Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

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

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.

The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving.

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.

This is what the online expression of solidarity sometimes feels like—a manner of listening so extreme and performative that it often turns into the show.

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.

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.

The internet is governed by incentives that make it impossible to be a full person while interacting with it. In the future, we will inevitably be cheapened. Less and less of us will be left, not just as individuals but also as community members, as a collective of people facing various catastrophes.

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.

I think, in a way, that people in high school were jealous that I felt so free to be myself. Because you’re not supposed to do that. You’re supposed to worry about people looking at you and judging you.”

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.

“That perfection remains always beyond, something we have to strive for and can never attain, does not diminish the power of the ideal; indeed it may even strengthen it.”

In 1844, “optimize” was used as a verb for the first time, meaning “to act like an optimist.” In 1857, it was used for the first time in the way we currently use it—“to make the most of.”

We pay too much for the things we think are precious, but we also start to believe things are precious if someone makes us pay too much.

My relationship to female protagonists changed sharply in adolescence: childhood heroines had shown me who I wanted to be, but teenage heroines showed me who I was afraid of becoming—a girl whose life revolved around her desirability, who was interesting to the degree that her life spun out of control.

“We are given a single story line about what makes a good life, even though not a few who follow that story line have bad lives,” she writes. “We speak as though there is one good plot with one happy outcome, while the myriad forms a life can take flower—and wither—all around us.”

I hated the prosperity gospel, which had taught many rich white Christians to believe—albeit politely, and with generous year-end donations to various ministries—that wealth was some sort of divine anointment, that they were genuinely worth more to God and country than everyone else.

It’s hard to draw the line between taking pleasure in God’s purpose and aligning God’s purpose with what I take pleasure in,

In other words, the cause matters less than the effect—what matters is not the thing itself, but whether that thing moves you closer to God or closer to damnation.

“Everything we want contradicts the conditions or the consequences attached to it….It is because we are a contradiction—being creatures—being God and infinitely other than God.”

It came after the advent of reality TV and Facebook, which drew on the renewable natural resource of our narcissism to create a world where our selves, our relationships, and our personalities were not just monetizable but actively in need of monetization.

The financial crisis of 2008 was an extended, flamboyant demonstration of the fact that one of the best bids a person can make for financial safety in America is to get really good at exploiting other people.

Facebook, using our native narcissism and our desire to connect with other people, captured our attention and our behavioral data; it used this attention and data to manipulate our behavior, to the point that nearly half of America began relying on Facebook for the news.

Facebook bent the media’s economic model to match its own practices: publications needed to capture attention quickly and consistently trigger high emotional responses to be seen at all.

The energy you’ll expend focusing on someone else’s life is better spent working on your own.”

This is what you gentrifiers get with your hard-ons for artisanal garbage! the tweets and blog posts cackled. This is what you Instagram addicts get for paying three months’ rent money for a festival no one had ever heard of! This is what you get for being so rich that you need a QR code to make a glass of fucking juice!

People are so busy just trying to get back to zero, or trying to build up a buffer against disaster, or trying to enjoy themselves, because there’s so little else to count on—three endeavors that could contain the vast majority of human effort until our depleted planet finally ends it all.

I have wondered if we’re entering a period in which the line between valuing a woman in the face of mistreatment and valuing her because of that mistreatment is blurring;

The pattern—woman is criticized for something related to her being a woman; her continued existence is interpreted as politically meaningful—is so ridiculously loose that almost anything can fit inside it.

It’s easy for me to understand why a person would want to get married. But, as these weddings consistently reminded me, the understanding doesn’t often go both ways.

As middle-class women attempted to create an impression of elite social standing through their weddings, white dresses became more important.

A wedding no longer marked a woman’s shift from single to married, but rather, it indicated her ascension from ordinary woman to bride and wife.

Today, Instagram encourages people to treat life itself like a wedding—like a production engineered to be witnessed and admired by an audience.