Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

The last few years have taught me to suspend my desire for a conclusion, to assume that nothing is static and that renegotiation will be perpetual, to hope primarily that little truths will keep emerging in time.

Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious.

Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute for offline ones, and then overtake them. This is why everyone tries to look so hot and well-traveled on Instagram; this is why everyone seems so smug and triumphant on Facebook; this is why, on Twitter, making a righteous political statement has come to seem, for many people, like a political good in itself.

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.

The worldview of the Gamergaters and Pizzagaters was actualized and to a large extent vindicated in the 2016 election—an event that strongly suggested that the worst things about the internet were now determining, rather than reflecting, the worst things about offline life.

Trump’s rise to power is inseparable from the existence of social networks that must continually aggravate their users in order to continue making money.

I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems: first, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale.

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.

The everyday madness perpetuated by the internet is the madness of this architecture, which positions personal identity as the center of the universe. It’s as if we’ve been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection. Through social media, many people have quickly come to view all new information as a sort of direct commentary on who they are.

Identity, according to Goffman, is a series of claims and promises. On the internet, a highly functional person is one who can promise everything to an indefinitely increasing audience at all times.

The internet is engineered for this sort of misrepresentation; it’s designed to encourage us to create certain impressions rather than allowing these impressions to arise “as an incidental by-product of [our] activity.” This is why, with the internet, it’s so easy to stop trying to be decent, or reasonable, or politically engaged—and start trying merely to seem so.

Elliot Rodger’s Isla Vista massacre, in which he killed six people and wounded fourteen in an attempt to exact revenge on women for rejecting him. Women responded to this story with a sense of nauseating recognition: mass violence is nearly always linked to violence toward women, and for women it is something approaching a universal experience to have placated a man out of the real fear that he will hurt you. In turn, some men responded with the entirely unnecessary reminder that “not all men” are like that. (I was once hit with “not all men” right after a stranger yelled something obscene at me; the guy I was with noted my displeasure and helpfully reminded me that not all men are jerks.) Women began posting stories on Twitter and Facebook with #YesAllWomen to make an obvious but important point: not all men have made women fearful, but yes, all women have experienced fear because of men.

Even as women have attempted to use #YesAllWomen and #MeToo to regain control of a narrative, these hashtags have at least partially reified the thing they’re trying to eradicate: the way that womanhood can feel like a story of loss of control. They have made feminist solidarity and shared vulnerability seem inextricable, as if we were incapable of building solidarity around anything else. What we have in common is obviously essential, but it’s the differences between women’s stories—the factors that allow some to survive, and force others under—that illuminate the vectors that lead to a better world. And, because there is no room or requirement in a tweet to add a disclaimer about individual experience, and because hashtags subtly equate disconnected statements in a way that can’t be controlled by those speaking, it has been even easier for #MeToo critics to claim that women must themselves think that going on a bad date is the same as being violently raped.

It’s because of the hashtag, the retweet, and the profile that solidarity on the internet gets inextricably tangled up with visibility, identity, and self-promotion.

Facebook’s goal of showing people only what they were interested in seeing resulted, within a decade, in the effective end of shared civic reality.

front of the timeline, as many critics have noted, we exhibit classic reward-seeking lab-rat behavior, the sort that’s observed when lab rats are put in front of an unpredictable food dispenser. Rats will eventually stop pressing the lever if their device dispenses food regularly or not at all. But if the lever’s rewards are rare and irregular, the rats will never stop pressing it. In other words, it is essential that social media is mostly unsatisfying. That is what keeps us scrolling, scrolling, pressing our lever over and over in the hopes of getting some fleeting sensation—some momentary rush of recognition, flattery, or rage.

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.

But the worse the internet gets, the more we appear to crave it—the more it gains the power to shape our instincts and desires. To guard against this, I give myself arbitrary boundaries—no Instagram stories, no app notifications—and rely on apps that shut down my Twitter and Instagram accounts after forty-five minutes of daily use. And still, on occasion, I’ll disable my social media blockers, and I’ll sit there like a rat pressing the lever, like a woman repeatedly hitting myself on the forehead with a hammer, masturbating through the nightmare until I finally catch the gasoline whiff of a good meme.

