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" wrote this book between the spring of 2017 and the fall of 2018—a period during which American identity, culture, technology, politics, and discourse seemed to coalesce into an unbearable supernova of perpetually escalating conflict, a stretch of time when daily experience seemed both like a stopped elevator and an endless state-fair ride, when many of us regularly found ourselves thinking that everything had gotten as bad as we could possibly imagine, after which, of course, things always got worse. "
― Jia Tolentino , Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
167
" This period of the internet has been labeled Web 1.0—a name that works backward from the term Web 2.0, which was coined by the writer and user-experience designer Darcy DiNucci in an article called “Fragmented Future,” published in 1999. “The Web we know now,” she wrote, “which loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear….The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of texts and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens.” On Web 2.0, the structures would be dynamic, she predicted: instead of houses, websites would be portals, through which an ever-changing stream of activity—status updates, photos—could be displayed. What you did on the internet would become intertwined with what everyone else did, and the things other people liked would become the things that you would see. Web 2.0 platforms like Blogger and Myspace made it possible for people who had merely been taking in the sights to start generating their own personalized and constantly changing scenery. As more people began to register their existence digitally, a pastime turned into an imperative: you had to register yourself digitally to exist. "
― Jia Tolentino , Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
170
" To communicate an identity requires some degree of self-delusion. A performer, in order to be convincing, must conceal ‘the discreditable facts that he has had to learn about the performance; in everyday terms, there will be things he knows, or has known, that he will not be able to tell himself.’ The interviewee, for example, avoids thinking about the fact that his biggest flaw actually involves drinking at the office. A friend sitting across from you at dinner, called to play therapist for your trivial romantic hang-ups, has to pretend to herself that she wouldn’t rather just go home and get in bed to read Barbara Pym. No audience has to be physically present for a performer to engage in this sort of selective concealment: a woman, home along fro the weekend, might scrub the baseboards and watch nature documentaries even though she’d rather trash the place, buy an eight ball, and have a Craigslist orgy. People often make faces, in private, in front of bathroom mirrors, to convince themselves of their own attractiveness. The ‘lively belief that an unseen audience is present’, Goffman writes, can have a significant effect. "
― Jia Tolentino , Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
177
" In the introduction to The Second Sex (1949), de Beauvoir writes taht the ‘drama of woman’ lies in the conflict between the individual experienec of the self and the collective experienec of womanhood. To herself, a woman is inherently central and essential. To society, she is inessential, secondary, defined on the terms of her relationship to men. These are not ‘eternal verities,’ de Beauvoir writes, but are, rather, the ‘common basis that underlies every individual feminine existence. "
― Jia Tolentino , Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
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" I tell myself that these tiny scraps of relief and convenience and advantage will eventually accumulate into something transformative--that one day I will ascend to an echelon where I won’t have to compromise aymore ,where I can really behave thoughtfully, where some imaginary future actions will cancel out all the self-interested scrabbling that came before. This is a useful fantasy, I think, but it’s a fantasy. We are what we do, and we do what we’re used to, and like so many people in my generation, I was raised from adolescence to this fragile, frantic, unstable adulthood on a relentless demonstration that scamming pays. "
― Jia Tolentino , Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion