Collin G Brooke

Gamergate announced our new era, of American life shaped by social media’s incentives and rules, from platforms just beyond the outskirts of mainstream society.

I think we are trained, particularly on the left, to be critical of performance. And I feel we should be more honest in acknowledging that performance is crucial to politics. It doesn't mean it's the only factor––that policy or other factors don't matter. But it is a defining feature.

Supposedly mature adults with no sense of scale or proportionality.”

In this context, conspiracy theories, as micro-narratives, are a remedy. They are taken up as resources that provide identity and meaning.

The anthropologist David Graeber once wrote: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” The same is true of the Internet.

Conspiracy theories, as we have seen, are both symptoms of confusion and powerlessness and tools of division and distraction that benefit elites.

linguistic concept called the theory of performativity says that language does not simply describe or reflect who we are, it creates who we are.

As a result, the news and information ecosystem that is so important to a functioning democracy and civil society has suffered a double whammy. First, as we have seen, the social media platforms’ recommendation engines have promoted misinformation and disinformation. Second, we have now seen how programmatic advertising has provided financial

people keep coming back to social media because they help us do something that makes us distinctively human: create, revise, and maintain our identities to gain social status. Social media allow people to present different versions of themselves, monitor how others react to those versions, and revise their identities with unprecedented speed and