Though it feels unlikely that one person who knows me would call me tech-savvy, I can say that I went relatively early and pretty hard for the greatest hits of social networking sites (before they were even called that). I thought Friendster was a blast, updated my Facebook “wall” constantly and simply loved to Tweet. During the Pandemic, there was a stretch in which I posted to Instagram every. Single. Day (versus 2024, where my hard posts numbered 7 – which would have been 6 if President Carter had booked his departure for the Pearly Gates two days later!) I got into Clubhouse for a hot minute (okay, let’s call it 59 seconds), and though Snapchat baffled me, yes, I did have a profile. Sure, I forgot the handle AND the recovery email, though since I had never had the desire to post there even once (I’ve never used a filter in my life), it didn’t really matter.
Then came TikTok and I thought: ok — maybe I’m done.
Now it’s not that I’m too old: people of all ages produce and consume TikToks, which is but one of the reasons it might end up being the most influential social platform in history (IMO). Now I am not one of these people, but this is not even a demonstration of my usual anti-joiner stance. When I first registered an account (which is just @user followed by A DOZEN numbers, so don’t bother to search for me), I was being served all sorts of content that I wasn’t fundamentally interested in but which puzzled me enough to keep watching – sort of how you might stop to examine a gross thing that washed up on a beach. “Why do I keep getting videos of people doing the same dance?” I lamented to my friend Jaime, my personal TikTok expert. “Partly because you’re not watching enough to let the algorithm lead you to what you will definitely be interested in,” she replied before adding, “And also because that’s a good deal of what TikTok is.” I pretended like I understood, but from this point forward that I was pretty sure that TikTok would never be for me.
This was several years ago (in – or probably slightly post – the peak of “Neon Moon” content), but to be honest with you, I’ve never once opened the app without being sent there by someone else – often to try to cram as much information about some trend, reference or artifact that people have been talking about for weeks while I have been doltishly (but also blissfully) unaware. That was until – in a trajectory that was familiar to me from the De La Soul story-rap “My Brother’s A Basehead”– I went from the one that could handle any drug to finding the one that could pull my plug, i.e., dramatic readings of the Blake/Baldoni correspondence. Guys, I couldn’t get enough.
The Simple Life Indeed.
Though you probably feel that it’s been a long, strange trip since December, you surely recall the reason these texts have seen the light of day is that the former co-stars of a film either prophetically or wildly inaccurately titled It Ends With Us have brought suit against each other for (incoming: a not-at-all legal term) pulling all sorts of wack shit from pre-production right through the premiere. At first, many applauded Ms. Lively’s pushing back on a pretty grim spectacle of internet hate, asserting that she had been the victim of targeted retaliation for taking issue with Mr. Baldoni’s systematic abuse (he was not merely her co-star but also her director). For a brief, potentially liberatory moment, the filing stood as a kind of Women In Hollywood status update, a Me Too-point-Oh: were women really still fighting this nonsense, even when their names were at the top of the call sheet?! And was this how easy it was to defame and punish a woman who challenged the opinions, authority and ego of her male boss? Um, duh, Lively insisted, as she dumped out a whole trash can of receipts.
Though it wasn’t quite that simple – in part because unlike the communication between representatives of the firm tasked with “burying” the film’s female lead that was initially published by the New York Times, the texts between the two stars seemed to reveal no clear villain, no obvious threats. Faux civility? Check. Weird posturing? Present. Confusing HBO cryptid references? Sì, Ortega. Something called a “Reputation-coded threat”? Thanks, Pop Apologists. But frankly, that just confirms that these two are kinda tedious (read: actor-y), not evil (unless you hold Justin’s 6+ minute voice notes against him, which I know my friends Sarah and Danny would).
Nonetheless, these amount to little more than the liner notes for the theatre kid version of a diss track, not another watershed moment in women’s struggle for workplace equity and equality. So why are we all still spinning the tune? (No, seriously: I’m willing to bet people are posting about it as you read this). Other than stupid dramatic people hell-bent on sounding smart, what is really on offer here beyond the simple bonus of a glimpse at messages we were never meant to see?
I think it might be this: these two have submitted to regular folk the kind of lesson that applies to a demo beyond their similarly genetically blessed, globally admired wildly overpaid peers: anyone who yes, also puts their pants one leg at a time, but more importantly has a mobile phone. Which means all of us. Because the real issue here was not the content, even in all its needy, grandiose, bizarre, self-serious, high-handed, this-is-what-a-sensitive-man/boss bitch-looks-like and jokes-that-don’t-quite-land cringe; it was what can happen both parties care more about their own soapboxes than what the other person is trying to say.
It's rare to find people who love (talking on the) phone anymore, and hey, I get it: at this stage in history, our mobile devices are more instruments of intrusion than connection. It’s not enough that when we open up Instagram (or the Times or CNN app), we get bombarded with media in the form of headlines, photos and videos that kept us there longer than we intended and which are specifically designed to wrest focus. Having a smart phone means you are never far from the reach of anyone who has access to whatever shows up in most basic internet search of your name, which might include a work email, personal email, direct phone number, any social media accounts with a messaging function. But these feel downright passive compared to a ringing (or even silently vibrating) phone, which rarely signals good news but does bring telemarketers, fundraisers, robocallers and outright scams. As a person who finds short phone calls extremely efficient and long ones most pleasurable as long as I am the one who has initiated them, I also have friends of many years that I have never spoken to on the phone one single time, as well as ones I know will never, ever pick up – even on their own birthdays.
