The Hall of Mirrors

Like you, I am an animal in constant competition for my own attention. I am from a hall of mirrors, a long sufferer of a losing battle against an array of ever-evolving algorithms. To write about it is a strange thing. “It” is not one thing at all, not one app or behavior or person or company. It is a Siliconian Hydra, simultaneously a cyclops, a big brother, a biblical angel. The Hydra has a hundred arms and a thousand eyes. It wears the same grey t-shirt on each of its many necks. Its heads vie for my attention, hungry and jealous of each other. 

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If you asked me casually, I’d tell you that I love the internet. That my friends in Berlin know what I had for breakfast. That I love to catalogue my life, to look back on the years of my adolescence. 

A post is a strange thing. It is not a message. I did not tell my friends in Berlin, hey, this is what I had for breakfast, it made me think of you, because it didn’t make me think of them. The edible flower on top of the brioche toast I ate at a cafe I found online did not make me think of anyone at all, not even of myself. I snapped a picture and sent it out and I wanted to see who clicked on a picture of my face to view it. The worst part is, I don’t even care.

They don’t care, the people who see it, the friends overseas. Literally nobody does, I don’t think, about anything anyone else is doing. Not for longer than it takes a thumb to click a screen, to tap to the next thing and the next, anyway.

There is much half-hearted discussion to be had on the divorce of the ‘real’ self and the self online, the blur between fact and autofiction. The online self often eclipses the flesh and blood counterpart: it is more accessible, more viewable, more present in a large number of people’s daily lives than any physical being could be. It is the diced up bits of a whole person, always ready, always primmed and viewable.

A presence on social media is a running autobiographical narrative, a magnum opus of self-expression. Personal profiles are slates upon which to create a character of the self. They are lies and archives. They host psychological primers, shorthand signals that allow consumers (friends and strangers) to quickly, even instantaneously, place the subject on their mental maps which divide people into genre clusters, categories to decide whether to consider that being as aspirational or mundane. Among these primers: 35mm film, group poses, ladybugs and beetles, landscapes, fur coats, foreign cities. They say: call me cool, loved, funky, beautiful. I am valuable. Remember I travel. Consider me soft.

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There is no way out of the hall of mirrors but to remember the place from which you came. For the unfortunate souls introduced to the Hydra and its infinite reflections, before they constructed a self without it, this is a useless project. 

The most insidious aspects of social media lie far beyond posting, beyond constructing the digital avatar whose reputation precedes that of its creator. There is something human in that, at least. A bid for connection, a celebration of the highlights of our days. There is something soft and hopeful and innocent about that impulse that makes it hard to condemn it too harshly. 

The attention economy is coming for everything. Social media is a self-endorsed blitz upon the human brain, a hijacking project backed by billions of dollars and determined to capture everything we have. The algorithms know me better than most people do. My insecurities, my worries. What I envision myself to be and where I fall short. The jobs I want. The life I want. I have given them all of this data and more of my own volition, coerced only by the threat of lacking my IV drip of stimulation. Like those of nearly everyone I know, my brain is a junkie for instant gratification. 

——

Algorithmic overload weathers my opinions, my interests, my voice. It carves them up like canyon rock, makes me numb and bored and thoughtless. I often abandon myself.

I see people die on my phone. I see makeup tutorials, the French Riviera. I see everything, and it's all at once. An assembly line of nothing at lightning speed. I think about things about which I do not care: girls from high school, snail mucin (which I bought to put on my face), ab workouts, tattoo removal. What else, I don’t recall. I can’t seem to list the things I consume. At the end of the day, I become a flat and forgetful avatar like my screengirl self, and I have snail gunk on my face. 

The Siliconian Hydra’s pockets fatten with every millisecond I give it, so it is endlessly clever in convincing me to let it take more. It shows me sniper drones and beach vacations, blood and water and money and sun. It gives me excitement and pain, and excitement and pain, and I am a gambler, betting all the time that I have against the house.