The internet hasn’t killed eccentricity but it makes it harder for anyone who lives (at least partly) online to live a specific life. The internet either crushes specificity, mocks it, ignores it, assimilates and commodifies it, or all of the above. It leads to a personality type that Henry James described in The Wings of the Dove: “You're familiar... See more

It’s become something of a sport to unearth these sorts of replies, the ones where strangers make willfully decontextualized moral judgments on other people’s lives. We give these people and these kinds of conversations names: “chronically online” or “terminally online,” implying that too much exposure to too many people’s weird ideas makes us all

... See more

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

... See more

With Instagram there was the idea that my life is constantly available for perception and evaluation by other people. I had these thoughts: I’d upload a photo and then I’d view my Instagram story and try to pretend to be somebody else—a stranger—and imagine how they’d see me. I’d be trying to present myself to be legible in a certain way to complet... See more

People were losing excitement about the internet, starting to articulate a set of new truisms. Facebook had become tedious, trivial, exhausting. Instagram seemed better, but would soon reveal its underlying function as a three-ring circus of happiness and popularity and success. Twitter, for all its discursive promise, was where everyone tweeted co

... See more

We spend a lot of time convincing ourselves and others that we are good people, that we are the best version of ourselves. Part of how we do this is by presenting the world with a curated, if not ideal, rendering of lives. Even without social media, we are selective about the version of us others get to see. We craft stories that highlight our succ

... See more

- "To exist on platforms is to be subject to this kind of continual identity reconstitution, to fluidity. Self-branding attempts to hide this inevitability by claiming agency over it, as though by choosing to turn our identity into capital, it becomes a free choice. Self-obfuscation, on the other hand, effectively embraces it through a kind of acce... See more