WHO IS NEWTOWN AFFIRMATIONS ????

After 20 minutes of waiting, I feel like I’m going crazy. I sit in a cafe, watching my surroundings. I’m profiling everyone I see. We are scheduled to meet at 10:30am, I arrive at ten, anxiously straightening the cutlery, ordering a batch brew, checking my notes for the 50th time. My neck whips around to look at everyone who arrives. Adidas Sambas, jorts, ordering an iced long black… seems too on the nose. A slightly scruffy three piece suit, a skim flat white… could they really be an office jockey? How should I even greet them? With a handshake? Do I dap them up? I remind myself of my current skill level… A high five?

I order a matcha to calm down, and then someone walks in, makes eye contact with me, waves, then orders. Is this them? Or is my memory for names and faces failing me again? They sit down opposite me. The handshake we end up doing is oddly chill. While unexpected on my part, it feels right for the moment. It’s finally happened. The culmination of a three week spiral, an anxiously sent DM, and sheer luck. I’ve found them. I found @newtown.affirmations.

Six months earlier. 

Eight seconds ago, @newtown.affirmations started following me. Eight seconds ago, I was having a tea outside, cloud watching, while somewhere else, someone else decided to follow me. And that someone was @newtown.affirmations. At first, the follow sat with me in a quiet delusion. The account probably just randomly followed me. Am I being recognised for my semi-frequent-esoteric-only-slightly-posture-y photo dumps? It ate away at me. It clawed at me. Who was behind it all? Who were they? Did they know me… Did I know them?? I started to see The Admin in all my friends, everyone at every funccction, in every person I passed on King Street. I knew I had to uncover the uncoverable. I had to find the true face of The Admin of the famously anonymous @newtown.affirmations. Everyone had their own story to tell — the account was their old friend from school, they met them at a smoko on Oxford Street (or was it the Impy?), they were on their close friends story, but they didn’t know who they were. I waded through a sludge of misinformation for a while. The inside joke snowballed into actual intent, and a plan. The Admin could hide but I’d catch them eventually. I’d unmask them. 

Three weeks earlier. 

I posted a call out asking for leads on The Admin. It yielded varied and very weird responses. Countless people had their own pet theories about their identity. Seven different old high school friends were suspect, a small group had the theory that they were a Labor staffer (I almost pulled the plug on the whole project then and there), a friend’s ex talked to The Admin via DM about Greens LGA discourse. According to a few, it was secretly me and I had no idea this entire time... it seemed that no one actually knew, but everyone had a vague idea. How were we all living like this? How was this going under all of our noses? A kingpin of Gadi meme pages was just roaming the street and it could be anyone. I was getting too close to this case. I needed to let it go. “It’s just a meme page, who cares.” “Pack it up Louis Theroux.” The haters jabbed at me. There were too many things that I had questions about. There was too much I didn’t know. I would uncover the account if it was the last thing I did. 

My investigation thus far was fruitless, it was time for a hail mary. I couldn’t live like this for much longer. I had to know. If the public weren’t going to give me answers I would peel off the mask myself. A cold DM to @newtown.affirmations. This is what journalism was made for. This is what Noam Chomsky would have wanted.

Five minutes later.

@newtown.affirmations is a Newtown-specific meme page, posting sometimes septence daily memes about Newtown, the Inner-West, its people, its happenings, and the broader world concerns of the Inner-Westosphere (if trying to find cheap selvedge denim can be classed as a concern). Every event happening in Sydney, the account has a hyperspecific meme for it. The Southwest link buses? Bosnians at Thai Pothong? Moo Deng giving a lesbian a cigarette at Birdcage? 7 circles of Hinge hell? All covered by @newtown.affirmations. The account is the centre of the veritable Newtown panopticon.

