Sometimes the internet is good and sometimes the internet is bad, and itap going to get worse before it gets better, according to Hank Green.
Green has authority on this sort of thing. The 38-year-old packed a sold-out Littleton High School theater Tuesday night for a Tattered Cover event promoting his just-published novel, “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing” (Dutton). The first-time author already has a dedicated fan base because he’s been kind of a big deal on the internet for the past decade — so much so that his internet fame has bled into real life.
The Washington Post called Green , a hat tip to his YouTube shows, and . Green, a staunch advocate of nerd culture, is also known for the YouTube series that has him and his novelist brother, John, educating, philosophizing and making dad jokes.
“Hank makes me think, and I love that,” said 18-year-old Sophia Miller, who grabbed a seat up front for Tuesday’s show. In addition to a short book reading, Green took questions from the crowd, sang the irrepressible earworm “Call Me Maybe” that appears in his book, and hit a Tattered Cover employee over the head with a blow-up baseball bat.
Basically, he was the internet.
When Green decided to become an author, he thought he should write what he knew. He ended up with a socially conscious science fiction story about the duality of internet culture — the dark and the light side — and the fame that can come with it. The narrative is propelled by a 23-year-old protagonist named April May who goes viral over a video she stars in featuring a giant, robot-like mechanism she found on the streets of New York.
Green is working on a sequel and, in what little spare time the father of a 2-year-old has, worrying about how we’re all going to survive the current online climate and social media maelstrom. Green reminded the room full of young folks to register to vote, get out into their real-life communities, and remember that social media can be a fantastic platform for good as long as we remember our own humanity and the humanity of those we interact with.
As he warns in “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing”: “I don’t think any of us are blameless when we all, more and more often, see ourselves not as members of a culture, but as weapons in a war.”
Here are more of Green’s musings he shared in an interview with The Denver Post.
Q. What is the biggest issue unique to millennials that they’re facing right now?
A. Student loans. Student debt is a big thing that I think about a lot and I worry about a lot. It is so important that we have good higher education and that it is accessible to people and does not immediately tie people to an entire lifetime of servicing the debt.
Q. You’ve seen internet culture and social media evolve so rapidly since you started your internet journey. If you had to make predictions on what that would look like in 10 years, what would you say?
A. Itap hard to even make things like six-month predictions with this. You can only get a pretty big-picture look. My hope is that itap been around so long that I think it will be very background to us and won’t seem like this scary, new thing. We will have worked out a lot of it, and we will feel it as part of our lives in a more natural way. The big question to me is, like, who ends up controlling it and how significantly are those companies allowed to control the people who are making the content, which I think is also who is consuming it. Everybody makes and everybody consumes.
Q. The book oftentimes felt like a warning. What were you trying to warn us about?
A. I think, partially, itap not so much specific to online life. I think a lot of it is about success and feeling valued and about the allure of constructing yourself in the minds of other people. Obviously, thatap a bigger deal when you’re dealing with fame and notoriety and being in the public eye, but itap also true for all of us. Maybe not everybody. But everybody who is on Instagram. I think thatap part of it. And then also, like, in that process losing the connection to the reality that I am not just a tool with which to achieve whatever win. That I shouldn’t treat other people like tools, and that I shouldn’t treat myself like a tool.
Q. What do you think we can do to help ourselves not do that?
A. Honestly, like, talk to people with our mouths.
Q. Thatap insane.
A. (Laughter.) I feel bad about that advice because I do think that online communication and communities are really vibrant and good and real, but I think that the internet can be isolating and that can lead to all kinds of negative outcomes both culturally and personally. Even health is very negatively impacted by isolation, so I worry about isolation.
Q. Does the future of internet culture scare you?
A. Itap hard to be scared by the future. Itap just an unknown. I think the present of internet culture does scare me. I’m pretty hopeful from the large view. I think that we’re good at adapting and changing and creating new rules and living in worlds we weren’t designed to live, which we’re all doing right now already. I’m long-term hopeful for sure, but I think itap going to get worse before it gets better.
