Reading Time: 4 minutes

There is no question that the internet has gotten a lot better since the Coronavirus pandemic began. The NYT Daily Episode about it has been one of the few bright spots of news coverage against an onslaught of grim headlines. Listen and you’ll hear a pastiche of uplifting audio from across the internet. There are virtual happy hours, singalongs with pop stars in pajamas, and Tiger King watch parties. There are experts sharing their knowledge/talent for free in the form of yoga lessons, impromptu concerts, and DJ sets. There’s even online improv.

It almost feels like the clock has been turned back to the ’90s—to a time before the internet became a “feverish, electric, unlivable hell” (to quote Jia Tolentino). But the internet didn’t change overnight. If anything, the surveillance capitalism model that many blame for ruining the web is thriving; when this is all over, there’s no question that companies like Amazon and Facebook will come out ahead. No, the internet didn’t change. We did. But how?

You could just chalk it up to people pulling together in a crisis. It’s happened before (see: WW-II). But this is the first time we’ve faced a crisis of this magnitude while simultaneously plugged into the internet. And what’s particularly fascinating is how Coronavirus has transformed some of the worst ways we’d grown accustomed to using the internet—for the better.

One small example: before, the internet was the perfect breeding ground for in-jokes, which—by definition—leave some people on the outside. But overnight, the internet appears to have transformed into a worldwide common kumbaya of cathartic humor that everyone can understand—from the most Tik Tok tuned-in teenybopper to the least tech-savvy boomer armed with three separate AOL accounts.

And what of the vitriolic shitshow that stands in for political discourse in the United States? Well, it looks like the immediacy of this threat may have forced our regular filter bubbles and echo chambers to converge on more or less the same set of shared facts again. Finally.

Actually, I don’t have a lot of evidence backing up that last claim; it could just be wishful thinking on my part—my own personal desire to fast forward already to the Post-Post Truth Era. So I’ll stick instead to a phenomenon that’s more personal—yet one that’s potentially common to us all as we continue to isolate from one another for the sake of public health.

The (Temporary) Death of FOMO

As someone who’s spent much of the past few years on the road, I am no stranger to loneliness. When you travel, there is companionship so long as you keep moving—so long as you stay on the traveler’s path. But the moment you stop, the moment you stay in one place, you begin to notice the world moving around you, people moving on—without you.

In my loneliest moments on the road, I would turn to the internet. As I scrolled through my newsfeed, seeing all the people having fun thousands of miles away, I was always a heartbeat away from booking a flight and racing back to the familiar. Now, even though I can’t legally move more than 100m of where I’m writing this—I don’t feel such intense feelings of FOMO. Because everyone is miserable. No one’s having fun. Anywhere.

I’m exaggerating a bit. Seriously, you should listen to that Daily episode; it will brighten your day. But FOMO hasn’t disappeared because we haven’t found ways to cope; it’s vanished because of the spirit in which we’re coping. As we clumsily migrate all the things we used to do in-person to the online world, we recognize it’s a sub-par solution. We’d all rather be doing things differently…

The result? The death of FOMO—on both the supply and demand sides of the equation. When everyone is stuck inside their homes, it cuts off the raw material that feeds the FOMO machine. Visually, it also helps that there’s something very dorky about the way everyone looks on a webcam. It does something to keep us all on the same playing field (don’t worry though, there’s help for that!).

But more importantly—on the demand side—when the social landscape is so level, we don’t feel that deep need to benchmark our lives against the lives of of others. Instead of being incessantly drawn to the various barometers of social status that constantly remind us where we stand in the grand pecking order, we can relax. We can revel in the humor and memes of the web like a carefree child playing with their toys. Released from our self-tormenting demons, we turn to the internet for the thing we need the most right now: relief. And nothing more.

Can The Good Times Last?

What’s really behind the death of FOMO is the leveling of lived experience. By that I don’t mean that everyone has or will experience the health or economic fallout of this crisis equally. In fact, the best case scenario would be that we pass through this difficult time with nothing but long periods of idleness and boredom. But that’s not how this is likely to play out.

To the extent that we can find refuge online, however, this informational Eden unfortunately won’t last. When the pandemic subsides, we will leave our houses, and our lived experiences will once again diverge. Jokes will again become ‘inny’. What shared political reality (if any) we have carved out will begin to fall apart. And the FOMO feedback loop will once again churn to life.

