The True Multiverse Is Our Social Media Feeds

‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ tackles the chronically online era

Allow me to be That Guy in your English Lit class for a moment.

A couple years ago, I quit Instagram. Not for the first time, but definitely for a long one. It’s a boring story. Every day felt like peeking into a life I couldn’t attain. Your friend in high school bought a house. Your acquaintance from college is galavanting across Europe. The stinger: Your actual friends are hanging out without you. It had gotten to the point where I hesitated to open the app, practically viewed people’s stories through splayed fingers. It didn’t feel fun.

I was guilty, too, though. The only photos I posted were ones I took on the streets during my travels. I wasn’t trying to make people feel bad or perceive me in a specific way. The truth is I’m just not that interesting. The best parts of my life to put on display were those where I was away from home—where I didn’t have to account for all the ways my life was not progressing.

I returned to Instagram after a year, mid-pandemic. I figured I could handle it, but I quickly realized I couldn’t. Even during a pandemic, people’s lives were perfect and mine was not. I knew logically that wasn’t the case, but emotionally I couldn’t shake it. During the first year and half of the pandemic, I was packed in my childhood home with my mom, stepdad, sister, and grandma. At first, I felt great, and I felt guilty for feeling great—a lifelong introvert who finally felt the world go still if just for a moment. It didn’t take long for me to feel irritable all the time. I didn’t see anyone who didn’t live with me in fear of infecting my 80-year-old grandmother, but that didn’t stop everyone else from pretending there was no pandemic, at least on social media.

I quit it again. It’s been more than a year.

It’s been a weird year, too. Twelve months ago, I was nobody. Today, I am still nobody… but with 75,000 followers on TikTok. That’s not much, especially considering how many people have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers. But it’s not nothing either.

I’ve swapped the supposed personal connection from something like Instagram and welcomed the chaos of TikTok. TikTok lives or dies by the videos of “content creators.” It’s not about keeping up with that guy who was your lab partner during sophomore year in college; it’s about following personalities who highly curate their output depending on their “niche.” (Some creators’ niche is telling people they should have a niche.) People who use it like Instagram or even Facebook can sometimes find themselves in the midst of internet fame they never asked for, their lives picked apart by the masses as fodder. Remember Couch Guy?

Like Twitter, these niches function as subsections. There’s BookTok, FilmTok, TVTok, LifestyleTok, CarTok, FoodTok, PlantTok, GolfTok, QueerTok, StraightTok. Some of these I made up, but I’m sure they exist. When you open TikTok, you’re met with your For You Page (FYP), a feed of videos that’s supposed to be tailored to your interests. Anyone who says this works perfectly is lying. Scrolling through videos on the FYP is chaos in concentrate. Every flick of the thumb catapults you to a new niche. You start in FilmTok and end up on ElementarySchoolTeacherTok.

I used to be able to thumb through the FYP for an hour or two with comfort. These days, I can barely stand it.

Jobu Tupaki (played by Stephanie Hsu) is the “villain” of Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAAO). She has seen and experienced every possibility in every universe. But doing so has bogged down her mind, somehow both zombifying and electrifying her. What’s the point of anything if you’ve experienced everything, when the only time you find any sense or meaning is a few seconds or minutes at a time? You can see where I’m going here.

There’s a lot of genius in EEAAO; being true to its title is at the top of the list for me. It’s about many things, which others have written and talked about at length. But it’s also about the disorienting feeling of internet algorithms.

On my third viewing, it clicked for me, and I wondered why I hadn’t caught it sooner. It’s not like it’s a secret. In an interview for the Los Angeles Times, the directors talk about parts of the film as metaphors for being online too much.

Still, it’s not something I see widely discussed. A cursory search on Google and Twitter yielded the one article and one tweet (maybe I need to get better at internet searches). The moment it came together for me is when Alpha Waymond (Ke Huy Kwan) warns Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) about Jobu Tupaki. He says, after all of her experiences across the multiverse, she’s in pursuit of an objective truth. It harkens back to the Trump era of being chronically online, the onslaught of fake news that infested social media during the 2016 U.S. presidential election and continues till this day.

Jumping from universe to universe works as metaphor in many ways. One of them is the confusion of trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not within the barrage of disinformation. Anyone who used Twitter or Facebook in 2015 and 2016 can tell you that, for many users (some of them our own family members), checking their phones meant to be in a state of disarray. Even for those of us who were more discerning of our sources, there was a tsunami of information, real or fake. It didn’t get better. If the election was a tsunami, the Trump presidency was every act of god at once—all the time.

EEAAO was written in 2016, in the midst of this disinformation hysteria, where it felt like sectors of the internet were splintering further. In 2020, the pandemic only exacerbated the fragmentation. In-person meetings were replaced by Zooms, happy hours with Houseparty, downtime with even more social media scrolling. What happens when everyone lives chronically online at the same time?

“The internet had started to create these alternate universes,” co-director Daniel Kwan told the LA Times. “We were for the first time realizing how scary the internet was, moving from this techno optimism to this techno terror. I think this movie was us trying to grapple with that chaos.”

I admit I was caught in this techno terror. The issues loomed large and felt like they would never be fixed, but somehow the steps to move forward felt pragmatic—if only someone with power would listen. I’d tweet, collecting likes and retweets like they were fueling me. Many of us were in search of an objective truth like Jobu Tupaki. If we were dizzied by fake news, that meant the literal truth. If we were outraged at every news alert, it meant accountability. None of my IRL friends cared.

