Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

These deranged takes, and their unnerving proximity to online monetization, are case studies in the way that our world—digitally mediated, utterly consumed by capitalism—makes communication about morality very easy but makes actual moral living very hard. You don’t end up using a news story about a dead toddler as a peg for white entitlement without a society in which the discourse of righteousness occupies far more public attention than the conditions that necessitate righteousness in the first place.

To communicate an identity requires some degree of self-delusion.

The self is not a fixed, organic thing, but a dramatic effect that emerges from a performance. This effect can be believed or disbelieved at will.

Through social media, many people have quickly come to view all new information as a sort of direct commentary on who they are.

This is not an accident but an essential design feature: social media was constructed around the idea that a thing is important insofar as it is important to you.

The internet was dramatically increasing our ability to know about things, while our ability to change things stayed the same, or possibly shrank right in front of us.

The ideal woman has always been conceptually overworked, an inorganic thing engineered to look natural.

It’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation, to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible. Women have known this intimately for a long time.

The problem is that a feminism that prioritizes the individual will always, at its core, be at odds with a feminism that prioritizes the collective.