Very Online (Part 1)
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Content warning: conspiracy theories; Capricorn irritation.
It’s been five years—almost to the day—since a nearly million-view YouTube video showed my face crossfading into J-ffrey Epst-in’s (twice). Very Online is the before, during, and after of being inexplicably targeted by Q-non conspiracy theorists. Please note that SEO keywords I’d like to avoid contain “-”, and I trust you can fill in the blanks. Part 2 will email out in full to newsletter subscribers this summer, and Low Swank will be back in your inbox (and online) in two weeks, right on schedule.
In August 2017 I gave a Creative Mornings talk at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. If you don't have Creative Mornings where you live, it’s a lecture series held monthly by chapters around the world, with a speaker and an audience and a few generous sponsors. The theme I was invited to speak on was “Genius” and I absolutely did not know what to do with that, so I mostly just sidestepped it by talking about my career and my online projects—the latter of which, to be fair, did center around promoting the city’s creative community and creative economy, and I don’t think it’s any sort of stretch to say that there’s collective genius floating around in those realms.
Afterwards I felt like I did fine, but I also remember being pretty torn up about what I could have done better. Public speaking does not come naturally to me. I cannot function without notes or a script; I have a hard time making it sound like I’m speaking conversationally and from the heart. I’m a Capricorn. For better or worse, I’m all effort.
They gave me a month to prepare, the final week of which I spent practicing out loud and recording myself, trying to work through nerves. The first three weeks, though, I just wrote and rewrote, attempting to shape a lot of scattered ideas into something cohesive.
I was always going to start things off by stressing the importance of putting your creative projects out into the world. This was a through line of mine, dating back to when I cold-emailed a Washington Post reporter and she put the URL of my brand-new street style blog in the print edition the very next week. I then spent more than a few early drafts trying to make the following argument:
We should all be promoting our projects for the sake of the city, because there’s an inherent danger in Washington, DC’s perceived identity being confused with that of the federal government.
The federal government piece had been the crux of my work for the previous decade. What I believed then (which I still believe now*) is that the national perception of DC does such a massive disservice to the people who actually live there. When the “drain the swamp” rhetoric isn’t challenged—when the city’s people, communities, local businesses, and, yes, art projects aren’t held up as counterpoints—the prevailing narrative is that DC is the federal government, full stop.**
But the danger part? That was new for me. I didn’t end up using it—it felt like a step too far. Alarmism just really wasn’t the Creative Mornings vibe, and the last thing I wanted to insinuate was that violence was going to befall anyone who neglected to press release their latest blog post. And honestly, I just wasn’t prepared to pay off the premise.
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In December 2016, a man named Edg-r M-ddison W-lch drove 350 miles to DC from Salisbury, North Carolina, and walked into C-met Ping Pong with an AR-15 and a revolver. He’d become obsessed with the P-zzagate conspiracy theory*** that placed C-met—a neighborhood pizza place—as the headquarters for an international cabal of ch-ld pr-dators. He was there to “investigate,” and he shot the lock off a closet door in the process. In a letter to the court that sentenced him to four years in prison, he said he "came to D.C. with the intent of helping people."
I was all riled up about this when it happened, to the point that I mentioned it in a January 2017 interview with my local NPR station. By August, though, I was no longer comfortable universalizing the incident. It didn’t feel like my story to tell, or one that I had rights to construct any sort of larger lesson from. I was also deeply concerned about the appearance of co-opting tragedy to make my own projects sound more important, or more necessary, and I was stressed out enough about this talk as it was. I cut the line, and I moved on.
The point I wanted to make, though, was this: based on what he likely knew about DC, I’d be surprised if Edg-r W-lch expected the city to be more than three blocks long. The White House would be there, of course, and then the Capitol, and then finally the pizza place where H-llary Cl-nton bleeds out of her eyeballs while doing s-tanic cult stuff. So when he got in his car and started his six-hour drive from North Carolina, by hour five he was surely passing dry cleaners and corner markets and rowhouses, not quite understanding why he hadn’t yet had multiple opportunities to flatten N-ncy P-losi in a crosswalk.
Is this ungenerous? Absolutely. But I believe that it’s a fairly common misperception among people prone to the type of rabbit-hole indoctrination that W-lch had fallen into, and I’m not sure it’s entirely their fault. I can only imagine the confusion that prevailed amongst the visitors who found themselves in DC a few January 6ths later.
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I don’t think saying any of this out loud in 2017 would have, in any way, changed what happened when the P-zzagate narrative bizarrely shifted in my direction. It does, however, feel like a missed opportunity for a small slice of prescient, on-the-record irritation about the whole thing, and for that incredibly selfish and entirely Capricorn reason I wish I’d articulated it at the time. Because once the death threats started rolling in, I really didn’t know what to say at all.
*I no longer have the energy or insight to tie the threads of this argument to what’s going on now between the current administration and the city (nor, having moved, do I feel it is in my purview to do so), but it is safe to say that things have only gotten worse.
**I’m completely serious when I say that the Commanders (1) actually having a stadium in DC and/or (2) winning a Super Bowl would do more for this cause than almost anything else.
***100% untrue, 100% debunked. Unfortunately, I’ve found that you do actually have to say that part out loud.
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