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The 8 Most Brain-Melting, Chronically Online Internet ‘Scandals’ of 2022

Kevin Hurler Avatar
Kevin Hurler
The 8 Most Brain-Melting, Chronically Online Internet ‘Scandals’ of 2022

Easily one of the worst things to come out of the digital age is discourse completely detached from reality. You might have heard the phrase “chronically online,” which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, but more specifically can refer to the idea of someone who has no/very little attachment to the way the “real world” works (see also: some variation of “touch grass”).

Those who are steeped in the world of being chronically online also frequently align themselves with the ideas of cancel culture and whataboutism, and operate on a hyper-just moral compass to the point of failure.

The saving grace of the chronically online folks and their subsequent discourse on issues they have made up to fit their own narratives are that they are pretty much unilaterally hated across the Internet. As such, Rebecca Jennings — Vox culture writer and Internet connoisseur — asked the Twitter-verse what the most chronically online discourse they saw in 2022 was, and the results gave me a migraine.

Mistki asks fans to put their phones down

Mitski is a Japanese-American singer-songwriter who mostly dabbles in indie rock. According to reporting from Slate, Mitski urged her fans to refrain from using their phones during her live shows via Twitter, with her management team (who manage the artist’s social media) posting: “I wanted to speak with you about phones at shows. … Sometimes when I see people filming entire songs or whole sets, it makes me feel as though we are not here together.”

The tweet in question is no longer available. Understandable, considering the fallout that Slate outlines. One fan pointed out that they had mental health issues that cause them to dissociate, and filming the concerts helps them remember, and others dogpiled on to pushback on the request in traditional chronically online fashion.

The chilli discourse

Around the time when Twitter began falling into a pit of despair, the chilli discourse began. Since Twitter was mainly focused on how its new corporate overlord Elon Musk would destroy the social media platform, this narrative is a little hard to piece together. Here goes.

It starts with a kind-hearted gesture from the neighbour of “several guys” who moved in next door. This neighbour noticed the guys were ordering a lot of Door Dash and decided to bring them a nice pot of chilli as she felt a “strange motherly urge” to feed them. Sweet, right? Wrong.

It quickly turned into a conversation around misogyny–men should be able to cook for and feed themselves — while others criticised the now proclaimed Chilli Neighbour for her self-described maternal instinct. One user even tried to justify why chilli would ruin the lives of these boys because MAYBE they don’t have bowls or they have dietary restrictions. Honestly, the discourse was pretty tame, with a lot of levelheaded people pointing out that offering food has been a long established way to greet neighbours.

Having coffee in the garden

Imagine enjoying a nice cup of coffee with your partner. Just kidding, you can’t, you’re being problematic. This October, lilplantmami tweeted: “my husband and i wake up every morning and bring our coffee out to our garden and sit and talk for hours. every morning. it never gets old & we never run out of things to talk to. love him so much.” Twitter was not happy.

Some criticised lilplantmami for being allegedly being wealthy, with some assuming that the couple was so rich that neither of them had to work. lilplantmommy later elaborated and explained the her and her husband work on their own schedule and are very lucky to have the life that they live, and for the most part, cooler heads prevailed to make fun of the outage.

NBC News reporter Ben Collins jokingly tweeted: “I wake up every day fully engulfed in flames and being eaten alive by wolves. The fact that your tweet doesn’t represent my experience is a personal affront to each and every fire eater and dingo who’s had to rise before dawn to do the gruelling labour of shooting this snuff film.”

Having a huge dick means you’re dumb

No comment.

Eating at home is NIMBY-aligned (that’s a real sentence I just typed)

A Twitter user who goes by Repositioning Play has news for you. They tweeted: “Recent Twitter discourse compels me to remind you: home cooking is regressive, NIMBY-aligned, problematically gendered, and ultimately a means of reifying existing class structures. The revolution will not be prepared in your kitchen; it will be served to you at a restaurant.”

Alright, here we go.

NIMBY stands for “not in my backyard” and it’s usually a way to describe the way residents of an area will refuse developments in their neighbourhoods while having no problem with the development occurring somewhere else. Hypocrisy in its purest form.

Repositioning Play says that cooking at home is NIMBY-aligned and I have to assume that they’re making an argument that cooking at home keeps people from engaging in their community. Maybe? I guess?

Reading, being a defence contractor, and owning a house

Apparently one person tweeted all of that. That is all.

The problematic authors spreadsheet

Art is designed to make us uncomfortable, that’s the whole point — unless that art doesn’t fit exactly into your worldview, then it’s PrObLeMaTiC. Enter: the problematic authors Twitter thread and spreadsheet.

“I know you guys are tired of ‘the same discourse’ but this needs to be shared,” tweets user Abookishdiaries. “There have been so many books I’ve read that have made me feel uncomfortable, triggered, and disrespected because of the authors. I’m only trying to help others, if you don’t like it then scroll.”

And scroll we did.

Abookishdiaries subsequently published screenshots of a spreadsheet they created on their iPhone’s notes app with a laundry list of authors, the reason they are problematic, and what their notable works are. Obviously some famous writers throughout the history of literature — H.P. Lovecraft, for example — are deeply flawed people. On the other hand, some of these are a little out there.

In-unit laundry is truly the devil

The idea of laundry inside your own home is a luxury you forget you have until you are forced to leave your apartment with a hamper of dirty clothes. It’s humbling, annoying, but to some, in-unit laundry is a foreign concept that is worth getting pissed off at. Take urbaniconoclasm’s Twitter thread for example.

It’s not clear where urbaniconoclasm is from, but it doesn’t appear that they are from the United States as they tweet: “Nothing makes me feel more completely disconnected from how American people live than looking a real estate listings.” This was in response to a picture from an apartment with a washer and dryer hookup, with iconoclast commenting “Well this is a level of desperation for in unit laundry that I have never seen before.”

Well damn. User urbaniconoclasm then spends several tweets then dunking on how doing your laundry at home is stupid by comparing it to driving to the store to get milk, as well as blaming the country’s water crisis on those who take advantage of a washing machine in their own apartment.