Nominative mania

We are dying to classify ourselves and our world

There’s a subreddit called r/lastimages, a place where people share the last pictures taken of people before their deaths. It recently was the subject of a minor scandal when a moderator banned a user for submitting a picture of his dying father with his cat on the bed. The subreddit has a rule: no animals, only people.

This is very silly of course, but overly aggressive moderation of internet forums has been a perennial complaint since we measured speed in baud. We can all imagine why a moderator might have taken this seemingly draconian and absurd enforcement action. A more interesting question is: why is there a subreddit dedicated to cataloging “the last known photographs or videos of a person” at all? What purpose does it serve? What do the 474k members of this forum gain from browsing it?

But to ask this question is to question the premise of reddit itself, a place where obsessive classification of the world’s phenomena into a set of labeled drawers is, if not its raison d’etre, then at least its most popular pastime. There is a subreddit dedicated to GIFs that make you imagine a sound. There is one cataloging images to use as a reaction in lieu of a comment. There is one full of screenshots of people performing back-of-the-envelope math to answer hypothetical questions. There is a subreddit for things that irritate you a fair amount but not too much, and another for things that please you a fair amount but not too much. The latter has 1.2M members. Here’s a representative sample.

When an event happens anywhere in the world, when any piece of media is published, an army of redditors stands ready with a mental card catalog of possible locations to file it neatly away, and an even larger army of commenters and lurkers waits breathlessly for neatly labeled packets of content to shoot down the tubes they have chosen to subscribe to. Witness an altercation at the mall? That goes into r/PublicFreakout, where it will join tens of thousands of similar videos archived for eternity. Did you have a bad experience at the return counter at Costco or in an Uber? Write a paragraph of rant for r/LateStageCapitalism, where 831k other souls want to hear about it. And of course, if your cat was looking extra adorable this morning, you know just where to file that (“Important: Do not post pictures of cats which aren't yours”, be warned. Did you think these internet points were just being handed out for free?)

Reddit is also the world’s premiere forum for discussing boutique sexualities and genders invented some time in the last decade or so. If you’re a confused teenager who feels ineffably different from other kids but lacks the words to articulate how exactly, there are a simply staggering number of subreddits to help you find, name, and coax out your true innermost self.

There are better and more authoritative essays about the bewildering variety of this kind of identity so I won’t dwell on them beyond inviting you to gaze up at them in wonder with me, to marvel at their mystifying and variegated profusion. But to give one brief example, the flag in the top-right corner is for demisexuals, which applies to people who only feel sexual attraction to people with whom they have an emotional connection. It’s an official queer identity claimed by more than one female celebrity who you can now be quite certain is not a boring vanilla heterosexual.

One finds the same pattern with mental health diagnoses, from the garden variety OCD and ADHD to far more exotic ailments such as Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD), characterized by a hypersensitivity to criticism, or hyperphantasia, which means your mental imagery is so intensely vivid it impacts your daily life. Far from being disabilities as understood by previous generations, these diagnoses and pseudo-diagnoses are typically proudly displayed next to a user’s other biographical information in their online profiles, digitally worn as badges of honor and distinction. In these online personas one senses a profound relief, a satisfaction at having arrived, having settled on an answer and having found the right words to speak one’s self into being. Indeed, it’s not uncommon to hear people wearing these badges say as much explicitly. Their diagnosis (official or self-imposed) becomes a permission slip to believe about themselves what they have always secretly known to be true but perhaps lacked the vocabulary to express.

I waffle on whether to label this obsession with labels autistic or simply narcissistic, but I tend toward the former as an organizing principle and the latter as a motivating force when applied to oneself. Autism is surely the animating spirit of the age, nowhere better illustrated than in the tech sector, the principal engine of our late-stage capitalist growth. It’s no secret that software nerds are prone to a touch of the ‘tism, and the software systems they (we) build and release upon the world do more than neutrally record and enable communication about that world — they shape it, impose upon it a set of constraints and suppositions as inflexible as natural law. The obsessive categorization of reddit was baked in from the moment the concept of a subreddit was encoded, it could have gone no other way. It’s the most natural thing in the world for a nerd to think of the world in terms of well-ordered, totalizing systems, without the need for nuance or exception. It can be beautiful and efficient inside their mind-palace.

The problem is they (we) have taken over the world, and normal people are not so naturally prone to this obsessive systemizing impulse. But we write the software that everyone must use to participate in the knowledge economy or even to minimally function in society, to apply for a job or pay taxes or for parking or to order a burrito. And we’ve baked into those software systems our propensity to think in terms of hierarchical categories, a hyper-specific Linnaean taxonomy applied to the whole of creation.

Crashing into these pigeonholing machines come normal people fascinated with nothing so much as themselves. People have always wanted to understand themselves and how they fit into the society around them, but before the age of mass media the vocabulary for doing so was necessarily limited, with themes tending toward the universal, or at most broad narrative archetypes. We are now nearly a full century into the Century of the Self, a full hundred years of market-driven refinement of individuality as the primary designator of social and moral worth, seventy years since the invention of “the lifestyle” as a store-brought personal differentiator.

Conspicuous consumption as identity plowed head-first into ubiquitous social software and out popped the demisexual. We are all “not like other girls” now, and we are less like other girls than we’ve ever been before. If things continue at their current pace we’ll soon be so unlike other girls we’ll all need our own personal sexuality flags like a medieval coat of arms to express the depth of nuance in our proclivities. But hasn’t it always been thus? Before 19-year-olds were fraysexual genderqueers with ADHD, they were flappers or beatniks or hippies or mods or preps or jocks or goths or geeks. But no, our culture and our need for individuality are accelerating — those labels feel antiquated because they are, because they are no longer enough, they no longer encode enough uniqueness, enough originality. Television created the hippy, but only Tumblr could have created the demi-boy. The internet gives rise to an infinite number of pigeonholes to sort ourselves into, just in time for us to require them.

But simple narcissism alone cannot explain the moderator who cannot suffer a cat to appear in the frame with a dying man, cannot explain the deeply felt desire expressed by millions to label a photo “mildly satisfying.” There is something much more fundamental going on. The urge to name and label and categorize, this nominative mania, may apply most fiercely to ourselves, but that’s simply because everything does. It clearly extends beyond ourselves as well. Nor can we simply blame the nerds for building the pigeonholing machines in the first place, even as we acknowledge the outsized role they played in creating these conditions. The nerds built it, true, but we came. And we stayed.

The truth is that there is profound power in naming something. To name something is to know it, to abstract it, to make it signified, capable of discussion and reference. It was the first power exercised by mankind over the newly created world, delegated to man by God himself.

And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

Mankind has always felt the pull of that power, from Adam to Linnaeus, to the enterprising gendersmiths of Tumblr. But the scope of that power, the damage we can deal in wielding it, increases with our reach, with the number of other minds we can pull under our sway. Like the printing press before it, the internet radically increased the ability of a normal person to disseminate ideas to their fellow man, therefore radically increasing the power of naming. The names we give to ourselves and to concepts in silly twitter slapfights and substack essays have the power to hypnotize millions, to topple regimes, to ripple outwards from ourselves in impossible-to-predict ramifications. They can quite literally change the world at the speed of thought. We watch it happen every day.

And we wield this terrifying power so carelessly, so casually, so often unconsciously. It should stagger us, but we never stop to consider it.