In the end, you can’t control the way everyone else uses the internet, but you can control your own usage. I’ve heard a lot of people say that the break in their routine brought on by the virus has made them reassess aspects of their lives that weren’t working for them. There’s no reason you can’t extend that exercise to the way you use the internet.

So remember this moment as one when the internet once again lived up to its promise. And be mindful of that moment to come when it no longer does. And when that happens, maybe unplug and simply savor the simple pleasures we didn’t know we were taking for granted until just a few weeks ago—like going out for a coffee or a beer with a friend. Because the most gratifying part of that experience won’t be the selfie you snap to tell the world you were there. It will be the conversation and connection you share knowing that the world is once again a safe place to simply be.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

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The blowback from Mark Zuckerberg’s October speech at Georgetown came down fast and furious. Aaron Sorkin hated it. So did Sasha Baron Cohen. The condemnation ranged from cynical (that Facebook only cares about money), to the disingenuous, to the charge that he simply refuses to see the dark side of his own creation. Like a social media Scarface, Zuckerberg has gotten “high on his own supply.”

The moral clarity of the outrage towards Zuckerberg can make it seem like passing a law to rein him in would be easy. But in the United States, you don’t just have the polarized gridlock in Congress to go up against, but also a Supreme Court that has only grown more conservative since the 2010 Citizens United decision. So even if a bill did manage to get signed into law, it probably wouldn’t withstand a challenge on First Amendment grounds. With these dim political prospects, I think Mark Zuckerberg might actually be our best hope.

Zuckerberg probably wouldn’t lie to his shareholders, so I take him at his word when he says political ads don’t make up a significant source of Facebook’s revenue. Therefore, it’s a bit over-simplistic to say that Facebook’s hands-off approach to political advertising is just about money. And if it’s between Zuckerberg being disingenuous versus him being blinded by technological optimism, then I’ll take blindness. Because at least then he’s making his arguments in good faith. And if that’s the case, there’s a chance he can be given the rhetorical equivalent of corrective LASIK surgery.

Consistency, Consistency

Zuckerberg already conceded that free speech is not the overriding universal value on Facebook. That happened three years ago when they began fact-checking news stories. With their new fact-checking apparatus in place, engagement would not be the only value powering their newsfeed feature. Rather, false stories would be down-weighted by the algorithm in the interest of a well-informed populace.

So the real question is: why does the interest of a well-informed populace not apply to political advertising? At Georgetown, Zuckerberg said Facebook doesn’t limit a politician’s speech in the same way “because we think people should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying.”

The same idea came up in his exchange with Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Speaking hypothetically, Zuckerberg said he wouldn’t take down a deceptive ad put up by the Congresswoman because it would be important for her constituents to see “that [she] had lied.”

This presupposes that people generally figure out the truth on their own. But given confirmation bias, and the sticky-ness of fake news, that’s a dubious premise. Besides, if politicians didn’t think the chances were good that voters would believe their lies, then they probably wouldn’t lie.

You could maintain that it comes down to a question of respect for people and their own judgment. But it’s not that simple. Because there is still the fact that Facebook makes the decision about what is shown to people and how it is arranged. And there is no way for that decision to be neutral. To this, maybe Zuckerberg would say, “Okay, well my value is to expose people to as many viewpoints as possible.” But if that is the case, then Facebook shouldn’t be doing any fact-checking at all. Because lies also qualify as a point of view.

Now the Hard Part

Zuckerberg’s critics often invoke journalist Edward R. Murrow’s maxim, that we “cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument.” It’s a solid sentiment, but as Zuckerberg oversees the moderation of public discourse, he’s probably more interested in how to operationalize it. Which stories are beyond the pale? How does one—or more relevantly, how does the algorithm—decide?

The argument that Facebook and other Internet content platforms made earlier in this decade—that they are simply dumb pipes serving as a conduit for the wisdom of the crowd/market forces or whatever you want to call it—no longer holds much water. But if that’s the position they want to occupy, there is a way for them to get back behind the bulwark of that argument: let the people program the algorithm.

Facebook might be using fact-checkers in principle, but in practice those fact-checkers often complain that Facebook isn’t transparent enough about the impact of their work. Facebook should instead be doubling down on transparency here, giving nearly full control of the fake news down-weighting levers in their newsfeed algorithm over to the panel of vetted fact-checking organizations. Only then can they rightfully claim that they really are just “dumb pipes” reflecting our own collective preferences as a society back at us.

