Mimetic desire is the real engine of social media. Social media is social mediation—and it now brings nearly all of our models inside our personal world.

The danger is not that we have a slot machine in our pockets. The danger is that we have a dream machine in our pockets. Smartphones project the desires of billions of people to us through social media, Google searches, and restaurant and hotel reviews. The neurological addictiveness of smartphones is real; but our addiction to the desires of

The reflexivity of desire is most apparent in rivalrous relationships. When a person is focused on what a rival model wants, the desires of both individuals are reflexive. Neither can want anything without affecting the other’s desire for it.

The situation is like being on a trampoline with another person jumping right next to you: neither person can jump without affecting the other. The reflexivity of desire in Freshmanistan distorts reality because people think they want things for spontaneous, rational reasons—the Romantic Lie—even while they are being affected by the people around

In situations where desirous participants have the possibility of interacting with each other, there is a two-way interaction between the participants’ desires.

Even clothes are reflexive, according to the author Virginia Woolf: “Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.… There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould

People worry about what other people will think before they say something—which affects what they say. In other words, our perception of reality changes reality by altering the way we might otherwise act. This leads to a self-fulfilling circularity.

Every once in a while, then, it’s good to deconstruct the mimetic layers behind someone’s authority and think seriously about how we chose our sources of knowledge in the first place. We might find that the road to our favorite experts was paved with mimetic influence.

Authority is more mimetic than we like to believe. The fastest way to become an expert is to convince a few of the right people to call you an expert.