There was a time when the experience of being online didn’t have the feel of live theater. Today everyone has to play their role – and the main character is Delulu.
Once again the deception has become radioactive. Just look around. Climate denial is trending on YouTube. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee believes he shouldn’t be on trial, and even with a judge’s silence order, he refuses to remain silent about it on social media. On college campuses across the U.S., peaceful student protests against the war are getting a nasty PR spin: They are being vilified as anti-Semitic, even though many of the protesters are Jewish.
On TikTok, delulu has reached the peak of the zeitgeist (the hashtag has over 2 billion views on the app and more than 130 million posts). Still, I prefer to spoon-feed my delusions via Instagram, the metropolis of millennial flight. As I scroll through the app, it’s easy to fool myself into thinking that things are better than they actually are – that the state of the world, already well outside the realm of the absurd, isn’t so bad after all. It’s a lie, of course, but lies have their uses.
I went public on Instagram in March because I wanted to promote a documentary I produced. It’s my first television project and I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve done. Selfishly, I also wanted as many people as possible to see it. But to promote the documentary, I had to give up the thrill of anonymity that came with my Finsta and instead adopt a more public persona. I knew I didn’t want to start over or dismantle the relationships I had quietly built, and this seemed like a happy medium, even if I had no idea what fruit it would bear.
How many people In my generation, I grew up on the internet. Twenty years later I’m still here. It’s just me longing for a new kind of connection. As age tends to readjust one’s perspective, my needs changed. I no longer feel an instinctive desire to share my every last thought or to engage with the masses as soon as I wake up every morning. That’s why my Finsta was a perfect compromise. I couldn’t completely switch off no matter how hard I tried, but I could find comfort in a smaller audience.
The world is more connected than ever before. But by opening up we lost intimacy. We perform it, but how true is it to our lived experiences? Twitter was particularly prescient in this regard: More voices did not mean more understanding, even as the platform revolutionized how and how quickly we connect. The alchemy of casual connection was best embodied by the youth of social media. By keeping my Instagram private, I can capture 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 real was the business of personality. The mechanics of the procedure have been completely revised. Even if you are not a “content creator,” you are still largely bound by these providers’ rules. Maybe I’m being too sentimental about what we’ve lost, but there used to be real romance on social media that was discarded in favor of hookups based on attention-seeking and brand deals. Social media has turned our relationship with real life on its head: instead of meeting reality, we happen to it.