The commodity of selfhood
Jia Tolentino on the state of self in the Age of Relevance
To round off celebrations for our latest report, the Age of Relevance, who better to speak to than the inimitable Jia Tolentino, staff writer at the New Yorker and author of Trick Mirror. Trick Mirror has become a key text of our age, a now-legendary collection of essays that helps to demystify the experience of our collective moving online, as our realities and identities fracture between the IRL and URL.
Below, writer and MØRNING Brand Director Gem Fletcher chats with her about the generational battlegrounds we’re living between, culture’s limbo state, and the nature of the self today. Read on to have your existential crises both stoked and soothed…
Gem Fletcher: To kick off, Jia, you sit right in the middle of the millennial generation. How would you describe that and do you feel connected to your generation?
Jia Tolentino: I definitely feel like I’m from the generation of cheugy culture, Instagram-mediated consumption and politics, Buzzfeed quizzes, bullshit social-internet startups and tech-facilitated gig work, “Yeah!” and The Knife and stomp-clap indie and Body Talk, optimization in the guise of wellness; I think there’s probably some some naive sputtering that repeats in my brain for reasons related to the millennial experience of having a teleology of broader stability in childhood and then spending your coming-of-age watching all the institutions fall apart. In general, my life has shown me that I’m just left of basic -- I’m a prickly joiner, but a joiner; I’m onto things a little early but well after they’ve become clear.
GF: In our recent report, The Age of Relevance, we explore the tired tropes of the generational battleground. What's your opinion on generational differences? Are they still relevant?
JT: I’m interested in generational tendencies, sure -- each of us is a case study for what happens when a human is formed under a particular set of social, economic, and political conditions, and in an aggregated group of our peers, our conceptions of virtue/vice/the real/the fake/the desirable/the undesirable are always telling. Generational differences feel relevant to me in terms of politics -- how thoroughly we are governed by incredibly old people, incredibly rich white old people; the stark divide in how people under 35 and people over 60 understand the slaughter in Gaza. I’m cautiously hopeful about the fact that millennials in America and England seem to be the first generation that has not yet begun to get more conservative as we get older.
GF: In our lifetime, we have witnessed this evolution of the internet ecosystem as it became the ‘central organ of contemporary life.’ In Trick Mirror, you talk about how the internet has distended our sense of identity. Arguably, the social incentives – to be liked, to be seen – have become even more pervasive since then. How do you think the way we triangulate our existence online has changed? Has our sense of selfhood buckled under the economic pressure?
JT: I think people have withdrawn in a big way from straightforwardly representing their identity online in the seven years since I wrote my book. I had the sense then (and this was a time when Chrissy Teigen was always “winning the internet” and “Klout scores” were in existence) that personal identity felt outsize, artificially consistent, artificially aspirational. I think now people are much less connected to the idea that a coherent, ideal selfhood can be represented on the internet. It’s my sense that more people now are watching fragments rather than attempting to communicate something coherent, and experiencing internet selfhood as a dizzying, neverending play that is mostly put on by others, with less and less connection to the real world. Though, back to generational differences, I’m also no longer part of the age group that is driving change in internet culture, so it’s certainly possible I have no idea what’s going on at all.
GF: It’s funny you say that because it feels like we are in a limbo state, where culture chases youth but the youth are chasing nostalgia. We seem unwilling to dive into the psyche of a grown-up. What do you think are the consequences of our obsession with youth?
JT: Oh, this cultural and aesthetic moment seems just baldly, humiliatingly indicative of a complete avoidance of the present and future. Taylor Swift, born in 1989, reigns through a worldview and aesthetic locked in high school. The parenting Reddit forums that I read every day when I was trying to get my second child to sleep through the night are full of posts strategizing how a husband might be convinced to stop playing video games for 5 hours a day and actually take care of his newborn. Zoomers on TikTok are paralyzed by fear that one day they might look as old as thirty. I sometimes think it looks nice when I wear a bow in my hair.
I don’t think growing up has to involve stagnation and convention. But I do think growing up means showing you can handle complication, learning to take care of something that then can grow in itself -- art, people, ideas, a community, land or flora or fauna, political possibility. I think we’re seeing the consequences of the internet rerouting so many of the impulses that lead to that kind of caretaking through the medium of a screen.
GF: You recently stopped writing criticism, describing it as ‘feeling like a dusty echoing room filled with trap doors.’ Can you unpack the root of that for us?
JT: The thinness of the “discourse” right now is something I attribute almost entirely to the attenuation of media. All of the websites that were flourishing when I came up (just a decade ago!) are not just gone but often wiped from the internet. Local papers are on their death rattles because of private equity takeovers, alt-weeklies feel sort of in the realm of newspaper film, blogs are dead, bloggy writing is dead, everything’s been redirected to Substack and Patreon and Discord, there’s just like ten publications chugging on, all of them relentlessly professional in tone (which is great for some things and really boring and probably harmful for others).
GF: In the book you dissect five intersecting problems: how the internet has distended our sense of identity, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions, how it maximizes our sense of opposition, how it destroys our sense of solidarity and how it destroys our sense of scale. In 2024, what else would you add to this list?
JT: I would add, maybe, that the internet siloes each individual sense of reality -- it has made it essentially impossible to come to a consensus on the present with anyone who is not seeing a very similar internet to you; it offers a mostly illusory sense of action; it paralyzes our sense of empathy through a kind of impossible overload; it reduces our sense of personal power to the power to react.
GF: If the engine of the internet/social media is selfhood, how can we rewild the web without personal identity being at the core?
JT: I think the engine of the current internet is really surveillance -- the extraction of value from attention, selfhood, and how these things manifest on the devices that are intertwined with nearly everything about work, play, family, politics, community, the entirety of our lives.
I don’t think there’s a way to really do anything about this in an overarching sense without a kind of fundamentally anti-capitalist regulation -- it would have to place limits around what can be used as raw material for corporate profit -- and I’m not betting on that.
As far as each of us go, though, we can… find things that are more consuming than whatever is on a screen!
This conversation has been condensed and edited.
Wow! So much of the conversation I've been having in my head recently. Thank you