Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

And, more important, the internet already is what it is. It has already become the central organ of contemporary life. It has already rewired the brains of its users, returning us to a state of primitive hyperawareness and distraction while overloading us with much more sensory input than was ever possible in primitive times.

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.

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, aggregat

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 m

This focus is rooted in the way the internet generally minimizes the need for physical action: you don’t have to do much of anything but sit behind a screen to live an acceptable, possibly valorized, twenty-first-century life.

I have benefited, I mean, from the internet’s unhealthy focus on opinion. This focus is rooted in the way the internet generally minimizes the need for physical action: you don’t have to do much of anything but sit behind a screen to live an acceptable, possibly valorized, twenty-first-century life. The internet can feel like an astonishingly direc

The internet has moved seamlessly into the interstices of this situation, redistributing our minimum of free time into unsatisfying micro-installments, spread throughout the day. In the absence of time to physically and politically engage with our community the way many of us want to, the internet provides a cheap substitute: it gives us brief mome

In the absence of time to physically and politically engage with our community the way many of us want to, the internet provides a cheap substitute: it gives us brief moments of pleasure and connection, tied up in the opportunity to constantly listen and speak. Under these circumstances, opinion stops being a first step toward something and starts

In other words, 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.

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 withou