There was a time when the online viewing experience didn’t feel like live theater. Today, everyone has a role—and the protagonist is one Delulu.
Once again, illusion has been radioactive. Just look around. Climate denial is trending on YouTube. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee doesn’t think he should participate testingand even with a court-mandated gag order, he Refuse to be silent about it on social networks. At universities across America, peaceful anti-war student protests were given a nasty PR treatment: They were vilified as anti-Semitic despite widespread opposition. protesters are Jewish.
ABOVE TikTok, delulu has reached the height of the zeitgeist (the hashtag has over 2 billion views on the app and over 130 million posts). However, I prefer my fantasy of being spoon-fed Instagram, urban escape for thousands of years. Scrolling through the app, it’s easy to fool yourself into believing things are better than they actually are — that maybe the state of the world, which is already somewhere far beyond the realm of absurdity, isn’t so bad after all. position. Of course it’s a lie, but lies have their effects.
I went public on Instagram in March because I wanted to promote one documentary I produced. This is my first TV project and I’m extremely proud of what we’ve done. Selfishly, I also want as many people as possible to see it. But promoting the documentary required me to give up the thrill of anonymity that my finances brought to a more public figure. I knew I didn’t want to completely start over or ruin the relationships I’d been quietly building, and this seemed like a happy medium, even though I didn’t know what it would bring.
Like many people of my generation, I grew up on the internet. Twenty years have passed, I’m still here. It’s just me longing for a new kind of connection. As age tends to adjust one’s perspective, my needs also changed. I no longer instinctively desire to broadcast my every last thought or interact with the masses every morning as soon as I wake up. That’s why my finsta is a perfect compromise. I can’t completely unplug, try as I might, but I can find comfort in having a smaller audience.
The world is more connected than ever. But when we open up, we lose intimacy. We do it, but how true is it to our lived experience? Twitter is especially prescient in that regard: more voices do not equal more understanding, even as the platform has revolutionized the way and speed with which we connect. The alchemy of optional connection is what social media adolescence demonstrates most clearly. Keeping my Instagram private allows me to enjoy a little of that feeling.
I know it can’t last forever. I make a living in a profession that requires constant self-promotion. What the influencer economy has made possible is individual entrepreneurship. It has completely revised the participation mechanism. Even if you’re not a “content creator,” you’re still primarily paying attention to them rule. Maybe I’m too sentimental about what we’ve lost, but there was once a real romance with social media that has been abandoned because the connection was built around attention seeking and Brand transactions. Social media has inverted our relationship with real life: Instead of reality happening to us, we happen to it.
