All that glistens is not gold
So reads Merchant of Venice's Prince of Morocco after opening a gold casket with nothing inside it (except a scroll). It goes on to warn: “Gilded tombs do worms enfold.” Painting is The Merchant of Venice, c. 1887, from Folger Shakespeare Library.
Culture writer Addison Del Mastro worries that living in Silicon Valley's tech bubble is over-inflating our egos, supercharging our paranoia, and bombarding our attention with (pretty frivolous) minutia. From Substack.
Social media in particular is—like any vice—something which in order to use well must be resisted. There’s a certain dishonesty in a lot of social media posting: angling, workshopping, fudging, splitting the difference. One of the things I’ve begun to realize is that this eventually poisons your ability to think. You start to see real life as some kind of pale imitation of the internet, instead of the other way around. You stop being able to hear anything as earnest or straightforward. Your brain is always looking for the puppet strings or the man behind the mask.
Social media gives you this sense of outsized importance; it makes you a petty god of an imaginary world. Don’t like someone? Block them, and they disappear. Don’t like a topic? Mute the word, and it ceases to exist. I don’t like reading about cancer, so I’ve muted the word “cancer.” Et voila! I’m getting close to muting the words “Donald Trump.”
You look out at the earth with vengeance and smite the wicked. The world is clay for you to shape. Your plaything. Social media makes you irritable and arrogant at the same time. It makes the real world, which is not clay to be shaped by your whims, frustrating by comparison. I think in a real sense it makes us more violent and angry. The only way to truly “mute and block” someone in real life is to kill them. It is not enough to ignore them; you want not to have to share a planet with them. The social media analogue of murder is, perhaps, for some, a sort of gateway drug.
There are certain people (people I’ve met, or our vice president) who sound very much like trolling social media accounts come to life. You can tell from the tone, the topics, the outsized importance they seem to give to things that might have been big trending social media topics but which are not major real-life issues. There’s just a certain “I can’t define it but I know it when I see it” quality to the way these people talk and comport themselves.
I wrote once, rather in jest, that the most dangerous invention of the 20th century was not the atom bomb, but the internet. I’m only half-joking now.
Read the whole thing here.
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