Tartare: Accessibility, Perception, and Internet Discourse
I ordered tartare, then I put it in a pan and posted photos of it on social media. Then ~5 million people hated me for it. Here's a story about food, technology, and the people.
Two days ago I ordered food. DoorDash is what many called it in the US. Glovo, is what it is here in Bulgaria. so I Glovo’d some food. Raw food. Raw meat. A tartare. Here’s a story of a Tartare, AI-generated images, and insufficient accessibility.
The story
As I lay on my couch, preparing to order food with my girlfriend, I give her my phone and she picks a restaurant -- an Italian restaurant. We have ordered from this restaurant a couple times already, so I knew I was going to be getting good food. As my turn arrives, I lay my fingers on the app and I click the ‘+’ sign on some light ‘Cacio e Pepe’. “Not enough”, I think, and I scrolled more. And that’s when I arrived at the image.
I look at an image of what resembles a steak. In the image, I see a raw steak, with a piece of raw yolk on top of it. “Couldn’t be raw”, I think as I click on the ‘+’ button.
Fast-forward 40 minutes and my delivery is here. I go down, I get it, and I go back home to unpack. While unpacking, I quickly make an observation that the box in which my steak is supposed to be, is cold. Not room-temperature cold. Cold-cold. “Hm..”, I think. And as I open the box, I gasp internally, as what I witness is beef, raw, with yolk, raw.
Taste
As this is the first time I stumble upon raw meat (even though I kind of knew this was a thing), I quickly open ChatGPT to try and understand what the reasons behind it being raw are. None. It’s just that — raw meat. “Um.. okay”, I think. “Is it safe, though”, I ask ChatGPT. “It kinda is.. or it might not be..”, it responds. “Okay, is this one safe, then”, as I send a picture of my steak to ChatGPT. “It might be.. or not..”, it responds. Um.. “well, f*ck it”, I think as I proceed with taking my first bite.
Raw. Cold. Ground beef. Raw. Mushy. Not good.
It was awful. I spit it out.
I really tried to set my mental space to one that considers raw meet as a delicacy... alas, to no success. It was just… plain bad. It tasted bad, is what it tasted. I took a quick picture of it, and decided to cook it.
Cooking the Tartare
“Well, I guess all I’m left with, is to cook it!”
I get my pan. I apply some oil. I put the tartare in. *ppppsssszzzzz* ~10 minutes later it’s done. As I sit and prepare to finish my diner, I notice a little strange smell coming from the (now cooked-cooked) tartare. I ignore it and I get to work. I cut a little bite and I put it in my mouth. I start chewing and... “dang! It’s worse now!!”.
Feeling defeated, I decided to call it a night by posting my visible frustration with the Tartare on Twitter/X. And so I did.
Then I moved on… or at least I thought I did….
Raw meat, internet discourse
Twenty-four hours after I posted my Tartare — raw AND cooked — the post banged. Five million impressions, death threats, all the stuff that come with a banger. Good laughs, too.
This was quite an unusual post for me, because all my other posts (mostly related to technology) usually bring in boring engagement and I end up muting them. Not this one, though.
Below is a highlight of all the most interesting reactions this post conjured.
This user (@allgarbled) hinted at how funny ordering a steak Tartare is:
And it is funny! Ordering raw meat is hilarious.
This user makes a point for how absurd seeing an image, and not believing it is:
And this user (@Bonecondor) exclaims, “He cooked it?!?!”:
Some users made supporting or at least coherent points:
source [x.com/(@willyLpierce, trillharris)
Some were in disbelief:
source [x.com/(@Supertanker2020, @DoctorNostrand, @Albaster_scarf, @blurryjoong)
What amazed me the most was the amount of pure hate towards “tech bros”:
source [x.com(BrorDudde, roguewerm, _redcoloratura, laurapalmer1899, ramasamaafro, tomsloaneld, punishedbphm)
I write more about the hate (which took about 80-90% of the reactions), not only towards “tech-bros”, but mostly towards me, in the last chapter.
And here is one person who even went as far as to find me & message me on Facebook!
However funny I found this period of engagement to be, three topics stuck with me:
Ineffective Accessibility
The demolishment of perception because of AI
How internet discourse takes direction
What follows is a set of philosophical reflections.
Ineffective Accessibility
source (x.com/@devahaz)
I order food two to three times a day. It just so happened through the years that I created this habit for myself. Now I am a little stuck with it. The thing is though, that as more time passed, I started making more money, and as such, I am currently at a point where I don’t have to think about the price of foods.
Often 70-150 BGN (41- 90usd) days.
I realized I don’t make a mental difference between “cheap” food and “fancy” food when I order it online. All I perceive it as, is food that I am going to eat, most probably in the plastic box it came in. How stupid is that!
This made me think how ineffective all that accessibility has become.
Taxis instead of public transport
Ordering food instead of shopping & cooking
Ordering clothes & shoes instead of going out and trying them on first
Streaming instead of going to a physical store and browsing a catalogue
All we do is receive, receive, receive. We receive everything, instantly.
Dating apps.
