where have all the catfish gone
To me, "catfish" meant fake accounts and Schulman; in today's strange new digital landscape, maybe it means something else.
I got into TikTok during the first 2020 quarantine, as many of us elder millennials did - it’s an easy way to let the fan in my brain cool off between tasks and relax, at least until about 20 minutes in when TikTok starts to make me feel worse instead of better. It accidentally also became a kind of living documentation of how (some) Gen-Zers are getting through the pandemic, one that with each passing year makes up a higher percentage of their self-aware lives on earth.
Lately there’s been a new trend: it prompts users to “show a catfish photo and then show yourself now.” I grew up with MTV’s Catfish series, although came into full cultural awareness a little after the original 2010 documentary that minted the term. To my cohort, it meant someone creating a layered false digital identity with deceptive intent: fake Facebook profiles, chat handles, dozens of stolen or doctored photos — sometimes hosts of fake supporting characters, friends and family that were really sock puppets run by the catfish to provide more credibility to their fake life, a strategy also used in Munchausen by Internet. You should have never called me a fat-ass Kelly Price, and so forth.
But to the kids on TikTok, their “catfish photo” is, at least as far as I can tell, just the best photo of them: good angles, a flattering outfit, a full face if they wear makeup, maybe taken by a professional. Sometimes it uses a filter, maybe one of the controversial ones that provide ~digital plastic surgery~ with a smaller nose, bigger eyes, sharper cheekbones, lighter skin, freckles. The trend has you follow up with the “real you:” a video of yourself taken in the moment, as you’re scrolling, often in bed with the lights off, no makeup. Users shoot their video from below, screw up their faces, tuck their jaw in for a double chin, giggle self-deprecatingly at themselves. Drawstring hoodies feature prominently. They look like normal kids - but they look like kids in the “catfish” photos, too.
It occurred to me to wonder, as I habitually have with all kinds of things for the past... almost three years now?, “what’s the pandemic been doing to catfishing?” A quick news search makes things look dire: “Coronavirus lockdowns create fertile ground for catfishers on dating apps, and the stress of it all may make the victims more willing to believe them”; “Why Is Catfishing on the Rise during the Pandemic?”. Upon closer inspection, the trend of stories like this peaked in mid 2020 with a few in early 2021, an era of the pandemic that feels almost quaint now. Remember washing your groceries! Were we ever so young. They’re also primarily about an iteration of catfishing that scams for profit: romantic scams that lead to asking the victim for money in an increasing number of sort-of plausible crises, or digital identities and photos being borrowed for medical fundraising scams.
Ostensibly, the reasons why catfishing might be “on the rise” (the number actually cited is 22%, and that’s based only on reports made to the FBI) make sense: people are forced to look online for romantic partners, catfish have plausible reasons to avoid meeting up in person or need money, and the extreme isolation of quarantine might motivate people to overlook red flags. “’The pandemic has created ideal conditions for romance scam fraudsters to thrive,’ said [FBI Supervisory Special Agent Keith Givens]. ‘You have a situation where people are isolated. People aren’t able to interact in person as they did prior to the pandemic. So that leads a lot of people to go online.’ A spokesperson from SocialCatfish.com (!!) says “These scammers were using COVID as an excuse of why they couldn’t get to them and why they needed money…. They’re using this plot saying they’re stuck overseas because of COVID and they can’t get back overseas. Or they caught COVID, and they’re stuck in the hospital, and they can’t get proper treatment.”
Not to nitpick unnecessarily, but there is a bit of playing fast and loose with terminology here - as is the way with many terms (RIP “gaslighting”), catfishing’s meaning has ballooned, here standing in for almost any kind of digital scam. Fake fundraisers also happen offline, as do romantic scams, which don’t generally include giving your victim your real name. The age range of the victims the FBI identifies makes clear that the majority of these are elder scams, which are horrific and also not unique to any kind of internet identity issue. Does anyone make up a fake identity on the internet out of old-fashioned malignant insecurity and maladaptive relational skills anymore? Maybe the meaning of the term I first knew — a multifaceted years-long feat of psychological manipulation mixed with self-loathing, gilded with the allure of a young internet we didn’t really understand and had no regulation for — is now only a relic of the early 2000s. Maybe the era of (mostly young) people exploring fucked up playacting online with little understanding of the real-world consequences is over. Maybe not!