When they sit down, they reference a story post made 30 seconds before walking in — a guy on a bright yellow Vespa getting randomly drug tested on King Street, with the caption ‘someone called the gentrification police on his ass.’ The comments on the post were part culture war (Newtown is post-gentrified), part Inner-West specific digs (Vespa guy was being arrested for claiming to live in Newtown while secretly living in Macdonaldtown). My theories about The Admin’s appearance were only somewhat correct. They have a brat tattoo (figures), and are wearing a pair of orange Adidas campus shoes. For a pretty big meme page, they are soft spoken but passionate. What was hiding under this veneer of nonchalance? What was inside the brain behind some of the best memes this side of Marrickville? They sip a strong cappuccino while I ramble, I realise that my notebook of questions is going to do precious little to structure this conversation. I embrace the tangents.

I find out a lot of pretty curious things about The Admin as we chat. The account was started during lockdown due to boredom more than anything, and despite @newtown.affirmations’ exponential growth, it is still a personal meme page for The Admin. As the account got bigger, they were conscious of the many moving parts of local social media fame: wrangling with brand deals, legal strife, disclosing running a meme page to employers, requests for the account to cancel people, manually adding 600 people to a Close Friends story. “There’s a lot more to consider now I guess, than when I started it.” But I didn’t come for the drama. What drew me into the case was finding The Admin. Searching for the person who was capable of such greatness (Sydney Metro shitposting) and horror (40+ close friends story posts in 12 hours). 

I asked what the most fun part of the page was overall, and they lit up. 

“I love it when people just message me out of nowhere and start yapping about something… and it’s such innocuous stuff sometimes, people have placed so much cultural reverence on something like a fucking turkey walking over the street… I don’t know why [people] like the page, honestly. It doesn’t mean much to me one way or the other. I feel like it’s nice to see them have a… I guess a positive response to me responding to them or whatever. Like that’s a nice feeling, how could it not be?” 

In our short 45-minute chat, I often forget that I was sitting right across from the subject of my months-long investigation. Is this how that twunk from Hannibal felt? The Admin was genuinely passionate about the Newtown world, they took most interactions they had on the account with a grain of salt, and a healthy level of disgust to the sometimes posturing phony nature of many Enmore Road inhabitants. “If I had to choose between having a beer with Barnaby Joyce and like any person from the Inner-West, I’d probably choose Barnaby.” Apart from the jadedness that comes from running a meme page for years, they enjoyed both the community and the page’s reception, as well as their personal distance from it. As I got to know more about The Admin, the illusion I had created of them slowly started to deflate. The weeks I spent wondering, questioning, doubting, suspecting, full of paranoia and distrust of those around me started to come undone. Had I done all this for nothing? Was it really not as big a deal as I thought? Burning doubt was soothed by the steady pace of my talk with The Admin. While my parasocial delusion was shattered, it was good to know that @newtown.affirmations reflected the best, rather than the worst of the Inner-West.

By the end of the chat, I felt bittersweet. The illusion was gone. I knew The Admin. The chase was over. I had found @newtown.affirmations and came to find that they weren’t a shadowy panopticon guard, ruling over the greater Enmore area, but a full-fledged person with a non-meme page centric life and non-Newtown Affirmations interests. As I asked my final question (‘What’s a fun fact that wouldn’t kill anonymity?’), The Admin laughed and looked around the room for a bit, searching for an answer. We stood up, a second handshake, now a little more secure than the first. They responded: “you could say something like ‘I prefer Enmore’ that’d be funny… Yeah, do that one.”

When I started asking who The Admin was, if people weren’t laughing that I was trying to do an exposé on a meme page, they honestly didn’t care about the identity behind the page as much as I did. Do we need to know the face behind our memes? I would say after my interactions with The Admin, that @newtown.affirmations is still just as funny. The enjoyment we find in accounts like @newtown.affirmations can exist while The Admin lives in pure anonymity, I think it’s actually better this way for both parts of the meme-enjoyer-to-meme-maker relationship. But I’ve gotten too close to the truth. If we all knew The Admin, who knows what hell would break loose. Maybe there’s something to blissful ignorance. For the greater good, to protect the precarious balance of the niche meme landscape, The Admin remains unknown. 

We walk out to the street together. On Parramatta Road we part ways. I watch them slowly get engulfed in a raging city crowd. A few steps later, I look back over my shoulder. The Admin is gone.