Distraction is a “life-and-death matter,” Jenny Odell writes in How to Do Nothing. “A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can’t think and act.”

Of course, people have been carping in this way for many centuries. Socrates feared that the act of writing would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls.” The sixteenth-century scientist Conrad Gessner worried that the printing press would facilitate an “always on” environment. In the eighteenth century, men complained that newspapers would be intellectually and morally isolating, and that the rise of the novel would make it difficult for people—specifically women—to differentiate between fiction and fact. We worried that radio would drive children to distraction, and later that TV would erode the careful attention required by radio. In 1985, Neil Postman observed that the American desire for constant entertainment had become toxic, that television had ushered in a “vast descent into triviality.” The difference is that, today, there is nowhere further to go. Capitalism has no land left to cultivate but the self. Everything is being cannibalized—not just goods and labor, but personality and relationships and attention. The next step is complete identification with the online marketplace, physical and spiritual inseparability from the internet: a nightmare that is already banging down the door.

For most of my life I’ve believed, without really articulating it, that strange things just drop into my lap—that, especially because I can’t really think unless I’m writing, I’m some sort of blank-brained innocent who has repeatedly stumbled into the absurd unknown.

it, I was learning that in the twenty-first century it would sometimes be impossible to differentiate between the pretext for an experience, the record of that experience, and the experience itself.

As a sixteen-year-old, I was, in fact, hung up on arbitrary sexual boundaries; I was a virgin, and wanted to stay a virgin till marriage, a goal that would go out the window within about a year. But I can’t tell if, on the show, I was more concerned with looking virtuous or actually being virtuous—or if, having gone from a religious panopticon to a literal one, I was even capable of distinguishing between the two ideas.

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

More recently, the ideal woman has been whatever she wants to be as long as she manages to act upon the belief that perfecting herself and streamlining her relationship to the world can be a matter of both work and pleasure—of “lifestyle.” The ideal woman steps into a stratum of expensive juices, boutique exercise classes, skin-care routines, and vacations, and thereby happily remains.

But the psychological parasite of the ideal woman has evolved to survive in an ecosystem that pretends to resist her. If women start to resist an aesthetic, like the overapplication of Photoshop, the aesthetic just changes to suit us; the power of the ideal image never actually wanes.

Sweetgreen is a marvel of optimization: a line of forty people—a texting, shuffling, eyes-down snake—can be processed in ten minutes, as customer after customer orders a kale Caesar with chicken without even looking at the other, darker-skinned, hairnet-wearing line of people who are busy adding chicken to kale Caesars as if it were their purpose in life to do so and their customers’ purpose in life to send emails for sixteen hours a day with a brief break to snort down a bowl of nutrients that ward off the unhealthfulness of urban professional living.

Matt Buchanan, who wrote at The Awl in 2015: The chopped salad is engineered…to free one’s hand and eyes from the task of consuming nutrients, so that precious attention can be directed toward a small screen, where it is more urgently needed, so it can consume data: work email or Amazon’s nearly infinite catalog or Facebook’s actually infinite News Feed, where, as one shops for diapers or engages with the native advertising sprinkled between the not-hoaxes and baby photos, one is being productive by generating revenue for a large internet company, which is obviously good for the economy, or at least it is certainly better than spending lunch reading a book from the library, because who is making money from that?

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. —

Naomi Wolf wrote, in The Beauty Myth, about the peculiar fact that beauty requirements have escalated as women’s subjugation has decreased.

Wolf wrote that a woman had to believe three things in order to accept the beauty myth. First, she had to think about beauty as a “legitimate and necessary qualification for a woman’s rise in power.” Second, she had to ignore the beauty standard’s reliance on chance and discrimination, and instead imagine beauty as a matter of hard work and entrepreneurship, the American Dream. Third, she had to believe that the beauty requirement would increase as she herself gained power. Personal advancement wouldn’t free her from needing to be beautiful. In fact, success would handcuff her to her looks, to “physical self-consciousness and sacrifice,” even more.

