"That was quite an interview," a neighbor told me while grabbing a
drink that Friday afternoon. The virality had escaped the internet and
had come back to me IRL. This is always disconcerting, because what is
so unusual about the experience of going viral, so uniquely modern, is
that it makes concrete the deranging split the self undergoes in the
21st century, between one's online identity and one's physical body.
Most people are able, most of the time, to ignore this split. But not
the human being gone megavi. You may step away from your computer, or
put away your phone, and forget for a moment that something enormous
is happening to you -- something that might define you in the minds
of untold thousands, something that might deliver opportunity or
danger or boost your career or torpedo it. But that conversation does
not stop, even if you're no longer participating in it. Pour a glass
of water. Talk to your kids. Somewhere else, that parallel world, the
wave of traffic continues to build, and a version of you is still
riding it or, more likely, being overwhelmed by it. It will carry you
along until it inevitably recedes, leaving you beached in a new place.