In real life, the success or failure of each individual performance often plays out in the form of concrete, physical action—you get invited over for dinner, or you lose the friendship, or you get the job. Online, performance is mostly arrested in the nebulous realm of sentiment, through an unbroken stream of hearts and likes and eyeballs, aggregated in numbers attached to your name. Worst of all, there’s essentially no backstage on the internet; where the offline audience necessarily empties out and changes over, the online audience never has to leave.

Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

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In physical spaces, there’s a limited audience and time span for every performance. Online, your audience can hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never has to end. (You can essentially be on a job interview in perpetuity.) In real life, the success or failure of each individual performance often plays out in the form of concr

Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

Online, performance is mostly arrested in the nebulous realm of sentiment, through an unbroken stream of hearts and likes and eyeballs, aggregated in numbers attached to your name.

Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

Selfhood buckles under the weight of this commercial importance. In physical spaces, there’s a limited audience and time span for every performance. Online, your audience can hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never has to end.

Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

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

Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

The pressure to perform and live up to the expectations of others is not a new social phenomenon — nor a bad one. **^^But the way it manifests at the internet’s global scale increases its intensity tenfold — especially for young people. The goal is no longer to simply live up to the high expectations of your parents and peers — online you could be ... See more

Molly Mielke • callings

Getting a job through compulsive tweeting marked my first exposure to the digital attention economy that was beginning to monopolize the Internet. I grasped a new formula: content = attention = followers = profit. Anything that made enough noise online could be monetized in one way or another. My online presence increasingly felt like a carefully c... See more

Kyle Chayka • Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet | The New Yorker

as humans, we take all of the big challenges of real life and the complex social structures of the physical world and they get re-created in weird ways in a digital, social space.

Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

Molly Mielke • callings

Kyle Chayka • Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet | The New Yorker

The Atlantic • Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse