What was 'replying'?

Mariah Kreutter on what it means to “reply” in 2023.

We don’t know how to behave, so we come up with theories. Theories about commenting, theories about ghosting, theories about double texting. Theories about replying too quickly or too slowly or too elaborately or too laconically. There are theories about Reply Guys and Instagram story etiquette and whether the rudest, most IDGAF text reply is a thumbs up emoji or a thumbs up reaction. (For my money: the reaction is more IDGAF, but the emoji is ruder.)

We talk like we are haunted. My best friend tells me she’s been ghosted and what she means is a guy replied to one of her texts with something that didn’t require a reply, so she didn’t reply, but he hasn’t double texted, so that’s him ghosting. I ask if it’s possible she ghosted him or, perhaps, they ghosted each other. She glares at me. We debate for a while if a heart reaction and then nothing counts as ghosting. We debate if an “Lol” and then nothing counts as ghosting. I ask if it’s weird that this guy I sort of know replies to all of my tweets and she says it depends on how old he is. I ask if it's weird for me to reply to my ex-boyfriend’s Instagram stories and she says no, unless I do it too much.

There are poems about ghosting. (My editor on this piece sent me one, presumably as market research; I meant to reply with something breezy like “lmao this is bleak,” but I was out and busy and missed the window, so I guess I sort of ghosted her.) There are books about it. There are reviews of the books that are better than the books themselves. To me, this is a crucial data point in my overarching theory that everyone has lost their minds.

But I see evidence of our collective derangement in other ways, too—like when someone asks a question and then gets mad when people respond. I have often observed this phenomenon with the horrified fascination of a rubbernecker on a highway or the median viewer of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. Once a comedian I used to follow tweeted that she was looking for suggestions for “breakfast soup” and then spent hours in the reply section belittling anyone who suggested either Asian soups commonly eaten for breakfast (because she wanted “American” breakfast) or soups featuring eggs (because she didn’t like eggs). I read the entire thread. I couldn’t look away. It was incredible to watch a person behave, in real time, as if the failure of strangers to perfectly intuit her unstated preferences was an affront that merited rudeness in reply. I kept thinking—but you asked! You asked about the breakfast soup!

On the other hand, sometimes nobody asked. Once I tweeted that I loved hanging out with elder millennials because I was always learning new things about 9/11, and some guy I’d never interacted with replied, “Weed and whiskey and I’m there.” I remember thinking, what? When did I invite you? Why would I give you weed?

These anecdotes illustrate two sides of the same dysfunction, I think. Social media encourages us to think of every thought we have as interesting; it makes everyone else feel accessible, and therefore disposable; it exposes us to endless bad actors, hardening our hearts and compelling us to suspect the worst; it rewards vulnerability, but also incentivizes defensiveness; and, most cogently for the purposes of this essay, it has birthed a distorted and unprecedented form of communication known as the Reply. It is easy to forget how to talk to a person, because you’re not talking to a person: you’re Replying. Everyone involved is either an abstraction, an ideal, entertainment, or part of an annoying crowdsourced search engine. Anyone can barge in on anyone else. Worse, it can be very hard to tell which side of the battering ram you’re on.

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Replies have always existed, of course. But there was a time when they were either public or private, and moreover either instantaneous (talking) or asynchronous (any form of written text). Derrida characterized the drama of written communication in Of Grammatology: it is both absent, divorced from the body, and delayed, separated across time. But digital communication collapses all categories.

The Reply merges the public and private lives of the internet into something unruly and unstable. Among friends, it is a performance: bantering on the timeline instead of in private messages is saying, “Look at us. Wouldn’t you like to join?” Among strangers, the Reply begs to be noticed, and thus bleeds into abjection. The Reply is a cry for attention, a voice in the wilderness, a shout into the void. Twitter is known for Replies, but Instagram has them, too, in the form of the Story Reply—which is not quite a comment (public and therefore embarrassing) but not quite a direct message, either (unprompted and therefore embarrassing). The Reply is ambiguous. It can indicate any level of intimacy, any level of investment, any level of care.

The artist and theorist Hito Steyerl called the new uncertainty of digital writing “absense”: a sensual absence, in which the wait is minimized but the distance stays put. This communication in “(almost) real time” creates a “live and lively absence, to which the lack of a physical body is not an unfortunate coincidence, but necessary,” Steyerl writes (in “Epistolary Affect and Romance Scams: Letter from an Unknown Woman”). But just because digital writing can be instantaneous doesn’t mean it always is, as anyone who has ever agonized over a crush’s slow response knows well.

This delay—a delay when there doesn’t have to be one—is fertile terrain for unhinged theories gently tended by an excess of interpretive labor. Maybe she didn’t see it. Maybe they broke their phone. Maybe he deleted the app. Maybe she’s out of town and doesn’t have service. Maybe he likes me so much he’s forcing himself to wait to text back because he doesn’t want to give away the game too quickly. Maybe—do I dare to hope?—she’s dead.

It’s not all bad. One of my friends now lives with a man who spent several years unsuccessfully trying to DM her. She used to have a popular Twitter account with a legion of Reply Guys; he loved her from afar, but his messages never cracked the shell of her limited attention. They eventually met, I believe, in person, and fell for each other for real.

And sometimes it just is what it is. I ghosted someone in August. I didn’t mean to. I just couldn’t figure out how to explain the situation in few enough words to not look crazy. I didn’t know how to say “When you asked me out a month ago I was officially single, and I was trying to date around, because I have a bad habit of imagining marrying every guy I sleep with, and I was looking for reasons not to fall for the guy I’d just started seeing because I had told all my friends I couldn’t deal with another bohemian, even though that wasn’t true, I’m only 25, obviously I can deal with another bohemian, and also I live my life according to the guiding principle of ‘Why not?,’ but between then and now I started seeing my Why Not like four nights a week, and even though we’re still not officially official we’ve gone to Coney Island to watch the fireworks twice, so I’m not exactly available, and I probably never really was, but you can understand why I figured I was single enough to say ‘sure’ to coffee a month ago, especially because coffee isn’t even really a date, but by a week ago when you followed up things had changed, and I guess we could get coffee as friends or whatever because I don’t want to assume or imply that you’re the kind of guy who only interacts with women along the axis of fucking them, and it’s always struck me as gauche to assume someone wants to fuck me because they asked to get coffee, but I know you want to fuck me because we barely even talked at that party, indicating that this must be a primarily visual level of interest, so why play this whole game? Let’s just never speak to each other again.”

I felt guilty for a while, but I never replied. If I’m perfectly honest that felt fucking amazing. I suppose I could reply now, another couple months later, and explain that the guy I was sort of beginning to date in August is now my boyfriend, which is an iron-clad excuse if I ever saw one. But I don’t have to, and so I probably won’t. I’ve said what I needed to say by not saying anything. The guy is a friend of a friend of a friend; we exchanged approximately four sentences the night we met; we never actually hung out. I’m well within my rights. No jury would convict. Not even one made up entirely of Twitter users.

Some people bemoan ghosting as a sign that civilization is on its last legs. But like every other form of communication, it’s context-dependent—the same way it’s fun when your friend replies to your tweet about a dinner you made with “where’s my invite?” but off-putting and weird when a married guy you barely know says the same thing. For all that the digital world has taken from us, it’s also given us new, strange, and sometimes compelling modes of communication.

Now people say that Twitter is dying. Maybe it’ll take the Reply with it. But I think it’s more likely that it’ll just keep getting incrementally worse, and occasionally funnier, until all we have left are the tics and paranoias we developed along the way.

The Dirt: There are only the ghosted, the ghosting, the busy and the tired.

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