaces like Reddit or Bluesky or TikTok are a representative slice of the population. To see one’s feed as telling the truth about society rather than a truth, to see it as the whole ocean of humanity rather than a mere tributary, is to be Extremely Online.

One: Extremely Online is a way of being, embodied and performative.

The brief definitions I gave above are all about assigning unwarranted importance to what you see on your feed. A stronger formulation of this idea comes from the editors of the late, great Real Life magazine who wrote a brief introduction to a week of essays about “becoming rather than being online.”

This formulation is about getting us away from the idea of “online” as a place and more as a way of being, which makes the concept of an Extremely Online person more legible—it is not merely about hanging out somewhere, but acting a certain way, developing a habitus of internet bullshit. In this way, it is analogous to subcultural identities, like being goth, punk, or alt. It is performative in the true sense of the word: constituted and made real through behaviour. As the Real Life editors put it:

To be ‘extremely online’ would designate when the habits common to communicating with screens seep into our awareness and our identity and our behaviors regardless of the screen’s presence. Online-ness, here, isn’t a remove or a retreat from the everyday and the real but is the norm that centers us in the world and in our own heads. It is to speak in memes, to see in photos, to intuit the metrics and know what counts.

To be ‘extremely online’ is to post and to see what has been posted as very important—and it is also to risk misunderstanding what is seen on your screens as too representative of the rest of the world, to think our niches are bigger than they are. For some, the internet, as a genre, is a low-key lower-case detached ironic nihilism. For others, it follows deep into screen-based communities founded in radical chaos or white supremacy.

There again is my map-versus-territory definition, and we can add some characteristics that define what this way of being is like. Many Extremely Online people will exhibit some or all of these qualities; not all are equally bad, but in concert they can spell trouble:

1. Excessive familiarity with personalities that became famous through social media influencing. 
2. Adopting the memetics and argot of online communities (e.g., using memespeak).
3. Allowing oneself to be influenced by social media discourse above and beyond other influences. The influence of social media thus becomes likelier to guide one’s priorities and actions in the physical world.
4. Assuming that people you’ve seen in your feed online teach you something meaningful about strangers you may meet in person.
5. Expecting the physical world to be as responsive to you as your feed is (i.e., catering to individual preferences, with frictionless control; this leads to a diminished capacity to deal healthily with disagreement and conflict, or to reconcile your individual preferences to the needs of a larger collective).
6. Prioritising gratification and validation over consensus and deliberation. 
7. Regarding news and perspectives transmitted through social media as inherently more authentic or reliable than any mainstream source.

Some of these criteria may be confronting—especially point 7. After all, hasn’t Liberal Currents itself benefited from that phenomenon? We are, after all, often positioning ourselves against the sanewashing, complicit corporate media that feels so unequal to this moment. But as with all of these criteria, they each exist on a continuum and can be taken too far. Familiarity with online personalities is no vice; some of my best friends are online personalities. But when one enthrones them as a primary influence, the risk of fatally narrowing one’s perspective grows. Similarly, a moment’s thought about point 7 should remind you of countless instances of dangerous online influencers peddling everything from MAHA or QAnon, to COVID denialism or doomerism, to your choice of wild conspiracy theories. It is, in short, the madness of “do your own research” taken to a logical extreme. This is where the fad of antipathy to expertise dwells, and from this circle of hell it has done much harm.

But this more expansive formulation also gets us to another problem with being Extremely Online: the way it gets offline, and how that particular embodied practice can start to shape relationships far from any Wi-Fi connection. So, let’s start there.

Two: If being Extremely Online is embodied, then one can bring these embodied online practices and relationships out into the physical world, often with disastrous consequences.

The habitus of embodiment is not deterministic. Embodying a certain personality—like, say, the consummate professional or the edgy punk or the dutiful daughter—will not reliably or perfectly produce the same results every time, nor lead to perfect conformity among its practitioners. We remain free and unique individuals, even as we pantomime one another in hopes of fitting in somewhere, somehow.

Like, say, the fluidic dimension of Online. Habitus helps us understand how certain social practices become a way of being as much as a way of life, and we take it with us. One person can wear only so many masks. If we are who we pretend to be, then we take our various guises with us wherever we go. In short, being Online comes with you when you are offline. Many of us do this in benign ways. My best friend and I have a habit of self-effacing about trivial risk-taking by saying “I’m built different. Better. Maybe even better than the gods,” a classic Twitter meme. Argot, in-jokes, the bric-a-brac of culture: you take it with you everywhere, even conversations at your friend’s kitchen table. 