For such a system to have legitimacy, it is vital that the panel include a balance of left-leaning and right-leaning fact-checking organizations. Facebook already does this for the six fact-checking organizations it works with in the United States, and the results have not been without controversy. But it’s possible the only satisfactory system is one where everyone is a bit unsatisfied. Fact-checkers can have differing agendas, but the most important thing is that they stick to the standards of the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN). A peer voting system could be instituted to assess the continued membership of each fact-checking organization, with Facebook only getting involved to cast tie-breaking votes—like the Vice President does in the Senate.

Go Big or Go Home

I’m under no illusions that the system I describe, in which fact-checking organizations would have direct control over Facebook’s algorithm, would still be loud and messy. But it would be an improvement—not just over Facebook’s inconsistent status-quo strategy, but also over what existed before Facebook ever became the modern-day version of the public square.

At Georgetown, Zuckerberg said that “political advertising is more transparent on Facebook than anywhere else.” And that’s true. Their searchable political ad archive is much more user-friendly than the API endpoints at OpenSecrets.org, the go-to source for journalists trying to wade through the muck of shadowy political advertising money that flows through America in the post-Citizens United world.

But Zuckerberg has much more work to do. And more than being greedy or insincere, I think his biggest problem is that his company is huge, slow-to-react, and risk-averse. Particularly as he positions himself as a global ambassador of American values, it behooves him to overcome this organizational inertia and get things right at home before exporting those values abroad. But if he’s not willing to put in the work to get political ad fact-checking right, then he should just follow Twitter’s example and pull them off completely.

Published on December 15, 2019

Reading Time: 7 minutes

There is something different about social media–something that distinguishes it from the habit-forming products that came before it. It’s social.

(big surprise, I know)

When we reach for that cigarette, or that pint of Ben and Jerry’s, the urge that motivates us–along with its (at least temporary) satisfaction–are centered within the individual. But the urge we feel to refresh our news feed and see what our friends are doing without us on a Friday night is all about our need to feel desired, accepted, and loved by others.

I don’t mean to oversimplify here; the desire for Ben and Jerry’s can be rooted in a void someone feels due to a lack of acceptance or love from others. My point is that we’ve never seen a compulsive product that so directly engages with our relational insecurities before. When it comes to those who suffer from addiction, it’s often easy for society to write these people off as a sub-population with poor self-control, or with an inherent predisposition towards dependency. But when it comes to our needs as social animals, I think we’re all quite susceptible to temptation.

Because our social needs are so core to our nature, we’re better off just admitting to ourselves: we love this new technology. We love the ability to see what our friends are doing without us. We love to read the digital tea leaves left behind by our crushes. We love to keep track of our social status in relation to others–because that’s what we were doing long before social media came along. The only difference is that now we have a bright neon electronic scoreboard to conveniently do what we were doing before in our heads.

I’m not saying any of this is healthy, but I think this is an apple that can’t be unbitten. And I would argue few of us would prefer to go back to the way things were before.

The problem with the current atmosphere of tech backlash is that it obscures the degree to which we ourselves are responsible for our undesirable present-day equilibrium. In turn, this fosters unrealistic expectations about the extent to which top-down solutions can address the problem. In the end, I think a more honest reckoning with our own role would better focus efforts to improve the status quo.

The Race to the Bottom of the Brainstem

“The race to the bottom of the brainstem” is a phrase coined by Tristan Harris, former Google Design Ethicist and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. It describes the incentive of tech companies to exploit our paleolithically-wired brains to get us to use their platforms as much as possible. I’m actually a big fan of the CHT’s work; before Harris began ringing the alarm, the balance of the attention economy was way out of whack–tilted too far towards monetization and maximization of screen time. I laud Harris’ work to raise awareness and create pressure on tech companies to reform their ways.

Harris believes that all the problems stemming from technology–from vanity-fication to political polarization and election manipulation–are rooted in human weaknesses. While I agree with him on that point, I think it’s important to recognize that not all weaknesses are created equal. It’s one thing to tweak the parameters of a recommendation algorithm so that it’s not feeding me more and more extreme content all in the name of maximizing engagement. But it’s another thing to stop me from giving into FOMO and seek out pictures from the party I wasn’t invited to last weekend. One is about what the platform pushes upon us, while the other is about what we pull out for ourselves.