The now-commonplace term catfish has spawned a range of related terms, many of which refer to white people borrowing racial aesthetics from groups they’re simultaneously materially oppressing: blackfishing, Asianfishing, etc. This is closer to the original meaning of the term in that it’s clearly interpersonally harmful in a way that’s based in pathology, in this case the pathology of violent white supremacy, rather than a self-aware strategy to access capital to survive (although there’s arguably an economic component, especially for people whose aesthetics are their livelihood). Less clear to me is the more recent term ‘maskfishing’: literally looking hot with a mask on, or hotter than you ‘really are.’ Or, as this poorly written trend piece confusingly argues, also looking less hot? “Mask fishing works in two different ways. People can either look better than expected underneath their face mask, or worse.” So true, bestie.
This new definition is confusing to me - surely just looking good can’t be deceptive. In an age when we know more about every detail of every single digital citizen’s life than ever before, when (anecdotally) youth feel obligated to put all their biographical info, axes of oppression and diagnoses in their bios, can your own photo of your actual physical self somehow constitute getting one over on someone? From my admittedly limited perspective, it feels like a reconstitution of false identity to mean anything but the most abject version of yourself possible.
Obviously there’s some room for perspective here: maskfishing is clearly mostly a joke, and the trend of sharing a hot picture of yourself and then a “real” (but still actually pretty good looking, just coyly self-deprecating) photo is pretty normal and age-appropriate; a digital version of the Mean Girls mirror scene. It’s also just heartbreakingly young; I’m reminded of wearing a special outfit or hairstyle as a teen and interpreting the attention from adult men as a sign that I had successfully passed as older and more attractive, only realizing in hindsight they were talking to me because I looked exactly my age. But it also feels like there’s some bedrock of real anxiety there; for a generation that’s increasingly spending more time in digital spaces than not, what felt to my peers like the intoxicating freedom to create an online identity may instead feel stressful or even burdensome. What if you haven’t digitally constructed yourself accurately enough, and end up tacitly lying because others don’t see the real you? Even worse, what if they do?
Again, it’s more a cultural product of my microgeneration, but I’m reminded of the “mortifying ordeal of being known” meme (both the original text and the later literal meme). The vulnerability of letting someone experience your authentic self and thus creating the circumstances for actual intimacy is uncomfortable for us all. For Gen Z (and maybe increasingly for all of us), it feels like it may also just be impossible - that is, if it relies on constantly constructing and reconstructing an authentic online presence, a Synecdoche, NY of digital selfhood.
There’s a certain hopeful naivetë in thinking a golden-hour selfie with a nose contour could look so good it defies belief it’s even you, but there’s also a kind of panic about how others might perceive us when our selfhood doesn’t feel fixed, and when we’re tasked with the project of creating a self to represent us in digital spaces rather than simply being, for better or for worse. Are we doing it correctly? Or is it fake? Is the version of ourselves we want others to see something we can really lay claim to as “real,” or does that only apply to some unvarnished, more shameful one of our faces? To the extent our expansive digital lives are in part tied to an ongoing pandemic, the catfishing anxiety and maskfishing anxiety are concerned about the same question: when you really see me, someday after all this is over (is this ever going to be over?), will you still like me? Will you still recognize me? Who will I be?
Friends of the pod may be interested to know I’m teaching my personal essay writing course (narrative essays! braided essays! imagistic essays!) through Loft Literary; six sessions over Zoom will start on January 26, and you can register here. If six sessions sounds a little rich for your blood, I’ll also be doing a condensed single-session version in April.