Jia Tolentino on what happens when life is an endless performance

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Society & Culture, News, Politics, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.6 • 10.8K Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2019

⏱️ 103 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The introduction to Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, hit me hard. In her investigation of how American politics and culture had collapsed into “an unbearable supernova of perpetually escalating conflict,” she became obsessed with 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." Yeah, me too. What sets Tolentino’s work apart, though, is that it’s not about the internet — it’s about how people are living their real, everyday lives in the age of the internet. This is a conversation about what happens when technology combines with the most powerful forces of human psychology to transform the nature of human interaction itself. It’s about how we construct and express our core sense of self, and what that’s doing to who we really are. References: The art of attention (with Jenny Odell) Book Recommendations: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond Want to contact the show? Reach out at [email protected] News comes at you fast. Join us at the end of your day to understand it. Subscribe to Today, Explained Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for the show comes from Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast about joy and justice, produced with Vox Creative.
0:08.0	As state legislatures consider more than 500 anti-trans bills, the latest episode of Into the Mix asks how best to support and protect transgender youth.
0:19.0	Like Ali Aske, a young man who, despite growing up in a loving and supportive home, felt the need for friendship with other trans and queer kids.
0:27.0	At just seven years old, he took initiative and built a lasting community.
0:32.0	That story on Into the Mix, subscribe now.
0:57.0	Any time that we are interacting with another person, we are putting on a performance for them, and we are constructing an idea of our self in context of this performance.
1:27.0	Hello, welcome to the Vox Media Podcast Network.
1:34.0	My guest is Geotolentino, author of Trick Meer, Reflections on Self-Dilusion, which is an amazing book of essays about the internet, and how it is co-lessed into, as she puts it, an unbearable supernova, perpetually escalating conflict.
1:47.0	It's a brilliant book, it just debuted, I think, in second place on the nonfiction bestseller list, also an author at the New Yorker, just a brilliant chronicler of all things internet.
1:56.0	There's an amazing conversation about how the internet uses and leverages identity to change itself, to change us, and to change politics.
2:05.0	And I don't think anybody has thought more clearly about this, or few people have at least than Tolentino.
2:10.0	As always, my email is recluncho.com, again, has recluncho.com. Here's Geotolentino.
2:16.0	Geotolentino, welcome to the Vox guest.
2:18.0	Thank you for having me on.
2:20.0	So the book is great. Is it all surreal?
2:23.0	The people are actually buying it. For me, that's extremely surreal. I mean, even my editor at the New Yorker who I love, he was sort of, he was like, yeah, I think the book's good.
2:32.0	I think you're a good writer, but it's not, he was like, it's not a commercial book.
2:37.0	And I think I am kind of surprised. I'm just surprised.
2:41.0	There's not like a takeaway from any of the essays. The book is a whole, it's not a very neat book. It's pretty dense.
2:49.0	I mean, I'm giving it a terrible sales pitch right now, but I, you know, I'm surprised that people are down.
2:54.0	And I feel really like incredibly grateful, you know what I mean?
2:58.0	How do you think people are finding it? Like, what do you think it's transmission mechanism is?
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