Trick Mirror
Reflections on Self-delusion
- As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But you can't just walk around and be visible on the internet -- for anyone to see you, you have to act. You have to communicate in order to maintain an internet presence. And, because the internet's central platforms are built around personal profiles, it can seem -- first at a mechanical level, and later on as an encoded instinct -- like the main purpose of this communication is to make yourself look good. 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 has come to seen, for many people, like a political good in itself.
- We have generated billions of dollars for social medial platforms through our desire -- and then through a subsequent, escalating economic and cultural requirement -- to replicate for the internet who we know, who we think we are, who we want to be.
- People who maintain a public internet profile are building a self that can be viewed simultaneously by their mom, their boss, their potential future bosses, their eleven-year-old nephew, their past and future sex partners, their relatives who loathe their politics, as well as anyone who cares to look for any possible reason. On the internet, a highly functional person is one who can promise everything to an indefinitely increasing audience at all times.
- Part of what brought Jezebel into the center of online feminist discourse was its outcry against Photoshop use in ads and on magazine covers, which on the one hand instantly exposed the artificiality and dishonesty of the contemporary beauty standard, and on the other showed enough of a powerful, lingering desire for 'real' beauty that it cleared space for ever-heightened expectations. Today, as demonstrated by the cult success of the makeup and skin-care brand Glossier, we idealize beauty that appears to require almost no intervention -- women who look poreless and radiant even when bare-faced in front of an iPhone camera, women who are beautiful in almost punishingly natural ways.
- 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.
- The heroine's journey, or her lack of one, serves as a reminder that whatever is dictated is not eternal, not predestined, not necessarily true. The trajectory of literary women from brave to blank to bitter is a product of material social conditions. 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.
- The nature of a revelation is that you don't have to re-experience it; you don't even have to believe whatever is revealed to hang on to it for as long as you want. In the seventies, researchers believed that MDMA treatment would be discrete and limited -- that once you got the message, as they put it, you could hang up the phone. You would be better for having listened. You would be changed. They don't say this about religion, but they should.
- Fyre Fest sailed down Scam Mountain with all the accumulating force and velocity of a cultural shift that had, over the previous decade, subtly but permanently changed the character of the nation, making scamming -- the abuse of trust for profit -- seem simply like the way things were going to be. It came after the election of Donald Trump, an incontrovertible, humiliating vindication of scamming as the quintessential American ethos. It came after a big smiling wave of feminist initiatives and female entrepreneurs had convincingly framed wealth acquisition as progressive politics. It came after the rise of companies like Uber and Amazon, which broke apart the economy and then sold it a cheap ride to the duct tape store, all while promising to make the world a better and more convenient place. 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. It came after college tuition skyrocketed only to send graduates into low-wage contract work and world-historical economic inequality. It came, finally, after the 2008 financial crisis, the event that arguably kick-started the millennial-era understanding that the quickest way to win is to scam.
- It's just easier, as Malcolm Harris argues in his book “Kids These Days,” to think millennials float from gig to gig because we're shiftless or spoiled or in love with the 'hustle' than to consider the fact that the labor market -- for people of every generation -- is punitively unstable and growing more so every day.
- And so, at a time of unprecedented freedom and power for women, at a time when we were more poised than ever to understand our lives politically, we got, instead of expanded reproductive protections and equal pay and federally mandated family leave and subsidized childcare and a higher minimum wage, the sort of self-congratulatory empowerment feminism that corporations can get behind, the kind that comes with merchandise -- mugs that said 'Male Tears,' T-shirts that said 'Feminist as Fuck.'
- With Uber and Airbnb, the aesthetic of rapid innovation -- and, crucially, the sense of relief these cheap experiences provide to consumers who are experiencing an entirely related squeeze -- obscures the fact that these companies' biggest breakthroughs have been successfully monetizing the unyielding stresses of late capitalism, shifting the need to compete from the company itself to the unprotected individual, and normalizing a paradigm in which workers and consumers bear the company's rightful responsibility and risk.
- No crime is confounding and punitive the way rape is. No other violent offense comes with a built-in alibi that can instantly exonerate the criminal and place responsibility on the victim. There is no glorified interpersonal behavior that can be used to explain robbery or murder the way that sex can be used to explain rape.