Everything Everywhere on the Internet All at Once

Imagine a world where anything you can think of can become a reality. A watermelon pie? We got it. A cactus ghost? Got it. Hunter S. Thompson as a president? We got that too. The last week I was obsessed with an ai image generator called “mid-journey,” where you put in a prompt like “the perfect cloud,” and it spits out some results. Sometimes they’re terrible; sometimes they’re bizarrely terrifying, but just as many times, they’re incredible. A movie camera by Pablo Picasso? Infinite cabbage? A bathroom designed by M.C. Escher? A person made entirely out of cheese? Deluxe beans? A strip mall painted by Monet? Dune directed by Wes Anderson? A bubble gum farm? Family dinner painted by David Lynch? Chicken nuggets at a Michelin star restaurant? Cotton candy grapes? Twin Peaks drew by a child? Potted tongue plant pills by Gucci? I’ve spent hours now surfing through what is essentially humanity’s collective imagination remixed by my random ideas and a powerful ai. It’s addicting and fascinating. Every image is a gamble; you don’t know if it will spit out something unique or just a pile of trash. What about a pile of trash by Van Gogh, but it’s as terrifying as it is fascinating. As this technology improves, which is already dali 2, Google’s own image generation ai that isn’t available for the public yet, is already much more robust than mid-journey, which I’ve been using. What will it mean for art image’s imagination? What is a world where anything we can imagine can become a reality? How does encountering this world make you feel? What if we put everything on a bagel?

There’s a new feeling I’ve started encountering in recent years. It’s hard to describe. It’s uncomfortable-fractal-overwhelming-disorienting but at the same time enticing and awe-inspiring. For a while, I didn’t know where this feeling was coming from, what was causing it, or how many other people might be feeling what I was feeling. But then, in 2021, I started noticing a few artists depicting the feeling that I was having. Bo Burnham was the first to put his finger on it with his comedy special Inside. But another recent work that captures the feeling and an even more fundamental way is the hyper-modern maximalist Everything Everywhere All at Once.

It’s easy to get bogged down in the technical elements of multiverses and how they work either as a storytelling device or as an actual theory for our cosmos, but what I’m most interested in about the multiverse as it’s used in Everything Everywhere All at Once is as a metaphor for our own world and our personal experience, especially as a metaphor for the experience of the internet.

I love the internet. I’ve always loved learning about new and novel things. I have had an insatiable curiosity. For someone who could spend all their time exploring what’s out there if they didn’t have to do other things like eating, paying rent, and socializing…the internet has been an endless garden of delight and possibility. The internet has an inexhaustible variety of cool stuff and tons of fascinating people and ideas to discover, but it’s a double-edged sword. Even when pointed at seemingly productive learning and not just mindless entertainment, when given the option to fulfill endless curiosity, there comes a tipping point a crossing of the bell curve.

We don’t need an actual multiverse to put cracks in the clay pot of our minds when we already have devices for careening through the endless imaginations of the multitudes. When we exist in an environment where you can encounter the personal stories and experiences from people on every continent, all of who are living their own unique life in just a few minutes, all from the comfort of your toilet when more interesting ideas and concepts people and places can fly by in the space of one 30-minute tick-tock binge than some of our ancestors experienced in the entirety of their localized illiterate lives. The internet, for those who are inspired to spend a lot of time on it and use it in a certain way for those who envelop themselves in its self-referential world of constantly evolving novelty and imagery, will inevitably have a profound effect on the way you see the world. What is the result of this headlong dive through novel ideas and imagery?

Many astronauts upon seeing the earth for the first time from space spinning by below them, report something that has been dubbed The Overview Effect. When they see the world they’ve always known from such a radically different viewpoint flying by in its entirety in the space of 90 minutes, hundreds, or thousands of times, it can cause a significant paradigm shift in how they view life and the world. I don’t think the effect of being very online is the same as the overview effect that astronauts experience. Still, I think there’s a lighter-weight analogous effect that can happen from consuming the amount of information that many of us now do use the internet. Seeing so much of the world so quickly can trigger a sort of psychological paradigm shift. The shift isn’t coming from being exposed to a single new idea or perspective that forces you to reassess your own, the shift comes from the sheer amount of views and ideas that we can now be exposed to online. The change from being online all the time contains some positives. Still, it can also leave you stuck in a state of overwhelm, constantly considering alternative life paths, constantly comparing your own experience to the experience of others, and unable to hold a consistent view of what’s real or what is essential for most people. I think the digital overview effect is a gradual and pervasive accumulation slowly building up as we swim through a world of thoughts, ideas, concepts, and emotions, all projected at us through images, text, and video one after another in an endless parade. Each new idea can pull you in a different direction, and there’s a certain point if you go far enough and fast enough where everything, the infinite possibility of life, starts to blur by and look and feel like nothing, and at that point, the entire thing collapses on itself.

