I've worked from home, mostly alone and on the internet, for nearly 20 years now. While to many people I meet in person that sounds amazing, I know in my heart--who else would know it, I work alone, I've got nobody else to tell!!--that it has fucked me up in loads of ways I don't think there is currently a proper scientific way to identify
I started blogging for Kotaku in October 2006, meaning I'd done it for 14 years already by the time Covid hit in 2020 and the rest of the planet was introduced, at speed, to the concept of doing your office job from home. And for most it was great! People are rightly campaigning to be able to work like that forever if they want!
I wrote at the time, though, that there were huge downsides to working from home. The loneliness could get you, for sure, and there are health and focus issues to deal with as well. But one of the longest-lasting and most debilitating consequences for me (at least in select circumstances) has been the development of something I call Profile Picture Disorder.
Before I started working on the internet, I met and remembered people the same way humans have for millennia, and probably the same way you still do. I would learn their name, see their face and remember those, then everything else I ever said or dealt with in relation to that person would be stored in my brain under that name. This is the best way humans can do this, because it's the way everyone does it and has always done it. If you say to me "hey have you met Tim Timothy", I can say "Sure have, I met him last week", and I remember that because his name is Tim Timothy, and we both know what he looks like. Even if I forget his name, as they saying goes, we never forget a face!
20 years of working online has changed that for me. I've dealt with so many people on platforms like Bluesky, Discord and Instagram, where I'd only communicate via text, that after a while I noticed that I'd stopped filing everything I knew about someone under their name, and had instead starting filing it under the ways I recognised them on the internet: some blurred synthesis of their handle and ever-changing and entirely not-their-actual-face profile picture, in a way that meant I could always remember it, but which made conveying information about them to others verbally (in meetings, interviews, on podcasts, whatever) increasingly difficult!
This is even worse in-person, in those times where I have to/get to meet people in the flesh who I've only ever previously spoken to online, because it's frequently led to situations where I initially come across as a complete dickhead, someone who has entirely forgotten every interaction with a person I may have interacted with hundreds of times, when I haven't! It's just that in my head everything I know about you is filed under an illustration of your cat and the name "ShitP0ster420" instead of your human face and regular name, and as soon as I resolve that, we're all good!
I'd noticed this happening for many years now, even before Covid, but had kept it mostly to myself because, well, it was something that only seemed to affect me. But in a recent conversation online--with people I've mostly never met IRL, and who I remember as a collection of small round images and usernames--I posted about my "condition" on BlueSky and had quite a few folks reply to tell me they go through exactly the same thing.
In one way, that's reassuring. I have not cultivated a truly unique form of cognitive degradation. Phew. In another, it's less comforting; what if this is something that is quietly afflicting a lot of people out there, in ways that might not be serious, but which are at least annoying, and also maybe worthy of further study?
The internet has fucked us all up in so many ways. The ecosystems around information, news, social interactions, marketplaces–they've all been upended over the last 10-15 years as the early internet (do your banking, maybe use a forum!) was replaced by the social internet (sell you things, drive you insane). All of that requires further research, and in some cases action, but stuff like my little "disorder" is the kind of thing that sometimes interests me the most.
Like, what has the internet done to us? In this very particular case, it's taken an aspect of functional human society (meeting people) and just replaced it wholesale with something else entirely, something that only works for me on the internet, and which is useless at best in the real world and humiliating at worst. That's a net negative for me, and I hate it.
(If you have or are experiencing something like this, please let me know below, it's fascinating hearing about everyone's different names and takes for this!)
