from Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino
I found her opening essay, “The I in the Internet” enlightening:
“Because there were so few search engines [in the 1990s] and no centralized social platforms, discovery on the early internet took place mainly in private, and pleasure existed as its own solitary reward.” p5
Interesting comparison.
“What you did on the internet would become intertwined with what everyone else did, and the things other people liked would become the things that you would see.” p6
Ah, peer pressure on steroids.
“… personal lives were becoming public domain …” p6
“Twitter … was where everyone … bitched about articles that had been commissioned to make people bitch.” p7-8
I had no idea that intentional antagonism had such a long history. (I’m old and non-urban, so I was very much a late-comer to the Internet. When all you have is dial-up, you don’t waste your time with shit …)
“the existence of social networks that must continually aggravate their users in order to continue making money” p11
What is wrong with people? That they are so attracted to aggravation?
“But lately I’ve been wondering how everything got so intimately terrible, and why, exactly, we keep playing along.”
Exactly. (Though I don’t include myself in the ‘we’. I don’t really do social media. People’s addiction to it is quite puzzling.)
(As is their addiction to cellphones; I would HATE carrying a phone with me at all time, being interrupted all day long, having to answer it every time it buzzed or whatever, being available to everyone all the time … Why would you do that unless you were a surgeon on call?)
“How did a huge number of people begin spending the bulk of our disappearing free time in an openly torturous environment? How did the internet get so bad, so confining, so inescapably personal …?” p11
She’s asking the right questions.
“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 every possible in primitive times. It has already built an ecosystem that runs on exploiting attention and monetizing the self.” p11
She then identifies five problems: the internet is built to distend our sense of identity, it encourages us to overvalue our opinions, it maximizes our sense of opposition, it cheapens our understanding of solidarity, and it destroys our sense of scale. p12
Unfortunately, the rest of the essays … well, I don’t know who she’s talking to, really. Certainly not me. “The ideal woman”? Not my ideal. Even her many references to feminism—that’s not feminism, I want to scream at her. I guess it’s a generational thing. I’m a second-wave feminist. And I don’t think many of us consider third-wave or ‘popular’ feminism to be feminism.
For example, she says “Feminism has faithfully adhered to this idea of beauty as goodness …” (p79). What? No! Not at all! Honestly, she often sounds like a 1950s woman, and that’s interesting: what has caused this regression? Saturation in social media? So when young women today say ‘I’m not a feminist, but …’ they really mean it. They’re not feminists; they’re Stepford wives.
Her essay titled “Always Be Optimizing” is horrifying. I’m very glad she’s not talking about me or my life. Young women, why do you accept all that shit?
I’m glad I read on, though, because her chapter about American churches was enlightening.
“the dominance of Southern evangelicals and extractive Texan empires” p131
I had not put the two together.
The megachurches … Now I understand a bit more why American political campaigns are so much spectacle. (So little substance.)
“prosperity gospel” p132 ??
Oh my. It’s the idea that wealth is evidence of divine anointment. Well, that explains a lot. About the U.S.
The chapter on scams was also enlightening. (Young Americans are so fucked up.) (‘Course, old Americans are too …)
“… making scamming—the abuse of trust for profit—seem simply like the way things were going to be. it came after the election of Donald Trump, an incontrovertible, humiliating vindication of scamming as the quintessential American ethos.”
Yup. So very fucked up.
“Lewis, as an inexperienced twentysomething, had found himself in charge of millions of dollars in assets without fully understanding what was going on.” p163
Yeah, tell me again how that happens?
“Despite posting a $61 billion loss at the end of 2008 … AIG gave out $165 million in bonuses to its financial services division the next year” p165
After being bailed out with $182 billion of federal—i.e., taxpayer’s—money.
“The con is in the DNA of this country, which was founded on the idea that it is good, important, and even noble to see an opportunity to profit and take whatever you can.” p167
Guess we have different definitions of ‘Christian’ too.
“The average CEO now makes 271 times the salary of the average American workers, whereas in 1965, the ration was 20:1. Healthcare costs are staggering—per capita health spending has increased twenty-nine times over the past four decades—and childcare costs are rising like college tuition, even as the frontline works in both healthcare and childcare often receive poverty wages.” p169-170
“On Facebook, our basic humanity is reframed as an exploitable viral asset. Our social potential is compressed to our ability to command public attention” (p174)
So leave Facebook.
“Bezos [owner of Amazon] is the richest man in the world, but his warehouse employees often made just enough to clear the federal poverty line. (Of course, this is part of the reason he’s the richest man in the world.)” p186
I’ll add a little nugget of information to that: I was recently notified by Amazon, that I had made too many returns, and they cautioned me to stop or they’d ban me from the site. I did the arithmetic: to date, that year, I’d made 107 purchases (I live in a rural area, and a trip to the nearest Walmart, 45 minutes one-way, for each purchase, at $7/gallon gas, is very expensive; I don’t require next day delivery, let alone delivery for each item separately, as Amazon often does much to my annoyance; furthermore, regarding their labor practices [described by Tolentino on p186-7], I’d happily pay an extra dollar to the employee who processes my purchase and an extra dollar to the courier who delivers it) and I returned 7 purchases (less than 10%; in one case the purchase simply didn’t work; in another, the dB description online was considerably more than the actual dB, specifically the dB stated in the owner’s manual).
The section on Trump—p190-194—just read it.
But the section “The Cult of the Difficult Women”—again, I am stunned at Tolentino’s understanding of feminism: “Because of the feminist cultural reflex to protect women from criticism that invokes their bodies or choices or personal presentation in any way …” (p256)
What? We have long criticized women for wearing make-up. For example.
And the last section about weddings, again I wonder who she’s talking to, who she’s talking about. The people she hangs around with, the people with which she identifies, airheads.
“And still I wonder how much harder it would be to get straight women to accept the reality of marriage if they were not first presented with the fantasy of a wedding.” p289
Well, duh. That’s why Today’s Bride (and Vogue and Better Housekeeping) are not on any feminist’s reading list.
So, among other benefits, reading Tolentino’s book has given me a glimpse at the huge chasm that separates second-wave feminists from whatever Tolentino calls herself.
