Trick Mirror

Trick Mirror

Reflections on Self-Delusion

by

Completed: May 9, 2021
★★

The book started off reasonably strongly but ultimately disappointing. Depends on your expectations though. If you’re willing to think of this as a collection of middling essays from another issue of, say, The Atlantic or New York Magazine or something, then it’s worth a skim - chances are you’ll enjoy at least some of the essays.

Sample excerpt from the first essay on the Internet today:

I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems: first, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale.

To communicate an identity requires some degree of self-delusion.

In the absence of time to physically and politically engage with our community the way many of us want to, the internet provides a cheap substitute: it gives us brief moments of pleasure and connection, tied up in the opportunity to constantly listen and speak. Under these circumstances, opinion stops being a first step toward something and starts seeming like an end in itself.

The internet was dramatically increasing our ability to know about things, while our ability to change things stayed the same, or possibly shrank right in front of us. I had started to feel that the internet would only ever induce this cycle of heartbreak and hardening – a hyper-engagement that would make less sense every day.

All book cover images are from Goodreads unless specified otherwise.

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