Do Every Thing Wrong!: XXXTentacion Against the World (2018)

By Jarett Kobek

171pp, Fiction

Notes

2019-03-04

One of the promises of the internet in the 90s was that you could be anonymous, you could re-invent yourself and you could play with identity or identities. No one in “real” pre-internet-life has one simple identity. We* behave differently with work colleagues, with friends, with family, with shop staff, with strangers in clubs. The internet seemed to me to promise a greater breadth of possibilities in terms of how I could express myself, different identities in different contexts. This did not come to pass.

Jarret Kobek’s extended essay about recently shot rapper XXXTentacion examines via the medium of his twitter history the mechanisms by which social media flattens people down to a single expression, restricts their possible behaviours and ultimately circumscribes people's life chances.