Who Am I?
Before I inundate you with my contributions to the ever expanding “take economy”, I wanted to give you a little background about myself and my goals.
A common point of conversation in my house growing up was the 10,000 hour rule, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, and initially proposed by psychologist Anders Ericsson. The idea being that it takes 10 years, or roughly 10,000 hours of concentrated practice to become an expert at doing something across a large number of different professions. This is a loose interpretation of what Ericson et al. actually concluded in The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, but the discussion in my family was fruitful all the same. These days, when Apple gives me my weekly screen time report, I’m slightly appalled by the progress I’ve made toward that mark when it comes to time spent on social media.
Born in 1997, I am part of the micro generation between Millennials and Gen Z who grew up as technology grew up. In middle school, the Droid Razr was the hip phone to have, and iPhones burst onto the scene when we were in high school. We were too young to understand what was happening on 9/11, but on the internet early enough to accidentally watch a beheading on LiveLeak. We have memories of life before technology, but went through our entire education with the internet as a tool. A large number of us learned some amount of computer science in school and notably, we are some of the oldest people to have grown up in a world where social media existed while we were forming our childhood friendships.
We are the first members of Gen Z to reach adulthood and we share an inexplicable connection to each other and lack of such a connection to things deemed stereotypically Millennial or Gen Z. But of all the similarities among Zennials, perhaps the most unifying and ubiquitous is that we have all been taught digital literacy from early on in our mental development. Technology is not a thing we tried to learn as adults, nor was it an established environment that we were born into. We are the generation of I Can Has Cheezburger?, Minecraft, Club Penguin, and an entirely unregulated internet. We grew up before parental controls, ubiquitous social media platforms, and scarily targeted ads. Most of us are reaching adulthood having learned more from the internet than books, and owning devices that function as extensions of ourselves. As children of the early internet, I believe we have some incredibly important contributions to make to the body of work covering this transformative change in the way humans process information. I don't proclaim to have much more to add to the conversation than some minor observations on the small corner of the internet that I have come to understand and create content in, but I believe there are genius minds in this microgeneration who will transform our understanding of the internet and all of information as a result.
As I approach my 10-year and 10,000-hour mark for time on social media, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what expertise I have garnered from an activity that adults have been quick to remind me is time wasted. I have always found the random audience of the internet to be somewhat of a safe place for me to explore my thoughts outside of the real world where I feel awkward and painfully aware of the social quirks that make me different from everyone else. I have always had an obsessive fascination with history, and by extension politics, and I found that, while such interests made me a real pain in the ass at family gatherings, there was an entire world of people online who were just as neurotic and endlessly curious about politics and the history behind them as me. As a result, from the moment I got my first computer late in middle school, I have been an avid consumer of political internet content in all its forms.
This Substack is just the latest attempt at organizing 10 years’ worth of notes, content, and failed attempts to make some sense of the wonderful nightmare that is political discourse on the internet. I offer a few main guidelines for feeling less overwhelmed, having more productive conversations, and thinking about reality as we enter into an age where artificial intelligence will transform what kinds of misinformation are possible. That said, I have no intention to provide any answers, any conclusive truth, any new ideology to cling to. I highly value individualism in myself and in others and I would feel irresponsible if people were to take my words as gospel and not as simply a different point of view to think about. I have always considered myself a curious person, and am instinctually drawn to the content that is censored and people who are outsiders. This has led me on a whiplash of personal political development throughout my formative years, a process by which my opinion on most issues has changed more than once.
My hope is through this newsletter, you will see the futility in constantly searching for some platonic “truth” and instead prioritize creating your own strategies for reaching a point where you would consider yourself “productively misinformed”. We are an imperfect creature operating on imperfect information that is changing all the time. It is both wishful thinking and ahistorical to believe any one of us will ever reach a point where all we believe is the objective truth. We all have biases, incomplete and slightly inaccurate knowledge bases, and social contexts that dictate how we feel about world events. To seek some form of objectivity on everything as if that is a possible goal is a path that leads deep into the most pernicious of internet conspiracies. As we stand on the precipice of an internet that is soon to fill up with indistinguishable deep fakes and continued politicized misinformation generated by artificial intelligence, it’s going to become critical that we all move into a headspace where we understand that some of the things we believe are lies. We will need an ability to quickly change our views and beliefs as we learn and unlearn things at a rapidly escalating pace. Humility will be needed to soften our egos, focusing on why we believe things over what we believe will allow us to distance ourselves from the substance of our beliefs, and choosing empathy will allow us to build an interpersonal resilience that is woefully lacking online today.
If you have been a long time follower of my Instagram page, much of this is familiar to you. You are familiar with my emphasis on thinking for yourself, my deep love of Wikipedia (hence all the unnecessary hyperlinks), and you know that I try not to take myself that seriously. But what you likely don’t know is who I am as an individual. I learned early on that broadcasting your personal identity alongside sometimes controversial political content online is simply setting yourself up for unwanted interactions. But for the devoted few who find my opinions interesting enough to follow me here, I can be a bit more open.
My name is Matt Flathers. I grew up in central Massachusetts, attending the oldest junior boarding school in America, Fay School, before attending the prep school right across the street, St. Mark’s School. From there I went on to Brown University where I got a degree in Engineering and Archaeology and took classes in 17 different departments (Archaeology, Engineering, Computer Science, History, Economics, Egyptology, Math, Applied Math, Psychology, Philosophy, Public Health, Public Policy, Literary Arts, Anthropology, American Studies, Film, and Geology). Upon graduation I accepted a role as a Data Aggregation Engineer at Epic Systems and moved out to Madison Wisconsin in late 2019. I moved back to Massachusetts in late 2021 to take an Analytics Engineering role at a health data company in Boston.
My plan is to send out this newsletter roughly once a month, each time covering a new political topic, with specific focus on how it the topic is discussed online. Unlike most digital politics pundits, my search is for unconventional narratives and I have no interest in picking sides in the partisan culture war. I did my time in the comment section trenches on both sides as a stupid teenager and now spend my days waving memes around in hopes of freeing more people from the mentally destructive process that is online political outrage porn. I will end every newsletter with an original meme since that is the spirit from which this project was born and I hope to infuse a little more humor into my work than is typical of most political commentary. I hope you find some of the things I write thought-provoking and encourage you to DM me feedback on Instagram at @anewgenerationofmemes!
Meme Template Backstory: In 1946, Albert Einstein gave a lecture at Lincoln University, one of the first degree-granting black colleges in the United States. This meme template is from that lecture. In an article that he penned just before his visit titled The Negro Question, Einstein wrote
There is a somber point in the social outlook of Americans, their sense of quality and human dignity is mainly limited to men of white skin. Even among these, there are prejudices of which I as a Jew am clearly conscious. But they are unimportant in comparison with the attitude of whites toward their fellow citizens of darker complexion, particularly toward Negroes. The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me. I can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out.
There are still many evils in the world today, some even carried out by an American nation I am proud to be a part of. And so, in that same spirit of speaking out, my memes serve as my way to try avoiding complicity in those things America does which I cannot support.
Hi Matt, I’ve followed your Instagram page for ages and I just wanted to say that this is really well written and I’m excited to see how this develops, good luck!
really a good read