The Times Literary Non-Fiction Book of the Year‘A whip-smart, challenging book. It filled me with hope’ Zadie SmithFrom one of the brightest young chroniclers of US culture comes this dazzling collection of essays on the internet, the self, feminism and politics.We are living in the era of the self, in an era of malleable truth and widespread personal and political delusion. In these nine interlinked essays, Jia Tolentino, the New Yorker’s brightest young talent, explores her own coming of age in this warped and confusing landscape.From the rise of the internet to her own appearance on an early reality TV show; from her experiences of ecstasy – both religious and chemical – to her uneasy engagement with our culture’s endless drive towards ‘self-optimisation’; from the phenomenon of the successful American scammer to her generation’s obsession with extravagant weddings, Jia Tolentino writes with style, humour and a fierce clarity about these strangest of times.Following in the footsteps of American luminaries such as Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Rebecca Solnit, yet with a voice and vision all her own, Jia Tolentino writes with a rare gift for elucidating nuance and complexity, coupled with a disarming warmth. This debut collection of her essays announces her exactly the sort of voice we need to hear from right now – and for many years to come.
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Jia Tolentino. Trick Mirror
TRICK MIRROR. REFLECTIONS ON SELF-DELUSION. Jia Tolentino
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
The I in the Internet
Reality TV Me
Always Be Optimizing
Pure Heroines
Ecstasy
The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams
The Crash
The Student Debt Disaster
The Social Media Scam
The Girlbosses
The Really Obvious Ones
The Disruptors
The Election
We Come from Old Virginia
The Cult of the Difficult Woman
I Thee Dread
Acknowledgments
Background Reading. The I in the Internet
Always Be Optimizing
Pure Heroines
Ecstasy
The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams
We Come from Old Virginia
The Cult of the Difficult Woman
I Thee Dread
About the Author
About the Publisher
Отрывок из книги
For my parents
Title Page
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But the internet brings the “I” into everything. The internet can make it seem that supporting someone means literally sharing in their experience—that solidarity is a matter of identity rather than politics or morality, and that it’s best established at a point of maximum mutual vulnerability in everyday life. Under these terms, instead of expressing morally obvious solidarity with the struggle of black Americans under the police state or the plight of fat women who must roam the earth to purchase stylish and thoughtful clothing, the internet would encourage me to express solidarity through inserting my own identity. Of course I support the black struggle because I, myself, as a woman of Asian heritage, have personally been injured by white supremacy. (In fact, as an Asian woman, part of a minority group often deemed white-adjacent, I have benefited from American anti-blackness on just as many occasions.) Of course I understand the difficulty of shopping as a woman who is overlooked by the fashion industry because I, myself, have also somehow been marginalized by this industry. This framework, which centers the self in an expression of support for others, is not ideal.
The phenomenon in which people take more comfort in a sense of injury than a sense of freedom governs many situations where people are objectively not being victimized on a systematic basis. For example, men’s rights activists have developed a sense of solidarity around the absurd claim that men are second-class citizens. White nationalists have brought white people together through the idea that white people are endangered, specifically white men—this at a time when 91 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are white men, when white people make up 90 percent of elected American officials and an overwhelming majority of top decision-makers in music, publishing, television, movies, and sports.