For me, Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the first true post-internet films. It’s not just about the internet; it doesn’t just comment on the internet but fully embraces it in all of its chaotic absurdist glory. The maximalist excess and complete tonal whiplash from one moment to the next capture the unhinged, unfiltered anarchy of using the internet in a way that nothing else I’ve ever consumed has. This is a movie for people who have found themselves blinking asleep out of their eyes with 50 tabs open at 2 am, which I suspect is many more of us than we’d openly care to admit.

In an interview with Slash Film, Daniel Shinart, one of the movie’s directors, said, “… we’ve talked a lot about what it’s like to have grown up on the internet and how that exacerbated the typical generational divide and what it feels like for everyone no matter how old you are to live right now with the internet so that’s one of the key metaphors was just like we wanted the maximalism of the movie to connect with what it’s like to scroll through an infinite amount of stuff which is something we’re all doing too much”. Most media that tries to comment on the internet comments on the content of the internet or one small aspect of it that it wants to critique, but it doesn’t comment on the message that comes from the medium of the internet. The feeling of the experience of the internet, the way the most absurd or inane things you’ve ever seen coexist in the immediate context of tragedy and posts from your friends and family. Everything Everywhere All at Once does comment on this experience. It’s silly and stupid and chaotic because, like Bo said, “welcome to the internet, have a look around. Anything that brain of yours can think of can be found”.

Jobu Tupaki is a child of the internet raised in and by the chaos of the multiverse, cast unknowingly by her parents without training wheels into the void. She doesn’t have the skills to cope with that experience, and neither do many of the real teenagers who are growing up on the internet now. Evelyn, her mother, first tries to resist this experience and then tries to understand but eventually realizes that she, too, is not equipped to handle the onslaught of experiencing the internet head-on.

How do we handle this situation? How do we stare head-on into the darkness of the bagel and survive? Maybe you haven’t experienced what i’m talking about, maybe you don’t know what I mean, maybe you’ve ventured into this brave new world and have come out relatively unscathed but even if you haven’t been negatively affected by it I would argue that you probably are impacted by it in some way. Our world is being shaped right now by people who have gone in and haven’t come out unscathed. While my parent’s generation and my generation still got to grow up with the internet as a thing that we go to and then can go away from, the current generation is living with it as an omnipresent extension of themselves. They’re growing up in a technological world increasingly dominated by the internet. Their education, their social lives, and their careers are intertwined with this experience and it increasingly takes a particularly bold and defined individual to even take a step back from this world and it’s not slowing down. While the adults in power are just now noticing the issues that reared their heads almost a decade ago, the next decade holds a whole new set of wonders and terrors that we’re waiting to embrace with open arms.

It might sound from all of this like I feel like it’s a hopeless situation but I don’t feel hopeless and I don’t think Everything Everywhere All at Once does either. The film ultimately affirms a quiet acceptance of a life that openly acknowledges the infinite chaos and possibility swirling around us, vying for our attention but choosing to quietly ignore it to value what’s immediately in front of you. I think one of the points that the movie tries to make is that to engage with the multiverse of the internet more healthily; you have to understand what doesn’t matter to you because attention is the economy of the internet. We pay attention to things we see as necessary, so the entire engine of the internet is built to convince you that everything matters all at once all the time. Still, in the real world, in the world, you’re living in, you can only pay attention to a few things in one place at a time. To pay attention to the few things that do matter, you have to look at a world of infinite possibility out there and boldly proclaim that it doesn’t matter, and that’s not to say that nothing on the internet or that you find on the internet matters but the point is it can’t all matter equally to you if you try to act like it all matters equally to you. You’ll end up feeling like none of it matters. There’s a quote from Marshall McLuhan that gives me hope when I’m thinking about these kinds of issues, and so I’ll leave you with that there is no inevitability so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.