Substrate

and the flavors are so muted that drinking, say, LaCroix’s “muré pepino” is more like having someone gently whisper “blackberries and cucumber” in your ear than tasting either a blackberry or a cucumber. What differentiates seltzer from plain old water are the ephemeral qualities of smell and texture, and they begin to dissipate as soon as you pop the tab. Like Swiss cheese, it’s a product that’s defined as much by what’s not there than what is: Seltzer is nothingness, bottled and branded. This isn’t a story about death, not really. I just have to tell you about death so I can tell you about seltzer, because that’s how I can tell you that everyone you love is going to live forever. ​ It wasn’t just nothing, it was a placeless nothing, so LaCroix was free to be anything to anyone, anywhere. In an age of personal branding, online self-realization, and individualized versions of truth, LaCroix could take on any qualities of its consumer. It became a mirror. ​ To use freshman-year Marxist terms, social media replaces interaction between people with interaction between objects. All content, from a selfie to my mom’s last words to this article, is nothing; it only becomes something when it’s seen by someone else. ​ The fact that you never know who a hashtag is going to hook makes it something more than a way to interact with brands — a hashtag is a seance, mediating the space between constructed identities. It’s a way of reaching out, in hope and longing, into the ether. In this way, it performs the same function as art or prayer, linking tangible worlds to transcendent ones, an invisible line cast out with the hope of connection and of becoming whole, if only for a moment, right before the bubble bursts. ​ Content may be nothing, but nothing has two faces, emptiness and infinite potential, facts and ephemera. ​ I don’t remember much of what I said at my mother’s service. I know I tried to say that she was still a part of me, that she was alive where we all keep the people we love alive inside ourselves, but wasn’t able to get much of that out. This piece is how I finally said what I wanted to say. Maybe once it’s shot into the ether of the internet, it’ll take its place there with all the ads and memes and YouTube comments and every other bit of flotsam that’s thrust out with desperate apathy and the unspoken prayer that someone, anyone will notice. It, too, will be nothing, but by being nothing, it can be a point of momentary connection, a ghost that fades from view when it’s no longer in the corner of your eye. Like memories of the people you love, the act of willing these points of connection into being can exist long after the tangible things that put them into the world have disappeared.