Breadfaceblog and Internet Optimism

By Zack Boehm on September 9, 2016

The Internet can be a wretched place. To say something like that in September 2016 almost seems rote, but everyday we’re besieged with reminders of its un-deniability. The internet has an unfathomable potential for awfulness.

Every time we log on, we’re making a foul kind of covenant. We agree to give life to a platform that promises degrees of anonymity and impunity to people with detestable intentions. We perpetuate an echo chamber where only the loudest and most vitriolic see their voices ricochet off the walls and into our news feeds. We pardon a place where bilious lies and misinformation can spread unchallenged like cold sores until all of our faces are pimply and scarred.

And what’s worse: whatever trajectory of degeneration the internet was on before, it seems to be accelerating. Trolls are getting more brazen and more sinisterly savvy and the whole trolling enterprise has reached a level of grim, disturbing professionalization. Joyously narcissistic demagogues like Breitbart’s Milo Yianoppoulos, who in the past would have been marginalized for their fringe bigotry, are now able to build coalitions of groveling supplicants who stand, thumbs ever at the ready, prepared to mobilize en masse at the whims of their “daddy”. The result is the kind of coordinated campaign of relentlessly despicable abuse waged by Yianoppoulos’ contingent of followers against Leslie Jones, who was guilty only of being a black woman in an industry where faces like hers have long been scorned. The fetid stream of abuse directed at Jones culminated in her website being hacked and her personal photos being leaked. By “trolls”. Because she was a black woman.

The internet can suck.

And the problems endemic to internet discourse become distilled and magnified in an election cycle like this one, where people’s political persuasions become so entangled with their online identities that the entire social media experiment seems to become one great exercise in partisan political rage-stoking. This is especially true in the Age of Trump, where a presidential candidate has ascended to the pinnacle of his party on the back of a crass, anti-political-correctness (cue violent eye-roll) Twitter persona. Before Trump was a “politician” peddling racist lunacy about Mexican immigrants, he was a Twitter troll questioning the legitimacy of our first black president’s birth records.

No politician has used the Internet as successfully as Donald Trump, and that is because the Internet is exactly the kind of place where people like him flourish. The internet does not require honesty, substance, or intellectual authenticity. Just volume.

The feeling that the Internet’s most unpleasant features have recently experienced a sort of amplification and normalization has turned some people off of the web entirely. Self-imposed social media hiatuses are becoming a trend, something akin to a juice cleanse—a means of “detoxification”, scrubbing the grime that tends to accumulate after hours of outraged scrolling. In a recent Ezra Klein Show podcast, author Malcom Gladwell suggested that the Internet is architecturally unsound, that it is probably in need of a ground-up, structural overhaul, and that 20 years in the future we’ll be looking at this peculiar period of Internet history wondering what in the world we were thinking.

Gladwell’s criticisms had more to do with the downright porousness of digital privacy programs, but his ideas reflect broader feelings of Internet resentment. For many, it’s increasingly feeling like the Internet is no longer a net-positive force for good in their daily lives. And for everyone, it feels like using the Internet necessarily means wading through a cesspool of upsetting, unbidden garbage. It’s part of the agreement you make by logging on. If you ride this ride, you WILL get disgusted.

If there’s beauty on the Internet, then it’s buried beneath turgid, swelling mounds of hate, targeted ads, and porn bots. But every so often, a tiny glimmer of uncorrupted joy will fight its way to the surface of the morass and remind you that the Internet, no matter how debased it may be, still has the capacity for brilliance.

This week, I was introduced to breadfaceblog. This week, I fell back in love with the Internet.

breadfaceblog is an Instagram account run anonymously by a New York based copywriter. Every post on breadfaceblog (71 posts, each a masterpiece) follows the same simple script. Each video opens with the breadfaceblogger sat behind a table presenting a bread product to the camera. She squeezes it to demonstrate its hardness, and she rotates it in order to show its shape and texture. Her face hovers just out of frame. She is just a small, lithe pair of hands. Showing you some bread.

After the bread has been well thoroughly displayed, breadfaceblogger sets it down on the table. What comes next is sincerely flooring. The pièce de résistance. breadfaceblogger pauses for one seething moment, the tension and drama almost unbearable, before she smooshes her head into the bread product, kneading it until every inch of her face has been breaded for her blog.

23. Gourmet Garage French Baguette ????#breadfacing @unif @gourmetgarage A video posted by Bread Face (@breadfaceblog) on Jan 26, 2016 at 5:33pm PST

The bread changes from video to video (a home made banana bread, an authentic French baguette, hot dog buns) as do breadfaceblogger’s sharply evocative outfits and the songs that accompany and enrich each breadfacing. However the basic formula endures unchanged. Bread+face+blog.

The first time I watched a breadfaceblog video, I had that rare, exhilarating feeling of not knowing what the hell was happening. I was laughing without having any coherently rational understanding of why I should be laughing. I was thrilled by the small-scale absurdity, that someone could produce something so simple that contorts reality so deftly on such a prohibitive platform. There’s a sublime elegance to breadfaceblog that was completely enthralling for me, a clarity of vision and an “intentionality” that was intoxicating. Soon I was watching every post on the account. I could not stop watching this nameless woman shoving her face into bread.

I found myself consuming the videos with a strange kind of double-mind, simultaneously on a surface level as a short, funny Instagram video, and on a deeper level as fascinatingly well rendered artistic statement. The bread changes, the clothes change, the music changes, but the routine is inescapable. No matter how mutable the variables, the video will always end in a breadfacing.

The creation of this sort of high-low collision, of things that are at once totally ephemeral but incisive and resonant, is one of my favorite parts of the internet, and breadfaceblog is the first time in a while that something I’ve seen online has captivated me in any real way. Nowhere but the Internet would a project like breadfaceblog be permitted to exist, much less reach an audience of 90 thousand subscribers. This is the internet at its best, allowing for the production of interesting things by people with limited means, and then allowing those things to be shared on massive and accessible scales.

 

The Internet may be largely in a state of disarray, but breadfaceblog reminds us that its bones are salvageable. It is a tiny glimmer of joy rising to the surface of the morass showing us that the Internet still has the capacity for brilliance. Next time a cursory scroll through Twitter leaves you fuming, remember, there are reasons for optimism.

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