I understand why Harris wants to lump all of these together; it creates a common language and an easier call to action. But it also creates an atmosphere of unrealistic expectations around what kind of solutions are even feasible to tackle the problem. As a result, we end up venturing down some unproductive rabbit holes…

The Example of Bullying

In the spring of 2019, Instagram invited a bunch of journalists to their headquarters to showcase their anti-bullying efforts. The program was so nascent, it puzzled me why they would even want to trot it out so publicly before journalists. Perhaps they suffered from the endemic Silicon Valley illness that there’s a tech fix for everything–or, maybe they were so terrified of regulators descending upon their industry, they were trying to get ahead of it with some lip service-filled PR. Or maybe a bit of both.

Either way, I don’t think online bullying is going anywhere. Bullying is like a constantly-mutating social virus. New forms of it will always be emerging, so even if an artificial intelligence algorithm gets good at stamping out bullying today, that doesn’t mean it will still be good at it a year from now. In practice, anti-bullying is a content moderation problem; AI algorithms flag questionable content for human review, and these reviewers make the final call about what stays and what goes. Yet, the very examples the executives brought up in the spring presentation make it clear: this is a Sisyphean task.

Bullies might take a shot at their victim’s weight by tagging them in a picture of a whale. So does an algorithm flag all pictures of whales (or cows or pigs or what have you) and send them along to the human moderators for review? That idea becomes even more ridiculous when you consider the conditions that prevail at some of the content moderation contractors employed by Facebook.

These are the technical difficulties involved in attempting to address just the “push” problem of bullying. But what about the pull problem, i.e. the many ways in which we bully ourselves? That same NYT article mentions Instagram’s pilot program to hide like counts on posts publicly (but still keep a user’s likes visible to them privately). Will that stop users from keeping track of their own social status? I don’t think so. If you can’t compare yourself to others, you’ll just compare yourself to yourself–your past self, that is. I find myself doing this, since I don’t even bother contending with people punching in a higher Instagram weight class. Instead I get that precious IV drip of social feedback by comparing the performance of my different posts over time.

Get Smarter than SMART

The only way to stop these issues is to throw out the platforms entirely, but nobody’s advocating for that (and neither am I–at least not with any kind of top-down solution). Instead, the policy options actually on the table are sending us down yet more unproductive rabbit holes.

I’m talking specifically about the Social Media Addiction and Reduction (or SMART) Act–introduced by Senator Josh Hawley earlier this year–which includes prohibitions on features like autoplay, infinite scrollbars, and engagement badges. What is the point of wading so deep into the weeds of an app when it won’t be long before technology leaps forward to create new, ever-more engaging features? By the time augmented reality arrives in non-Google Glass form and replaces our phones entirely, I’m sure tech companies will have found new ways to engage us that will be outside the scope of the law (and probably even more addictive). It’s futile to try keep up with technology with this kind of legislation–to say nothing of its deep-seeded paternalism. But even more fundamentally, the law does nothing to address the “pull” problem of these platforms because that problem is located in us–not the technology.

I’m not saying we should throw out all top-down solutions. I’m just saying we need to be smarter about it. For example, Russian meddling in U.S. elections is a serious, tech-related problem–but it is one where the platforms can make a meaningful difference. Unlike in the case of bullying, we can actually measure the thing we want to minimize. The fact that fake news spreads faster than real news can actually be used against the people trying to spread disinformation. I am happy to see that there are smart people working on this. Even if it won’t entirely eliminate the problem, it stands a chance against Russia’s rapidly evolving tactics ahead of the 2020 election.

The problem with lumping all tech-related problems together is that we tend to grow frustrated when tech companies fail to solve problems that they have no realistic hope of solving. By holding them responsible for solving all the problems, it only makes us angrier when they fail, hardening us to the idea that there are cases where we should really be looking at ourselves. I don’t say this out of pity for a poor, defenseless tech industry (they’re anything but). I say it in the hope of focusing on solutions that work.

“We’re not freebasing Facebook. We’re not injecting Instagram”

I think there’s a better approach, but its most vocal champion seems to find himself the object of scorn these days. I’m talking about Nir Eyal, the technologist best known for writing 2013’s Hooked, the book widely credited as the Silicon Valley bible for creating habit-forming apps. This year he released Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. With this latest turn, many are accusing Eyal of being a hypocrite.

In the NYT review of Indistractable, child psychologist Richard Freed is quoted as saying, “Nir Eyal’s trying to flip. These people who’ve done this are all trying to come back selling the cure. But they’re the ones who’ve been selling the drugs in the first place.”