Loïc Wacquant’s summary of habitus helps us see that the embodied phenomenon of being Extremely Online is, indeed, leaky and not in need of an exhaustive definition to be satisfied in order to identify it. There can be lesser and greater varieties, expressions of it that tick some boxes and not others. And that frees us up to talk about the darker side of being Online as a specific phenomenon.

When the Extremely Online qualities are widely embodied outside their domain, disaster has often followed. In If We Burn, his book-length diagnosis of the failures of 2010s horizontalist activism, Vincent Bevins described how, for himself and his fellow journalists, “it is a real problem that we are drawn so powerfully to the production of whatever will go viral on social media.” He said this in the context of explaining why he and his work were often visible in the activist stories he was telling, but also expressing worry about the power of journalists to shape narratives about protest movements as a whole. 

If what goes viral drives the narrative, what might be getting left out? And what incentives does that create for both journalist and activist? In the latter case, Bevins’ book answers the question at length. He traces the roots of 2010s horizontalist activism to the 1960s New Left and decentralist hippie counterculture, as well as artistic movements like the French Situationists who “laughed at discipline and authority, were confrontationally anti-hierarchical, and refused to ever make concrete demands.” 

The role of the internet is something he ascribes to the post-Cold War triumphalism of capitalist individualism, with the 90s defining the internet’s fundamental design and ethos just as it was hitting the big time, imprinting it with California Ideology visions of self-organising networks. 

But the role of social media in fomenting the many movements he studied cannot be overstated; from Tehran to Kyiv to Istanbul to São Paulo to Santiago to New York, leaderless, anarchic protests came to dominate the form and presented radical challenges to power all over the world. But instead of the movements shaping social media to fit their needs, social media shaped them. “I think it’s a little sad,” one Hong Kong activist told Bevins, “that we got so many of our ideas from pop culture.” 

As Bevins put it later, “the means were the ends.” The leaderless, hyper-individualism of life on social media was recreated in the street, in occupied parks and squares, in marches and riots. “Social media firms made it much easier to scale up the size of horizontal mass gatherings,” he writes, and, in turn, brought the latest iteration of anarchic, shocking, free Situationism to the streets. Occupy Wall Street was not merely a protest, but a living practice (a habitus, one might say) of the world to come.

Thus, Online went offline, but the grass shriveled from its touch. We know where the 2010s ended up, of course, and how many (though not all!) of these movements came to nothing because they were unable to seize power. As with online culture and its myriad callouts, these movements were organised around merely sending a message to those already in power. If they managed to overthrow someone, a different elite was ready and waiting to seize the power that the street movements spent their time cancelling each other over. As with endless social media discourse, it was good for directing masses of people in something like a coherent, orgiastic yell, but it offered nothing—no mechanism, no hope—for what came after.

Three: The embodiment of being Extremely Online can lead one to overestimate the importance of online relationships to the larger world, and act accordingly.

This sub-definition may seem like a reformulation of the previous one, but it represents a shift in emphasis and flows naturally from the example given above. This is also, in some ways, an extension of the idea of social media being treated as a globally representative poll. Downstream of such misapprehensions is a tendency to assert that the people on your feed are a more common Type of Guy than they actually are.

An obvious example lies in the way some Extremely Online liberals continually scapegoat Extremely Online leftists for failing to vote in 2024 (or 2020 or 2016), or at least failing to perform sufficient enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate. I’ll cop to some sympathy for this perspective; these particular kinds of anti-voting activists, who even now promote the myth that Democrats and Republicans are exactly the same, are extremely irritating pioneers of dumbassery. Many are the kinds of people who say things like “if voting changed anything, they would try to take it away,” neglecting the fact that Republicans have spent the better part of my lifetime trying to take it away again and again.

But these people are a microminority of a minority and they cannot be said to speak for the armies of low-propensity voters who stayed home in any given election year. They can’t even be meaningfully said to represent the political Left, never mind a group as vast and disparate as a third of the U.S.’s entire electorate. 

Over on Bluesky I frequently see certain Extremely Online liberals working themselves towards a heart attack as they respond to every new horror of the Trump administration by cursing Extremely Online leftists who didn’t vote in 2024, or who were insufficiently coconut-pilled. Given the fluid dynamics of the election, scapegoating any such microminority is about as silly as scapegoating the mere existence of trans people for Harris’ loss. It has no rational basis beyond the fact that you are exposing yourself to very annoying people who outrage you because you’re passively telling a feed to show them to you every day—and then allowing them to take on an outsized role in your perception of events.

The consequences here are relatively small but could still engender a propensity for factional infighting that—again—will be something you bring into every domain of your political and activist life. At best, it’s silly; at worst, it’s actively destructive.

