This essay (as well as the entire collection) is dark, but so is the reality of the internet. It’s as if we’ve been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection. The everyday madness perpetuated by the internet is the madness of this architecture, which positions personal identity as the centre of the universe. The most dangerous trap of all is the self-delusion underlying it. In other words, engaging in the social internet as it’s designed means stepping into a trap, one that encourages us to waste time, and one that tracks our every move, selling us out to the highest bidder. Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute for offline ones, and then overtake them. And, because the internet’s central platforms are built around personal profiles, it can seem…like the main purpose of this communication is to make you look good. You have to communicate in order to maintain an internet presence. But you can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet-for anyone to see you, you have to act. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. Of the social internet, Web 2.0, she writes:Īs a medium, the Internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. Her relationship with the internet has metamorphosed over two decades.

Tolentino understands the age of the internet more deeply than most.

Tolentino quotes her ten-year-old self who, on an Angelfire subpage wrote, “I was in love with the internet the first time I used it at my dad’s office and thought it was the ULTIMATE COOL” (3). The book opens with the essay “The I in the Internet,” and the author’s assertion that, “In the beginning the internet seemed good” (3). In each essay she examines the ever-growing quagmire of self-delusion that faces us, humans living in the age of the internet. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion is the debut essay collection from The New Yorker staff writer, Jia Tolentino.

Trick mirror review