You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip

by Kelsey McKinney

It was the fizzing excitement that rose in my body after two espresso martinis in a dark bar.

“Children (who are supposed to be less influenced by cultures) gossip practically from the time they learn to talk and to recognize other people.”

the size of the human neocortex only allows us to monitor around 150 distinct social relationships. If you know only 150 people, it is easy to keep track of how you feel about all of them.

Of course, we gravitate to cancel culture—it’s our innate evolved form of government.”

The people who are afraid of the Gossip Trap (or Cancel Culture, Woke Mobs, the Media, or whatever you want to call the kind of social pressure that can create change) are the ones who have reason to be: they have outsized power in our society, and they want to hold on to it.

But that is the truth about gossip: We want to separate ourselves from it at the same time we want to drown in it. We want the truth, all of it, not told slant, until suddenly we don’t.

I have yet to see any art made by AI that caused me to feel anything at all.

We are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves, yet we are taught to see this desire as an illegitimate form of prying,”

Theory of mind is the ability to know that someone else thinks something.

Anyone who has ever sat at a table in a crowded bar close-reading a text message sent by someone your friend went on two dates with, constructing a reason for why they would have added an ellipsis after “Hey,” knows that creating a narrative out of situations we find confusing is a fundamental part of being a person.

Maybe it’s as simple as: not all stories are gossip, but the best ones feel like they could be. They invite a kind of collusion between the teller and the hearer, a secret shared that binds them together.

What’s missing from the ChatGPT version is a sense of wonder, of intrigue. There’s no heart in the story.

To gossip well and to tell a story well, the teller must occupy a real presence in space and time and tell the story from there, as a combination of their experiences.

Because what makes writing good isn’t only a display of technical skill, but the ability to use the writing to search for meaning in the world, to try to make sense of our space in the universe.

What is essential, then, to weaving a good story of any kind (gossip or not) is to have an identity and a point of view from which to tell that story. All writing is about the journey from information to telling, not just the final product. You cannot observe the world without eyes to see it through.

“As we further reduce our artistic practices to a compilation of all things algorithmically poised we reduce our capacity as a species for creativity.

There are only two practices Dunbar pointed to as being uniquely human: storytelling and religion. Both of those, he wrote, require us “to be able to imagine that another world exists.”

I didn’t just want to hear gossip; I wanted to take it in my hands and mold it, rearrange the punch lines and the reveals until I could get the timing right enough that my friends in the cafeteria would gasp.

But anyone privy to gossip that matters knows that often the only truth that exists can be found in the gossip mills because it is often the only kind of power a marginalized or subjugated group can grab hold of.

Perhaps that is the real identifying factor of whether something is gossip: Does it ask you to take a leap of faith, to trust the teller enough to believe a story you did not see with your own eyes and did not hear with your own ears?

It is less important to teenagers that they actually have something to say about you than it is that you know that they are talking about you.

As Chuck Bass once said, “I am a bitch when I want to be.”

“One reason women have traditionally gossiped more than men is because gossip has been a social interaction wherein women have felt comfortable stating what they really think and feel. Often, rather than asserting what they think at the appropriate moment, women say what they think will please the listener. Later, they gossip, stating at that moment their true thoughts.”

(Jodee Blanco’s 2003 Please Stop Laughing at Me: One Woman’s Inspirational Story and Rachel Simmons’s 2002 Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, for example),

The adults in Mean Girls want the same thing for their societies that the people in power at large seem to want for ours: for the people in charge to remain in charge and for peace to reign.

Jia Tolentino’s book Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, in which she wrote of the #MeToo movement: “There was something about the hashtag itself—its design, and the ways of thinking that it affirms and solidifies—that both erased the variety of women’s experiences and made it seem as if the crux of feminism was this articulation of vulnerability itself…

They have made feminist solidarity and shared vulnerability seem inextricable, as if we were incapable of building solidarity around anything else.”

When researchers model the way gossip spreads, they can use the same distributed algorithms that model the propagation of infectious disease.

Psychologists have also found that if we hear something and understand it, we will believe it and remember it. It does not matter whether that information is true or not.

In exchange for knowledge, we trade wonder, which feels like an unfair trade when entertainment is concerned.

This is the fan’s fallacy: to believe that you literally know a famous person just because you consume their art, and follow them on social media, and care about them so much.

Researchers have found that listening with headphones is a superconductor for creating a feeling of emotional connection, because it sounds like the person’s voice is inside your head.

A girl with a viral TikTok becomes a known person to us, we follow her on Instagram, and now her photos are right next to our best friend’s memes and our sister’s birthday party photos.

Take, for example, the joy of snooping. There is almost no greater pleasure in my life than being asked to help obtain gossip.

I am professionally nosy, and perhaps more curious than average, but this kind of desire to learn about the world and the people around you is inherent in humans.

Reading this book, for example, will not feed your family or protect your body. Maybe there is a way to use it to get laid, but that’s not my business. We’ve evolved to be curious, so you figure it out.

The fear that what is fun and silly online can radiate into violence or misery offline is based on history, not nightmare.

In modern-day American society, wearing blue is fine, but something almost universally disliked is being a fuckboy.

We have created our own surveillance state willingly, and we applaud ourselves for doing so.

it is just as much of a benefit to know who has an advantage as it is to have one. Your intel can keep you safe. As long as it’s right.

Something bad or difficult is happening to someone else, not to us. It is easy to believe that we will learn from their mistakes. We feel that the knowledge we gain from watching them will buoy us against harm.

Every year, my middle school held a career week. Adults used one of their few PTO days to appear in our Axe deodorant–laden halls and tell us stories about wearing suits, having a boss, and whatever else it was that they did.

As the olive oil–washed martinis gave way to espresso martinis, we began talking about a woman we all kind of knew who lies all the time.

There are few greater feelings than getting to tell a story that you know will hit every time.

The joy of getting to share this kind of gossip with someone you like is the verbal equivalent of buying someone the present they’ve always wanted for half off.

Telling this story and watching people hear it for the first time feels like seeing a couple making out in the park on the first warm day. It feels like the scream that emerges from your mouth on the way down the roller-coaster hill. It is play.

A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2012 found that when subjects actively gossiped about an unfair person or situation, it soothed them and kept their heart rate down.

A liar, he argues, is less dangerous than a bullshitter, because sometimes pieces of what the bullshitter tells you are true. A liar is conscious of the truth and actively chooses to work against it. But a bullshitter ignores any distinction between true and false.