At only eleven years of age, I was a cyber ho. Looking back, I’m embarrassed. For me. For my parents. But oddly enough, my cyber social debauchery is indirectly correlated with my current status as a so-called internet pioneer. It all started when I began catfishing—creating characters and transmitting them over the internet—though back then people just called it “lying.” Had my father not signed my entire family up with America Online accounts for the computer in our modest Potomac, Maryland, home I don’t know that I’d have had the tools to exploit the early ages of the internet.
Anyone not familiar with Issa Rae is likely to be lost immediately by this opening paragraph. Of course, it is somewhat difficult to figure out why anyone not familiar with Issa Rae would be reading this book, but such things have been known to happen. A grand likelihood is that even a massive chunk of people familiar with her don’t immediately jump to the phrase “internet pioneer” to describe her, but then again she immediately confesses to being a habitual liar, so is it possible what is going on here is some sort of postmodern meta-fiction in which the author’s memoir is also an example of catfishing? There’s only one way to find out. Well, actually two ways, but this shall remain a spoiler-free zone.
“You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.”
The author is here quoting Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Diaz. The most obvious interpretation of this quote is that she is using it in reference to being black. Or, possibly, a woman. Or, very possibly, a black woman. Something to do with an oppressed minority, anyway. But the backstory leading to the decision to offer this quote from Diaz—which is actually much longer than that excerpted here—actually has the context of being blocked by a stripper who dares to compare the oppression of being a sex worker to that of being a person of color. It is not an odd decision by Rae to draw upon this observation by Diaz, but it does seem an odd occasion on which to introduce it. In fact, it is just one of many decisions made by the author which seem just a bit off, somehow.
If it weren’t for YouTube, I would be extremely pessimistic, but I’m not anymore. YouTube has revolutionized content creation. If it weren’t for YouTube, I would still be at studios trying to convince executives that Awkward Black Girls really do exist. If it weren’t for YouTube, I would have been indefinitely discouraged by the network executive who suggested that actress/video girl/Lil Wayne’s baby’s mother, Lauren London, would be a great fit for the title character of a cable version of Awkward Black Girl.
Although this may seem like a paid commercial for YouTube, there is no actual evidence of that assumption. The plain truth of the matter is that Issa Rae’s career was given the kickstart every unknown longs for by the internet video platform. While the phrase “YouTube superstar” still seems like a very weird combination of words for a great many people, those people are likely not aware that there is a sizeable chunk of the American populace (mostly much younger than they) who watch almost nothing but YouTube. That may seem like an absurd statement, but many people old enough to be raised on conventional cable television programming might be shocked to learn just how many millennials have literally never watched a show on A&E or TNT or USA or even CBS. YouTube has its own subculture of superstars whose existence those people raised on cable television have no awareness of. Admittedly, being a YouTube superstar means you are watched regularly by merely a fraction of the audience of even the lowest-rated series on a cable TV network, but with a little luck and the right calculation that fractional viewership is enough to make the leap to—you guessed it—cable television.