At first glance it might look like there’s a contradiction. Eyal wants to have his cake and eat it too when it comes to human nature. While Hooked embodies a model of the human mind that can be acted upon and influenced as an object, Indistractable argues that we users are subjects with rational agency–not “puppets on a string.” So which is it? The question is, of course, an overly simplistic false dichotomy. The answer is that we’re both; it all depends whether we’re thinking fast or slow—in the Kahneman-esque sense.

I don’t agree with Nir Eyal on everything. For example, I think Ezra Klein successfully pushes back on Eyal’s aversion to the word “addiction” on his podcast. For some, using the language/framework of addiction can help them get a grip on their tech usage by admitting they have a problem that’s not entirely under their control. I haven’t read Indistractable (full disclosure) but in principle I’m behind Eyal’s instinct to start looking for solutions at the individual level. “The technology is the proximate cause, not the root cause,” he argues. Kids, for example, might be “overusing technology as an escape. But we don’t ask ourselves, what are they escaping from?”

It says something about the current atmosphere of tech backlash that the New York Times brushes the ideas in Eyal’s book aside as “hard and sort of annoying advice.” Maybe he’s not the person people want to hear from at the moment, but that doesn’t mean what has to say should be dismissed out of hand.

(photo credit: Marc Schaefer)

Published on November 4, 2019

Reading Time: 3 minutes

We all know why malls are dying in America; Amazon has changed the way we shop, out of brick-and-mortar stores and firmly glued to our couches—thumbing through product reviews while day-old DoorDash delivery boxes collect flies on a nearby coffee table. Our new way of shopping is obviously more convenient. If it weren’t, then malls wouldn’t be on the chopping block. But with this change, some believe we’ve lost something.

A recent NYT article profiled Facebook groups and subreddits where people wax nostalgic about the heyday of American shopping malls in the ’80s and ’90s. For many of them, malls weren’t just malls—they were a “part of the community.”

“You could trick-or-treat at the mall, from store to store. There would be fashion shows to showcase new seasonal collections. It was fairly safe for groups of kids to gather there, and there was more genuine excitement about seeing what stores had to offer.”

I don’t mean to deny these experiences as meaningful for the people who had them. It’s just that I remember malls a lot differently…

There were only so many times we could go into the Sharper Image to see what new gizmos they had; the merchandise didn’t change over as often as we went to the mall. And sometimes, we didn’t want to see what the stores had to offer—we just wanted a place to hang out. But as teenagers, we were the primary threat to law and order in my suburban Chicago community; when too many of us congregated together in the food court, we were promptly shoed away by security guards.

There wasn’t really a socially acceptable place for us to go. So what did we do? We went underground—literally—into our parents’ basements, where many of them also happened to store their liquor.

No matter how you remember malls, the rise of e-commerce certainly hasn’t nudged things in the right direction. There’s no longer even a pretense for teenagers—or any of us—to leave our homes. And that carries with it a social cost.

“You’re not interacting with the guy at the corner store anymore or the checkout person at the grocery store. On some level, that’s attractive to people but, at the same time, you’re sort of missing these small social interactions in terms of community when you’re holed up waiting for Amazon packages to arrive.”

My question is: what does it say about us that we couldn’t think of a better reason to socialize than to go shopping?

I know this phrasing risks overstating the problem. Americans do find plenty of other reasons to socialize (touch football, church groups, community theatre, and many others). But to the extent that mall nostalgia captures a lost sense of community, it speaks to a real problem of unmet social need in the population. What the decoupling of community and commerce has taught us is that consumerism didn’t capture all the values we care about. When we vested our desire for community in market forces, we didn’t realize that what the market gives, it can also take away.

If we really care about fostering community, then we have to put in the effort to make it happen. We must create the space for it—both physically and in terms of our time. It must be the destination, not just a pit stop between many others in our busy lives.

And we must be wary of cheap substitutes. In the same way Amazon caters to our laziness as consumers, Facebook and Instagram cater to our laziness as socializers. They can be used as effective organizing tools, but in a world where our phones are turning into our teddy bears, it can often feel more comfortable to tend to the representations of our social lives rather than the real thing.

Building real human connection remains hard and messy work. It cannot be short-changed. It cannot be productivity-hacked. It’s something that’s best done the old-fashioned way: face-to-face.