For instance, we have to talk about what happened to Congressional candidate Scott Wiener at San Francisco Trans March this year. The cisgender progressive, who currently serves as a California State Senator, has attended in solidarity with trans people for twenty-two years. This time found himself hounded and harangued out of the event by a small crowd, screaming at him for supposedly supporting genocide in Gaza. 

Wiener intended to join a trans-led Pride Shabbat service affiliated with the march, but never got close. Instead, according to Wiener, he was shouted at about his “Israeli handlers,” among other things. Earlier this year, Wiener affirmed his longstanding criticisms of the Israeli government and called the war in Gaza a genocide—for which he had to step down as co-chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus. But this wasn’t enough for the virality-chasing activist who filmed him at the San Francisco Trans March, screaming at him that he’d “been terrible on Gaza.” An issue he had precious little influence over as a state legislator, in any case. 

The coruscating rage directed at him, where it seemed his Jewish heritage was the very thing that made him suspect, could not be slaked by discourse. It demanded only punishment and exile. Post hoc statements from some organisers defending the hateful display claimed that Wiener was never invited, condemned him for fundraising off the incident, and demanded “accountability” for his “too little, too late” statements on Gaza. That nebulous demand for “accountability” could not be more Online if it were a wireless hotspot; it’s a Rorschach inkblot that provides only justification for ongoing abuse. 

Wiener was trying to meet his constituents where they were, and paid a price for the attempted compromise, earning the ire of both pro-Palestinian progressives and segments of the Jewish community. 

As for the supposed “harm” done to the trans community by this episode, I could find none—save for the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club seeming to imply that police actions later in the day were somehow related to the incident with Wiener. But the post hoc statements read like social media posts attempting to win an argument by making nebulous claims of “harm.” No specifics were offered. And it all feels like an attempt by some to blame Wiener for the own-goal they scored on themselves. 

I have sympathy for the organizers; we as trans people can do no right in the eyes of the mainstream press, and they are eager to demonize us as a violent mob. Which is why it baffles me that this small group of people would hijack the reputation of the Trans March to harass a man who was not there in a public capacity, and voluntarily film themselves doing this and put it online. Whatever negative publicity was generated did not come from Wiener, but from the people filming themselves shouting about “Israeli handlers.”

If the optics were bad, that’s the fault of the gaggle of harassers, not Wiener. Either the harassers should’ve been disavowed, or (crazy idea) Wiener—who was there without press or security—should’ve just been allowed to attend the Shabbat event.

Alas, social media dynamics took over. There was content to be made: 13.5 million views on Twitter.

There are even more consequential ways that social media culture leaks into the political sphere, embodied in the Trump administration itself. The dimensions of this should be obvious in both their catastrophic consequences and pitiable purpose; everything from the illegal targeting of boats in the Caribbean to the peace-sabotaging social media posts against Iran, to the very fact of that war, to the devastation being wrought across American cities by ICE and CBP as empowered fascist paramilitaries, is both real in the bloodshed wrought and the absolutely pathetic nature of the Extremely Online audience being courted in word and deed. 

While so many organisations and governments alike have a “social media strategy,” for the Trump administration such an enterprise has wholly replaced any other forms of strategy. Performing for the chorus of clapping racist seals on Twitter has become an end in itself, le epic owns served up with the full, decaying faith and credit of the United States government on a daily basis. This White House, staffed by people who know and care who ‘the Bronze Age Pervert’ is, seem continually stunned that their far-right obsessions fail to inspire mass support. What gets a thousand reposts on Twitter can’t fill a fascist fairground.

As we observed earlier, Elon Musk is perhaps the example par excellence of an Extremely Online individual, a man whose social media use is so cataclysmic in its scale and severity that only the wilfully dense could deny it. The billionaire has pickled his brain in the brine of white nationalist and neo-Nazi Twitter accounts over the last several years, leading to his open cheerleading for pogroms against non-white immigrants, eugenics, and Great Replacement theory conspiracism. 

On the same token, many so-called TERFs—the anti-trans extremists who at least superficially (if increasingly unconvincingly) also claim some liberal or feminist ideology—are people who clearly have spent far too much time online, assigning world-historical importance to their feeds. The British website Mumsnet, once an innocuous online forum for mothers to discuss that all-important vocation, became a hotbed of anti-trans hatred that both reflected and helped to spread the contagion throughout the entirety of the British establishment. 

Ordinary people are hardly immune. As we’ll see in the next section, social media power users (those most vulnerable to the extreme variants of being Too Online) have always been a rare breed. But many people don’t see it that way. Power users’ superpower is making their shadows loom large on the minds of others, and their loudness and extremism makes even relatively offline people overstate their influence—with significant consequences: just take a look at how recent pogroms in Belfast and Southampton were cheered on mostly by far-right accounts with no direct connection to the UK; these posts, in turn, have attracted almost as much attention as the pogroms themselves.