On the other hand, it’s the rare individual indeed who refuses to text, and in fact, some of these “Never Phoners” are highly prone to texting streaks with an individual or group that lasts as long or longer than the average phone call with your mom. So it can’t merely be a matter of reclaiming one’s time (especially when there are a lot more things you can accomplish while on the phone than while texting: driving, grocery shopping, exercising, and – as was demonstrated by scores of people I was stuck behind while trying to navigate concourses at Charlotte-Douglas Airport over the weekend – walking). And hey – texting is great. It’s ideal for quick adjustments to plans (“my Uber took forever/like 15 away/apologies” from my friend Marc a few weeks back); instructions from my wonderful hostess during a recent visit to California (“can you make sure the gate is open”) and a capsule review of a recent downloaded book to my friend Max (“a turd beyond”). On a day spent almost entirely on airplanes I sent and received over 100 text messages with 9 people in total — even without connecting to Wifi — including ones I’ve never met in person and some I haven’t seen or spoken to in months. But as I believe our two principals have proven, our facility with this ingenious technology-within-technology often gets us lugging it where it truly doesn’t belong – where it stops serving communication and starts feeding frustration, antagonism and ego.
Have you ever sent an angry letter? It’s something most of us have probably not done in some time, if ever; the labor required to write out your big feelings usually has a dampening effect on them (to say nothing of having to find a stamp when you’re done). And sometimes, the work of constructing a compelling thesis forces you to examine your position from the other side – maybe, just maybe, the other person had their reasons for seeing it their way and not yours.
Sending an angry email is a bit easier to manage, but once you’ve read it over and checked for typos (which I hope you always do), you might find that you don’t sound quite so rational, or feel as justified. The other thing about both of these mediums is that unless you were the type who kept copies of all your written transmissions or patrolled your sent items, the closest you probably got to revisiting your work was waiting – possibly days, possibly forever – for a response. But with texting, you have not just the maddening illusion of control, you can access the “evidence” your hermeneutic prowess any time you reach for your phone. It’s a selfie in print.
Does any of this mean that sexism did not play a role in this messy, viral parable about what seemed like a real drag of a workplace? Is there some merit in (or at least excuse for) sticking it to someone who makes your life hell – which seems to be what each of these actors claims about the other? As a perhaps unanswerable question, this is why the original title of this essay (Is Revenge Okay?) quickly morphed into the plainly facetious “Is It Okay to Text?”
Because let’s face it: while the legion of self-identified TikTok “investigators” are unquestionably unindicted co-conspirators in this saga, even if Baldoni and his camp aver (as I believe they do) that any gaffes on his part were not motivated by any ill intent, it’s hard to entirely excuse what he did next. Even if the campaign they staged on his behalf felt “necessary” to salvage the film’s grosses, his career and to head off strikes by of his unquestionably richer, more connected and more famous co-star, the toxic waste off-gassed by the mission ended up painting Lively as a real See You seems to be something that a truly dedicated “champion of women” might have predicted, if only because being depicted as a “mean girl” and lambasted for being friends with No. 1 incel target Taylor Swift could never have happened to a man. This has particular consequences in a culture where misogyny is so easy to come by, such low-hanging fruit, and are surely implicated in why critiques of Lively during the movie’s disastrous press tour leaned on other gendered slights like “difficult,” “vapid,” “privileged,” “self-centered.” Even if he and his team insist that they did not explicitly shape any narrative but rather let the Tok-o-sphere do what it do, the fact is that in the real world, we may expect to have to answer for any response other than de-escalation: it’s hard to stay free of paw prints if you authorize the whistle. Like it or not, if minority status makes our opponents more vulnerable to attack from GenPop assholes, the strategies we deploy to fight them might not leave our hands looking or feeling very clean, no matter what the “real” story is.
In this light, we should acknowledge that while texts and conversation are both forms of communication the two are not nearly identical, so the most faithful translation of them is most likely between people who know each other so well that voice, tone, and vernacular are not liable to be in dispute. Otherwise, even perfectly spelled and punctuated sentences may be no more declarative than scrawled handwriting, or baby talk. This means that if you don’t know the source well enough to be able to decipher their style, best to get more confirmation – preferably live and in person, or via a qualified intermediary – before plotting your next move lest a device you believe is providing clarity for your reader is actually helping you build a case against you.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with wanting someone to see things your way – who doesn’t? But that’s usually only part of what is conveyed by a screen colonized by grey – or blue – bubbles: a realm where graciousness can come off as insincerity, precision can seem pedantic and jokes can appear snide. Most of all, texts can make it almost impossible to assess – or believe – if the person on the other end is doing their best to find common ground or laying out a brilliant closing argument that means that for there will be no recovery of the opposing side.
By now, we should have learned that in addition to making us a more self-indulgent and vain species, our phones have rendered us more reckless with privacy and property, more persuaded to document than act. They have refined our taste for stings and gotchas and increased our demand for “proof” over reason or negotiation – all thanks to equipping the damned thing with a shutter and a lens. But if our phone’s camera is a mirror for some of our most (self) destructive tendencies, it’s possible that its cursor is the door. However, a bad photo can always be attributed to an unflattering angle, bad lighting, or even an unskilled operator; when it’s our own words that paint the picture, we usually have only ourselves to blame.