Published on September 12, 2019

Reading Time: 4 minutes

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In many ways, Jia Tolentino is the perfect person to critique our contemporary internet-driven culture. Her rise as a journalist coincided with the era in which lines blurred between regular media and social media, creating a voracious, attention-craving monster hungry for our eyeballs. Writers like her became inextricably tied to the internet at a time when it grew harder for them to stand out in an increasingly competitive media landscape. Tolentino also lives in New York City, one of the most competitive places on Earth. And as a feminist writer working at publications like Jezebel and The Hairpin over the past decade, she has been uniquely positioned to comment on some of the defining internet-fueled moments/movements of our age, including Gamergate and #MeToo.

What struck me most on my first read of Tolentino’s new collection of essays, Trick Mirror, was the amount of thematic overlap between her book and Un-Plugged-In. One thing she crystalized for me was the idea of the early internet versus the internet we know today; she describes the internet of the ’90s—the internet of our both our childhoods—as an idealized, informational Eden. It was a place where people gathered “in open forums, drawn, like butterflies, to the puddles and blossoms of other people’s curiosity and expertise.”

That was web 1.0, a not-so-social internet where joy came through discovery that took place mainly in private, like quality time spent at your very own virtual Walden Pond. Today’s overly social internet, by contrast, is filled with “mazes of incessant forced connection.” It has become a “feverish, electric, unlivable hell.”

It actually comes as a coincidence that the parallel timelines of Un-Plugged-In align so well with the two eras Tolentino demarcates so vividly. I was looking for a symmetric marker around the introduction of what I saw as the most defining technology of our era, the smartphone, and a decade before/after felt right to me. But there is no doubt that both technologies—social media and smartphones—worked together to create the internet as we know it today—one she labels as so “confining, so inescapably personal, [and] so politically determinative.” In her book Tolentino asks: how did we get from there to here?

Tolentino details five different mechanisms that transformed the internet into its current form. I won’t go into all of them here, but I do highly recommend picking up a copy of her book and reading them yourself; her analysis is entertaining and on point. But it’s the first phenomenon she articulates, the “distention of identity,” that has perhaps the clearest parallel with Un-Plugged-In.

Her analysis begins with sociologist Erving Goffman’s seminal work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. In the book, Goffman argues that our identities are like the performances of an actor onstage. Critical to our wellbeing in such an environment is the existence of a “backstage,” a place where we don’t feel such immense pressure to perform—a refuge where we can feel comfortable and relax. In our current era, Tolentino argues there is no longer any backstage. “Online, your audience can hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never has to end.”

In Un-Plugged-In, this point rings literally true for Jamie, one of the main characters of the story. When she’s introduced in the book, it’s the night of the premiere of her solo show at the college where she’s studying as a theatre major. In both the ’90s and present-day versions of the story, she has just performed to a packed house. In the ’90s version, this is enough to make her happy, but in the present-day version, she’s upset that the love-fest has not continued on social media—at least not in the way she was expecting; she’d received less likes than she had for past productions in which she’d played a starring role.

“In physical spaces, there’s a limited audience and time span for every performance… Online, performance is mostly arrested in the nebulous realm of sentiment, through an unbroken stream of hearts and likes and eyeballs, aggregated in numbers attached to your name.”

It’s another coincidence that Jamie’s character is an actress and that Goffman’s theory is couched in the language of theatre. I pictured Jamie as a performer because I wanted someone with a credible reason to care what other people thought about her. But Tolentino’s analysis applies perfectly here: if your audience can keep expanding forever, and if you care deeply about how big your audience is, then you’ll never be satisfied. Back in the web 1.0 era, it was different; there was a sense in which ignorance was bliss.

So where do we go from here? This is where Tolentino and I may differ a little bit. The internet may be driven by capitalism as she argues, but Tolentino sees the social web as something of a “final stage,” since it has infiltrated “our identities and relationships” and because “capitalism has no land left to cultivate but the self.” My issue here isn’t that I know the real answer—only that I am wary of labeling anything as “final” when it comes to technology. Technology is constantly advancing, and we simply don’t know how people and new advancements in technology will interact to create the next step in our techno-cultural evolution. This was actually something I struggled with in the writing of Un-Plugged-In: why bother to write it if something could come along tomorrow and make it all irrelevant?

Ultimately, like Tolentino, I do believe something significant has changed in the last twenty years—enough, at least, for a story. It might soon come off as a dated, quaint exercise, but in the meantime, hopefully like Trick Mirror it’ll be a fun read.

Published on August 29, 2019