Recent research backs up the idea that social media can jaundice one’s view of the world. Angela Y. Lee and her colleagues found that a nationally representative sample of Americans wildly overestimate the percentage of platform users who post abuse or disinformation. In short, ordinary people wildly misperceive how representative power users (or “super-sharers” in the study’s parlance) truly are. In reality, Lee et al.’s study found only 3% of Reddit users posted “toxic content” and only 8.5% of Facebook users shared fake news items. But their study participants “believe that the amount of harmful content on social media is the result of many users participating in harmful behaviors” (emphasis in original).

This is part of the leakiness of Extremely Online behaviour, an aura that can affect even those not cursed with terminal onlineness. More broadly, the perception of social media power users can become representative of what “people are like” in the minds of others, contributing to declines in social trust, and adding to perceptions of perceived moral decline, especially among youth (the “13-year-old in his mom’s basement” remains an irresistible mental model of the archetypal online troll for many). As we’ll see in the next section, this is particularly ironic given the actual online attitudes of young people.

At each point, we see people making consequential decisions that have made innocent peoples’ lives materially harder—or even snuffed those lives out altogether—who are doing it for the ’gram, who are steeped in Poster’s Madness, whose entire vision of the world is shaped by what they’re seeing on these platforms.

Four: Of necessity, not everyone is Extremely Online, not even everyone who uses social media. 

We should spend some time establishing the fact that there is, indeed, an outside to this phenomenon.

As a teacher of a university-level tech ethics class, I’m regularly talking to college-age students about how social media is plagued with problems at the very root of its poisonous tree. Of late, I’m astonished at how many of them not only agree up front, but tell me they outright don’t use it. Some are quite loud and proud about it. 

Of course, it’s one of the classic academic fallacies to assume university students are in any way representative of broad sociological trends beyond their specific clade, but emerging research suggests that there is growing skepticism about the platforms that have come to dominate our lives and hold a blade to democracy’s throat. 

According to a recent analysis by the University of Amsterdam’s Petter Törnberg, the youngest internet users are reaching a level of social media abstention that approaches that of the oldest age cohorts—and it’s been increasing over the last few years. Other surveys back this up, and more young people are recognising the corrosive aspects of social media usage. This points to a bleak future for social media, but also towards a present where whole vital swathes of the population are definitionally not Extremely Online.

It is certainly true that our lives are increasingly lived online. The mobile revolution has ensured that even developing countries could leapfrog the need for a broadband backbone in favour of a proliferation of cellphone towers. It brought digital living to every corner of the world, wherever one could lash onto some approximation of a 5G signal. This is part of what has ensured nearly 70% of the entire world is on social media, at least by the most generous estimates. But the flexibility of that generosity is the point; counting accounts, even inactive ones, and low-propensity users makes the situation clear: to get to 70% you have to include lots of people who are manifestly not very Online. 

That means that so much more of the world, mercifully, does not share the same winnowing of perspectives, the same excessive significance applied to the most trivial of online disputes—or its esoteric culture, its memes, its shitposts—as the Extremely Online.

Even low-propensity use can have its risks if you stumble onto and believe the wrong TikTok. Governments spend big on disinformation campaigns for a reason. But this is still not the same as everyone sharing the same characteristics of Online-ness. It matters that 79% of Americans either don’t know or have no opinion about Hasan Piker. Most Americans may use social media, but they’re not that Online.

Another rejoinder runs as follows: frontline, professional politics is increasingly conducted through social media, therefore we just need to suck it up and accept social media’s triumph over our wills. After all, even leaving Social Medias Georg (aka Donald J. Trump) to one side, it is a requirement for anyone who even aspires to office to have a social media presence of some sort and a strategy for deploying it like the deadly weapon it is. But I would contend that this is less a function of politics being necessarily Extremely Online than it is the long tail of the elite fad of being Extremely Online, which is precisely what has led to Britain’s spasm of transphobia at every level of its civil society and the implosion of its democracy.

The 2010s applied enormous pressure to politicians and media figures: get online or get left behind. That trend has now calcified into a dogma, and the most powerful people in our society are now spending all day in the brain microwave of platforms like Twitter with their proven radicalisation capacity. Mandatory social media use is not an inevitability of some long arc of evolutionary or technosocial development; it is a choice.

And it is one we can refuse.

Knowing how to recognise the symptoms is half the battle. The rest is up to us. The first step lies in admitting there’s a problem.  

Featured image is "Scrolling on phone," edited. CC BY-SA 3.0 Japanexperterna.se 2015.