Instant messaging.
Endless feeds, with endless content for our monkey brains to be entertained.
The world becomes faster. It becomes more accessible.
The more you make, the less you do.
But the less you do, the less you end up with.
I don’t like this. I don’t like the fact I got used to “fancy restaurants”.
I don’t like the fact I now can play any movie in the next 10 seconds, and if Netflix doesn’t have it, HBO will, and if HBO doesn’t have it, Amazon Prime will, and if it’s not on Prime, I’ll just rent it!
I don’t like the fact I can order anything and everything and it will just arrive. It demolishes any and all excitement from the act of acquiring an item. The “hunt” is gone.
On that note, I still shop for clothes and shoes. I also still shop for electronics. The thing is, however.. that, just like cassettes and physical movies disappeared, I feel like the same is about to happen with everything else. No physical stores. No small local businesses. Just one, big warehouse with no lights on, ran by robots.
And yet, it makes sense. Of course it does...!
The Demolishment of Perception
source (x.com/@devahaz)
“very funny that you just ignored them having a picture of raw meat and yolk and calling the burger a name you’d never heard before”
It is very funny. When I read this I instantly thought of AI-generated videos. I can’t trust anything online anymore. I can’t agree something is real, and I can’t agree something is fake. The latter is easier to agree with, though.
You know, it happens in stages — first it was the “Will Smith pasta” videos, then it was the “6 long months of slop” when the obviously AI-generated videos of cats and pigeons dancing flooded the internet.
I am not counting the tralalelo tralalas, because these were just memes.
After the “6 long months of slop”, we started getting believable videos.
Nightcam animals:
A seagull breaking the front windshield of a car:
A monkey flying away with an umbrella:
And now, with nano banana pro (lol), we just landed on the checkpoint where there is no way you can distinguish if an image is fake or not:
Frat tech lords:
Girl at a bar:
It is obvious. Trust is gone.
And as far as the Tartare goes, I got used to seeing AI-generated images online — Glovo (the European DoorDash) constantly presents you with AI images.
And as a person who’s now too used to seeing AI images, and also as a person who’s not making a difference between a cheap restaurant and a supposedly “high quality” one, I assumed a Tartare is a steak.
Here is one of my responses on X:
And as far as the raw yolk image goes:
- I gave them the benefit of the doubt thinking they might have fallen victim to a new auto-gen feature from the app lol
- there are like 30 different burger names.. everyone tries to stand-out by branding their own burgers :))
And while this is a great point in my own eyes, my post caused a serious “backlash” on the internet. Like… VERY SERIOUS BACKLASH ON THE INTERNET.
In the last chapter: I go over how I got hated by 5 million people, and my assumptions as to “why”.
Internet Culture & “The First Turn”
The first 5 replies under a post make for the entire direction the public is about to take when they decide to engage, too. In my case, the first 5 replies were ones ironically ridiculing me, in a friendly manner, that ordering steak tartare and cooking it is a hilarious direction.
As time passed, the ironic replies turned sarcastic.
And as more time passed, the sarcastic replies turned hateful.
Here is a list of words I’ve been called:
ret*rd
moid
philistine
troglodyte
robber baron
“slow jug hooter” (lol)
moron
and so on…
Now, I was lucky enough to have already gotten 20 million impressions in the past year and as such, gaining a substantial amount of “resiliency to the internet”.
Not context, situations
On the internet people do not have the time for look for context. They see situations.
If we take what the original definition of the word “situation” is:
a set of circumstances in which one finds oneself; a state of affairs.
“the situation between her and Jake had come to a head”
the location and surroundings of a place.
“the situation of the town is pleasant”
Both definitions revolve around not one, but two (or more) variables.
A post on the internet just by itself, is not a situation.
It becomes a situation.
In the case of my Tartare, it became a situation after these three replies:
I believe people seeing these three in combination with my post, allowed them to feel as if it is allowed, as if it is “the correct reaction”, to respond with the same — negativity.
A small group of people decided to switch factions:
But the rest… the rest remained stuck at the initial entry.
They remained stuck in the first room they landed in, inside which they were welcomed by the first 5 guests. The first 5 replies.
Closing
A raw steak, an AI-looking image, a miss-thought, and five (now 7) million strangers.
Funny how something so small can lead to such a storm, full of emotions — both mine, and of those 7 million strangers. It is indeed a strange world we all find ourselves to live inside now. Such a strange world, that is now one with the internet.
That is now one with technology.
And maybe there were Tartare’s pre-internet.
Maybe a townsperson tried sharpening a blade with brick.
Maybe a royalty once went on their terrace with their shirt the other way around.
And people laughed, and they pointed pointed fingers, and they stated, “I am better than him!”.
And maybe that’s what humanity is all about — those tiny moments of attention we turn into situations. Those situations we turn into spectacles. And those spectacles, in which we point a finger at another in maybe an attempt to feel better about ourselves.
Maybe the only difference today is the scale — once a village, now a world.
You know.. in a way, maybe we are all one misstep away from becoming someone else’s Tartare.
Thank you for reading.
Denis
Out