Mean Bros

When future Digital Archaeologists carefully sift through the web archives, I wonder what clues they will puzzle over, like finding artifacts in layers of soil. One of the more confusing patterns they would probably find is the regular occurrence of Mean Girls memes all over the internet every October 3rd, going all the way back to 2004 when it was released.

That year was like a tipping point into "Web 2.0" and social media. MySpace had just launched in 2003 and was the first ever social media platform to reach 1 million users a year later (a quaint number now). It was the year that Google launched GMail and IPO'd. It was the year that Firefox 1.0 launched, reigniting the flames of browser competition. It was the year that Digg launched to replace Slashdot and put more power in the hands of users (later to be itself replaced by Reddit). It was the year the flickr became the first major photosharing and hosting site, pioneering tagging, tag clouds, and folksonomies. And it was the year that Facebook launched and spread like wildfire across college campuses.

Despite all of this brewing potential, Mean Girls itself is like a pristine image of a time just before the internet wove itself deeply into teenagers' lives (and everyone else's for that matter). There's no cyberbullying in Mean Girls. Nobody is carrying cellphones. Smartphones don't even exist yet in 2004. Nobody is doom scrolling. I mean, the burn book is literally a paper book!

I think that's partly why I'm so fascinated by how much Mean Girls has been a lasting staple of the web. While it was successful on release, it rode to cult status on BuzzFeed articles and tumblr posts that were feeding this new, user driven, social internet. And now its become such a cultural touchstone that Mean Girls memes have been posted by both Obama and Trump. An anomaly to be sure. And like clockwork October 3rd comes around and there's still folks celebrating Mean Girls day.

But also... you can't help but look at the internet and social media and not immediately bring to mind quotes or moments from the movie. Let's do some together!

Toxic comments

Plastic influencers with devoted followers

Cancellation

Platforms that facilitate harm among and against children

Bots, AI, scam accounts

On the one hand, I think that it's easy to just imagine the internet, and especially social media, as an inevitable den of trolls, fighting, and lawless chaos–horny men finding only fans, scammers on dating sites, bots on Reddit, AI on Facebook, influencers on TikTok and Instagram. Mean Girls itself is based off of the book "Queen Bees and Wannabees", a more sociological and practical guide for parents of teen girls. It's not a far stretch to just assume that the internet collectively operates at the level of a teenage mob...

I think for anyone who has been part of a strong community–whether online or irl–they know that isn't true. The chaos, the fighting, the degradation of humanity, the manipulation for power–it's a vacuum of true leadership, of honor, of maturity, of empathy. One of the most hilarious recurring tropes in Mean Girls is the way that Regina George seems to have power over even the adults, either because of fear or desire to be cool. Who do we allow to take the reigns? Who is navigating our future? What moral guidelines are they using? How far are we willing to go in allowing sociopaths to make the rules we follow? Maybe its more than human nature. Maybe it matters who makes the arena and the rules of play.

I'll tell you a short story. It's about a loser who goes to a new school. They seem smart, but kind of a social misfit. Like they'd been homeschooled or something. They make a friend–someone who seems to like them for who they are. But they also have a kind of quality that makes them stand out to the elite. The loser and their true friend begin a venture–something that will maybe even show the world that these elites are nothing special. First step is to just get inside the in group, and leverage that.

Only... something happens along the way. The loser is almost too successful at their plan. Their popularity is even more than they expected. They move to phase two of the plan. And this is really where it backfires. In all of this taste of power and glory, and especially with all of the time they spend around influential people, they betray their actual friend.

I'm not talking about Cady in Mean Girls, though. I'm talking about Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, as well as what happened in real life. That movie made an interesting choice, leaning heavily on the court transcripts and focusing on the story between Mark, his friend and business partner he screwed over, Eduardo, and Sean Parker–a kind of charming Mean Bro sociopath of his own variety.

I recently watched the two of these movies almost back to back and the parallels just jumped right out at me.

Sadly for Mark, though, he doesn't really get the third act that Mean Girls gets. He does get sucked into the world of Silicon Valley and investment from Peter Thiel and chasing the dreams of growth at all cost. He doesn't get a chance to share power and disrupt the cycle. Instead he buys up or clones any possible threat to dominance.

And now, other billionaires are buying whatever rivals are available, with Elon Musk buying Twitter and recently Larry Ellison of Oracle getting in on the forced TikTok deal. This gaggle of Mean Bros are all seemingly bent on building a tech dystopia and taking no responsibility for the potential fallout.

Social media has effectively centralized the web into a handful of companies. These companies have profited off our data, manipulated us, and now used it to train AI. The technology is a wonder, to be sure, but it is also undeniably being used to bury the web in AI slop.

I've though about these Digital Archaeologists, you see. I wonder whether they'll be able to trust anything on the web after 2025. I wonder how we'll have to learn to handle being up to our ears in slop.

It sounds pretty grim, I know. But if all I was going to do was gripe, I probably wouldn't have bothered writing the article or getting this website set up. I do have hope! And we here at human.ing even have something of a plan in mind. You'll just have to sign up for more updates. I hate to say it, but we're gonna have to dig way deeper to get to the bottom of all this mess. We haven't even talked about the algorithms!