Click, Pray, Chat

Erica Berry on the comfort of strangers on Chatroulette.

The night before Thanksgiving 2020 my ex and I went on Chatroulette. It happened because I was trying to distract him—we’ll call him Dan—from missing his family. I had the great idea, after one weed mint, that reading from a website about the most popular websites of all time would be a sort of palliative diversion. When I got to Chatroulette, I wondered, aloud, if this particular portal still lived. Dan had never been on it. I told him this was because he was older than me, and he’d spent those years on real dates while I was in front of the double-monitor at Becky’s mom’s house, chipping brownies from a pan and screaming at penises we did and did not want to see. 

Dan said Hmm and started typing the website into the laptop. I assumed he’d read to me about its demise, a skeleton of our past like movie theaters and indoor restaurants, but then there was a spinning wheel and suddenly we were watching a white IKEA table with a shirtless man slouched behind it. His face was invisible, hidden above the view of the webcam. Tinny indeterminate rap played from the speaker. Oh God, I whispered. I was sprawled on the couch in a floral flannel pajama set I had owned since high school, my hair clumpy and wet from the shower. Dan was sitting on the floor with the laptop perched on his knee. Behind us a beige wall and the spindly spider plant I had found at a garage sale. It was brown at the tips, desperate and careening, like us, for the world outside. 

Dan raised a hand in slow greeting, as if we had encountered an alien and were trying to establish peace. Onscreen, the man nodded his head back and forth. Nobody spoke. I dug my fingers into Dan’s shoulder—What have you done—even as I surveyed the pale stubble on the man’s neck, the squat U of his chin. Just as I was not used to seeing strangers up close anymore, I was not used to being seen. Chatroulette was the opposite of walking down the grocery aisle in a mask. It was yelling into the street that you’re having a party then waiting to see who came inside your house, but also it was climbing through a window into a stranger’s dark apartment. The difference is that Chatroulette feels physically safe. The possibility of each unknown screen is terrifying, but your body is insulated. Chatroulette is going to the crocodile room at the zoo and trusting the thickness of the glass. 

In the seconds our screens were linked, I felt nothing for the man with pink shoulders turned blue in the glow of his screen. But though my brain said that I did not care whether he judged me or Dan or our sickly plant, my body did not listen. It hummed with self-consciousness. I had forgotten the feeling was possible. I tried to remember how to animate my sack of self. I put a hand over my eyes, as if closing off the man to me would close me off from him. When I peeked through my fingers, Dan had changed the scene. 

We fell from world into world. It was almost midnight in Oregon, which meant it was later in many of the rooms where we landed. Twinkle-lights, track lights, the spastic fluorescence of a TV. Dan whispered that he had selected one of two options when he typed in the website, so we were now on the “Filtered” stream, allegedly free of sexual content. This was, it soon became clear, more of a gentle suggestion. The rhythm of clicking through users felt like playing duck, duck, goose. Naked man, naked man, clothed teens. Naked man, naked man, man with greasy hair playing “Tears in Heaven” on a guitar. He wasn’t bad, and we stayed with him until the end. Nice, Dan said when he was done. Thanks, the man said. I’m still learning some chords. Then he hung up on us. 

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In an episode of the Mindy Project, Mindy says that going to clubs is like being judged and rejected by people you normally judge and reject. In 2020, the year of groundhog days—when good fortune meant the ability to stay inside, tethered only to the people we lived with and the objects we owned—Chatroulette was novelty the way a club was novelty. The judgment, the judging, the rejecting, the rejection. It made me feel awkward and uncomfortable, so self-conscious I might have been naked, but naked was the opposite of numb, and numb was most days. Now, with every click of a pointer finger, we were meeting someone new. 

This, said Dan, is the realm of the bored dude. We passed in and out of a dark room where someone had rigged up two giant monitors facing one another, with a different Chatroulette going on each screen. Dan waved, and then someone in one of the many boxes was waving back. Accented voices echoed like human static through the screen. I felt like an anthropologist, which was superior to feeling like what I was: another bored dude. 

We spoke to a woman in her 20s sitting at a desk in a white-walled room lined with books. She told us she was in Colombia at her parents’ house, weathering the pandemic in the town she grew up in. Dan and I had just moved out of my own parents’ house, but we were still in their neighborhood, unmoored from our friends. We commiserated about the incompetence of our respective governments’ pandemic responses and the strangeness of moving back to childhood homes. When we asked how often the woman used Chatroulette, she laughed. I don’t really do this, she said. A pause. Well, only some nights when I’m bored. 

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