There was a time when the experience of being online didn’t have the feel of live theater. Nowadays, everyone has a role to play and the main character is Delulu.
One more time, deception has become radioactive. Just look around. Climate denial It’s trending on YouTube. The presumptive Republican presidential candidate does not believe he should be tried, and even with a court-ordered gag order, refuses to shut up about it on social networks. On college campuses across the United States, peaceful student protests against the war receive an unpleasant public relations twist: They are vilified as anti-Semitic despite many of their protesters be Jewish.
On TikTok, delulu has peaked (the hashtag has over 2 billion views on the app and over 130 million posts). Even so, I prefer to feed my illusion through Instagram, the ancient metropolis of escape. Scrolling through the app, it’s easy to fool myself into believing that things are better than they really are, that maybe the state of the world, already well beyond the realm of absurdity, isn’t so bad. It’s a lie, of course, but lies have their uses.
In March I made Instagram public because I wanted to promote a documentary I produced. It’s my first television project and I’m incredibly proud of what we did. Selfishly, I also wanted as many people as possible to see it. But promoting the documentary required me to give up the thrill of anonymity that my finsta provided for a more public persona. I knew I didn’t want to start over completely or dissolve the relationships I’d quietly established, and this seemed like a middle ground, although I had no indication of what fruit it would bear.
like many people Of my generation, I grew up on the Internet. Twenty years later, I’m still here. Only I long for a new kind of connection. As age tends to readjust perspective, my needs changed. I no longer instinctively long to convey every last thought or engage with the masses every morning right when I wake up. That’s why my finsta was a perfect compromise. I couldn’t completely tune out, no matter how hard I tried, but I was able to find solace in a smaller audience.
The world is more connected than ever. But by opening ourselves, we have lost intimacy. We do it, but how faithful is it to our lived experiences? Twitter was especially predictive in that sense: More voices do not equal more understanding, even as the platform revolutionized how and how quickly we connect. The alchemy of unforced connection was what best embodied social media adolescence. Keeping my Instagram private allows me to keep a little of that feeling.
I knew it couldn’t last forever. I make a living in a profession that requires endless self-promotion. What the influencer economy made a reality was the business of personality. He completely overhauled the matchup mechanics. Even if you’re not a “content creator,” you’re still largely beholden to their rules of the game. Maybe I’m overly sentimental about what we’ve lost, but there used to be real romance on social media that was dismissed by the connection built around attention-seeking and brand deals. Social media has disrupted our relationship with real life: instead of reality happening to us, it happens to us.