The default assumption tends to be that it is politically important to designate everyone as beautiful, that it is a meaningful project to make sure that everyone can become, and feel, increasingly beautiful. We have hardly tried to imagine what it might look like if our culture could do the opposite—de-escalate the situation, make beauty matter less.

Old requirements, instead of being overthrown, are rebranded. Beauty work is labeled “self-care” to make it sound progressive.

Shapewear, essentially twenty-first-century corseting, controls the body under clothing; athleisure broadcasts your commitment to controlling your body through working out.

The historian Susan G. Cole wrote that the best way to instill social values is to eroticize them.

We can decode social priorities through looking at what’s most commonly eroticized: male power and female submission, male violence and female pain. The most generically sexual images of women involve silence, performance, and artificiality: traits that leave male power intact, or strengthened, by draining women’s energy and wasting our time.

It’s possible if we want it. But what do we want? What would you want—what desires, what forms of insubordination, would you be able to access—if you had succeeded in becoming an ideal woman, gratified and beloved, proof of the efficiency of a system that magnifies and diminishes you every day?

Adult heroines commit suicide for different reasons than teenage heroines do. Where the teenagers have been drained of all desire, the adults are so full of desire that it kills them.

She “thought of Leonce and the children. They were a part of her life. But they need not have thought that they could possess her, body and soul.”

A husband gets to be “first a citizen, a producer, secondly a husband,” where a wife is “before all, and often exclusively, a wife.”

De Beauvoir glossed this as transcendence versus immanence: men were expected to reach beyond their circumstances, while women were expected to be defined and bounded by theirs.

Kate Zambreno, in Heroines (2012), nods to de Beauvoir while writing about the existential horror of traditional gender roles—“the man allowed to go out into the world and transcend himself, the woman reduced to the kind of work that will be erased and forgotten at day’s end, living invisible among the vestigial people of the afternoon.”

Traditionally, male literary characters are written and received as emblems of the human conditi...

Female literary characters, in contrast, indicate the condition of being a woman. They are condemned to a universe that revolves around sex and family and domesticity. Their stories circle questions of love and obligation—love being, as the critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis writes, the concept “our culture uses [for women] to absorb all possible Bildung, success/failure, learning, education, and transition to adulthood.” And so I’m using the term “heroine” simply for the women whose version of literary femininity has stuck.

Pride and Prejudice (1813) cuts out on the high note of new love, with a final chapter that telescopes into Elizabeth’s happy future with Mr. Darcy. You wonder about her mood if the novel had started ten years later. Would Elizabeth be happy? Would there be a book if she was? Has anyone ever written a great novel about a woman who is happy in her marriage?

But heroes are mostly unhappy for existential reasons; heroines suffer for social reasons, because of male power, because of men.

Women are haunted by memories and stories of one another—shadow selves, icons, obsessions, ghosts. It is transcendent, in the way de Beauvoir meant it, to watch Ferrante’s narrators triangulate themselves from these images, in their emotional and intellectual project of asserting selfhood and control.

When two women “entrusted” themselves to each other, they prioritized not their similarities but their differences. They recognized that the differences between their stories were central to their identities, and in doing this, they also created these identities and affirmed this difference as strength. (Audre Lorde had made this argument in 1979, framing difference as something not just to be “merely tolerated,” but a “fund of necessary polarities, between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”)

If women were not allowed to be seen as emblematic of the human condition, I wouldn’t even get to be seen as emblematic of the female condition. Even worse was the fact that the female condition in literature—one of whiteness and confinement—remains so unsatisfying. I was shut out of a realm that I didn’t even really want to enter. The heroine’s text tells us that, at best, under a minimum of structural constrictions, women are still mostly pulverized by their own lives.

The fact that the heroine’s journey is framed as a default one for women is proof of our failure to see, for so long, that other paths were possible, and that many other ones exist.