Stop Looking At Each Other

Why was that pseudonymous presence on the internet better? Social media platforms have made all of us minor celebrities, and celebrity is an unpleasant thing. Celebrity psychology is fundamentally anxious, burdening us with constant performance, self-consciousness and self-censorship.

We have turned competition into connection because it’s the only way we’ve learned that we can get attention — and when you see a continuous decline in relationships outside of your phone because spaces continue to disappear, you’ll cling to whatever you can to feel like you belong to a larger world. That’s without taking into account how the platf... 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

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While an audience is a group of unique individuals, a significant issue arises when our individual needs are overshadowed by the appeal of aggregated data, a metric tethered to one’s social status.

In this scenario, we become mere data points on millions of AI-driven newsfeeds, puppets in an entertainment game where we are both actors and audience —... See more

“The villain here is not necessarily the internet, or even the idea of social media,” she writes. “It is the invasive logic of  commercial  social media, and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.” The business model of platforms like this — which rely on advertising and clicks and “en

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