So Here’s the Thing…: Notes on Growing Up, Getting Older, and Trusting Your Gut(30)

Read the whole fucking email before you respond.

Don’t ask someone to take time explaining something you could google.

If you are on the “CC” line, DO NOT REPLY ALL. EVER! If you are on the CC field, people want you to know what’s going on but don’t need you to make a decision about anything, so don’t fuck things up by replying all with an annoying question or suggestion. Email the sender first.

On a group email, always direct your question to someone, or to specific people. If not, you’ll end up with a long thread and no answer.

“Loop” me into an email chain without saying why and lose my friendship and respect forever.

Don’t use email if you have had more than two drinks or one joint.



I also always check the “to” field and only text gossip to people I trust. I know texting isn’t any safer than any other written form (except actual letters…maybe), but it’s comforting to imagine I have boundaries. When all of Paul Manafort’s encrypted Signal conversations were circulating because he’d backed them up on the cloud I felt a flash of something that wasn’t exactly sympathy but closer to worried hypothetical identification: I could imagine the same thing happening to me. Not that I’ve committed fraud—I swear!—but you know what I mean: We all put things in writing that we perhaps shouldn’t be putting in writing. The only real solace is that everyone has at least one bad email lurking somewhere, and if they’re ever all leaked at once (this is a fear I believe many of us have) I hope I’m boring enough that no one would think to search the inevitable database they’d be in for my name.

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There’s a big difference between the social internet and the practical internet. Both can be useful; the latter just doesn’t come with quite so many life-and society-ruining disadvantages. But regardless, I was a late adopter—I don’t think I used the internet at its maximum capability until I started working at Vice at the beginning of 2015. The catalyst was that when I got there, I still had a BlackBerry, and although I wanted to keep it, the IT guys told me I couldn’t because they didn’t know how to put my Vice email on the BlackBerry. How different would my life be if I still used a keypad?

Even by the time of the Kerry campaign, which was beholden to the twenty-four-hour news cycle, things that made your life easier weren’t necessarily on the internet. John Kerry was a picky eater, and when he was on the road we’d have to get menus from restaurants in towns he’d be visiting so we could pre-order dinner and pick it up to save time. But restaurants rarely put menus online, so you’d have to call them and ask them to fax you the menu. Then you’d have to type up the menu (because if you scanned the faxed copy it wouldn’t be readable) and send it to someone to give to JK.

Everything took so much longer, and I at least worked so much harder. Working in the press office didn’t mean trawling Twitter and Facebook all day until you found something worth screen grabbing (or clicking on); you had to read every single paper, clip out the articles, photocopy them, and fax them to whoever might need them. Now you can just search a word on Twitter to see what people are saying about an issue or use Google News as a jumping-off point (as long as you understand the perspectives of each outlet you find, of course). That’s why I have such a good understanding of Vermont, where I interned for Bernie, and of what was going on when I worked for JK—you couldn’t find exactly what you wanted as soon as the urge struck you; you had to wade through all the news. It was active. You couldn’t just sit at your computer and google until you died.

Which is what I feel like I do for work today. Now I waste more time than I have ever wasted in my life. I didn’t have a personal computer until I left the White House, so the only internet I used was at work. I did some online shopping (not technically allowed) but never went much beyond that. Any new convenience the World Wide Web offered was incorporated into my life as a small perk rather than evidence of the huge cultural shift it was. Now: no. It’s true that my jobs are less…essential, shall we say, than working on campaigns or for the president, but I do have a lot to do, and yet I find myself actually engaged in the process of doing it less and less. I don’t mean to sound like a nostalgic old fogey when I say this, but things used to be different, and not everything is better.

When I lived in Boston and commuted to work, I’d be reading the paper on the T and someone would ask me what article I was reading; more shocking is that I wouldn’t feel aggrieved that this person had interrupted my multi-tasking project of reading the news, listening to Madonna on my headphones, and texting four of my friends about the date I’d been on the night before, but happy to talk to this stranger for a few stops. And relationships with non-strangers were different, too; the people you knew were the people you’d met or heard about from your friends. Now my circle is huge but very porous; I have many levels of relationships with people, including those I’ve never met, but they’re confusing. It’s much more difficult to understand the nature of your relationship to people you’ve met once in person but may speak to multiple times a week in public forums like Instagram or Twitter. Whom can you trust? Who will come to your birthday party? Who will tweet something mean about you the second it seems convenient to do so?

All this confusion is compounded by the fact that the internet is not something I begrudgingly use only because it’s necessary—I’m on it all the time. I attribute this to my first experience on Twitter. After I left the White House, Mindy Kaling helped me set up my account, and within a few days I was using it as God intended, which is to say monitoring barely perceptible shifts in celebrity gossip. I had accumulated about two hundred followers when one day, I saw that Mandy Moore was getting divorced from Ryan Adams. This was my chance: I knew all about Ryan Adams. I tweeted something to the effect of “yay I support Mandy Ryan Adams is terrible” and then logged off and went about my day.