Unpacking the internet with Jia Tolentino

Life and Art from FT Weekend

Forhecz Topher

Tv & Film, Arts, Society & Culture

4.6 • 601 Ratings

🗓️ 10 September 2019

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As The New Yorker magazine's go-to millennial, Jia Tolentino writes cultural criticism about the internet and how it affects us. She recently published Trick Mirror, a wildly popular collection of essays that explores contemporary culture. On this episode, Jia speaks with Gris about how the internet is moulding us in its image ("and it's important to remember that we are very mouldable!"). She also considers how it feels to find professional success on Twitter, a platform that can be ultimately harmful. Trick Mirror doesn't attempt to solve these problems; it just exposes and untangles them. Later in the episode, Lilah and Gris discuss whether that's enough.

Want to discuss the episode? Come chat with us @FTCultureCall on Twitter. You can also tell us about the cultural trends you can’t get out of your head at [email protected].

Relevant links:

Jia's New Yorker piece on vaping: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/the-promise-of-vaping-and-the-rise-of-juul

The FT book review of Trick Mirror (paywall): https://www.ft.com/content/c5454c2e-a70b-11e9-90e9-fc4b9d9528b4

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, you're listening to Culture Call, a transatlantic conversation from the Financial Times.
0:11.1	I'm Gwazelda-Mari-Brown in London.
0:13.0	And I'm Lila Raptopoulos in New York.
0:15.6	Coming up on today's episode.
0:20.1	Gia Tolentino, welcome to cultural call.
0:22.4	I wrote a book about how the commoditized self is corrosive, and the better I put that,
0:27.7	the more I commodify my own self.
0:29.4	What do you mean by that?
0:30.3	If I've done my job right, when I walk around, I can just be a balloon.
0:33.4	Like, I want to be a balloon on a stream.
0:35.8	We're all going to do whatever we want anyway.
0:38.0	Yeah, it's definitely a mess.
0:41.3	It's a big, ugly mess.
0:42.7	Wait, you told me something about myself that I didn't know.
0:45.4	I have to write it down.
0:46.5	What's the relationship between control and sort of abandonment?
0:49.8	Well, I can trust sensation in a way that I don't necessarily trust my logical brain.
0:55.2	Knowing what's bad about something has never stopped me from forming my life and
0:59.2	my self-hood around it.
1:02.3	Gia Tolentino is a cultural critic. She writes about a lot of things, but most of them intersect
1:08.7	with internet culture. She's been a staff writer for the New Yorker
1:11.8	magazine since 2016. Over the past few years, she's written about all sorts of things that
	...

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