Being chronically online is exactly as it sounds. Typically, but not always, it involves having extreme social stances others would deem so politically correct they’re asinine, even by the most liberal people.

I consider Everything Everywhere All at Once to be one of several recent films tackling the chronically online and Trump eras. Many people will not favor me lumping the following movies with EEAAO. Wonder Woman 1984 commented on bending truths. Don’t Look Up captured the doomscrolling feeling and our continued polarization. There are also kids movies, like Space Jam: A New Legacy and Ron Gone Wrong. EEAAO is the best of these, without a doubt.

Alpha Waymond drives the point further. He tells Evelyn she’s been sensing that things are shifting. Her hair never falls in the same way anymore. Her clothes don’t fit exactly right. Our institutions are failing us, he says. Our institutions are only as strong as the people we put in charge to protect them. When those people decide to change what the truth is, it all crumbles. Jobu Tupaki has been in search of that objective truth this whole time, blocked by a frenzy of information she can’t escape.

Jumping through universes can feel like the tizzy of disinformation, but it also signals thumbing through the corners of the internet. Like TikTok, Twitter has its own subsections. There’s TV Twitter, Book Twitter, Political Twitter, Black Twitter, Weird Twitter, Local Twitter. Many elements of the film add to how disorienting and bizarre internet algorithms are: Dildos! Hotdog fingers! Sentient rocks! Each homepage or FYP is its own universe. Some of us live in these fragmented states with viral posts and discourse that exists only within a specific corner, and some of us catapult across universes with the flick of our thumb. Even on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn, each new scroll lands you in someone else’s universe—their latest accomplishments, the call to compare yourself to the best version of themselves they put on display.

Evelyn is perfect, Alpha Waymond tells her. She is bad at everything. Every bad choice she’s made has created a new universe where she’s accomplished something great. This makes her the perfect candidate to defeat Jobu Tupaki because she can tap into all those other Great Evelyns she never became. Each time I’ve arrived at that scene, I thought back to all the times I’ve wondered the same about me as I scrolled through Facebook. What if I chose a different major like that guy I knew in high school? What if I pursued my passions like my friend from middle school? What if I’d stayed in that past job I loved instead? What if… what if… what if…. In these other universes, I’m accomplished and truly happy, like my life’s purpose has been fulfilled.

It’s so close. A different choice, a tiny change. I ponder it over and over again as I thumb through each new post, my face slack, like Joy’s while watching clothes tumbling in a dryer.

Each time I watched EEAAO, I got chills toward the end of the movie when Waymond asks everyone to stop fighting. The first two times, I couldn’t pinpoint why. But by the third, I felt seen. He cries out that lately he doesn’t understand what’s happening but he feels like it’s all his fault.

Proof I venture outside my home. The Northman T-shirt made this more intense than intended.

As I write this conclusion, I am sitting in the backseat of a rental car en route to the Grand Canyon. There has been a lot of driving on this trip, which means a lot of time disconnected from my phone and the internet. (The irony of typing this on my phone as I’m enveloped by nature is not lost on me. Or perhaps it’s not ironic at all; perhaps it’s fitting.) My body hasn’t felt this exhausted in a while. The miles-long treks exploring new cities and the numbing vibration from the car as we drive hours on end have taken their toll on me. But my mind hasn’t felt this free in months.

With each new attraction or restaurant, my friends and I vow to treat our hometown like we’re tourists when we get back. I bite into a delectable meatball half the size of my fist and say, “Why don’t we ever try new restaurants back home?” We walk down an alley that leads to a hidden market and someone says, “Should we sign up for a tour when we get back?” We imagine all the realities we’re not living, the monotonies that hold us back.

I indulge slightly in the me I am while on vacation. Vacation Michael, I call him. We have to walk a couple hours to get there? Let’s do it! Usually I skip breakfast, but on vacation the day doesn’t start till I’ve found the best diner in town and tried their pancakes.

Back to the car. It’s the first time I’m not driving on this trip. Florida doesn’t have mountains, so I’m in awe anytime I see them. But my eyes and mind naturally wander to the people driving in the cars alongside us.

The young guy in a neon orange tank top and toy-sized car: I imagine he’s a college student going back home after the semester has ended. The middle-aged couple in the grey van (him, bald and wearing sunglasses; her, feet up on the dashboard, which makes me wince): I imagine it’s their weekend getaway from the kids. The old woman whose head barely reaches above the steering wheel: well, I’m a bit terrified. Still, I am envious of them—of their youth, the time they still have to lead great lives and accomplish all I have not, the relationships they’ve built and maintained, the fulfilling lives they’ve lived, their sense of adventure. I wish I were them. I wish I could hop into their cars as them, find that elusive element that will make me feel complete or make it all make sense. I’m sure it exists, just outside of me. It must. Others have it, and I don’t. I can see it in them, but it’s out of reach.

It takes me a moment—not till I type this exact sentence—to snap back. I’m still young…ish; it’s debatable. I’m on this trip with people whose company I enjoy. I decided to explore the great outdoors with little planning. Comparison, the pursuit of that objective truth, that elusive element, it’s only served to harm me. Out of all the universes, the cars on the road, the social media profiles of people I follow, I choose to be in this one. All the choices I’ve made that took me farther from the Great Michaels across the multiverse have brought me to this exact moment with these awesome people in this beautiful place. I hope Alpha Waymond would say all that untapped potential makes me perfect, too.

It’s tough. It’s not easy. I will falter again in the future. But time and time again, I find my way back.