Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

  Zuckerberg’s ascendance to the realm of viable presidential candidates began one October night in 2003, when he was a sophomore at Harvard. He was bored, he wrote on his blog, and he needed to take his mind off his “little bitch” of an ex. At 9:49 P.M.:

  I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10 pm and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland dormitory facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.

  By 11:10 P.M., he was pivoting:

  Yea, it’s on. I’m not exactly sure how the farm animals are going to fit into this whole thing (you can’t really ever be sure with farm animals…), but I like the idea of comparing two people together.

  “Let the hacking begin,” he wrote, just before one A.M.

  Zuckerberg created a site called Facemash, which put photos of Harvard undergrads side by side and asked you to vote between them. It wasn’t an original concept: the website Hot or Not was founded in 2000 by two recent college graduates who had gotten into a disagreement about the exact fuckability of a woman they saw on the street. (These young people were men, obviously, as are the founders of YouTube, who have also said they originally intended to build a riff on Hot or Not.) But when Facemash went up, 450 people visited the website within the first four hours; the photos were voted on more than 22,000 times. Zuckerberg got in trouble, and students protested the site as invasive, but plenty of them also liked the idea of an online directory, which would allow you to compare yourself to your peers in a more acceptable way. The Crimson wrote that Facemash provided “clear indicators that a campus-wide facebook is in order.” Zuckerberg, understanding that he could build in a month what would take Harvard much longer, launched the first version of Facebook the next February. Four thousand people signed up within the next two weeks.

  When I got Facebook (or “thefacebook”) at the end of my senior year of high school, I felt like I had stepped into a wonderful, narcissistic dream. At the time, I was at a peak of self-interest, extremely invested in figuring out who I would become when no longer confined to an environment of Republicans and daily Bible class. My friends and I were already used to creating digital avatars—we’d had AIM, Myspace, Xanga, LiveJournal—and Facebook seemed to make the concept clean and official; it felt as if we were going to a virtual City Hall and registering our new, proto-adult selves. (At the time, Facebook was restricted to college students, but in 2006 it would open up to anyone over thirteen who had an email address.) Once I got to college, people joked about coming home drunk and staring at their own Facebook pages—a precursor of today’s endless social media scroll. The concept was entrancing from the beginning: a bona fide, aesthetically unembarrassing website, seemingly devoted to a better version of you.

  Back then, it seemed that we were all using some new, wonderful product. Now, more than a decade later, it has become an axiom that we, the users, are the product ourselves. Even if Zuckerberg didn’t set out to consciously scam the people who signed up for Facebook, everyone who signed up—all two and a quarter billion monthly users (and counting)—has been had nonetheless. It’s our attention being sold to advertisers. It’s our personal data being sold to market research firms, our loose political animus being purchased by special interest groups. Facebook has outright deceived the public on many occasions: for one, it reportedly inflated viewer statistics for its videos by up to 900 percent, causing nearly every media company to shift its own strategy—and lay off workers—to reflect a Facebook profit strategy that didn’t exist. In the months surrounding the 2016 election, Facebook claimed that there had been no significant Russian interference on Facebook, despite the fact that an internal Facebook committee devoted to investigating the subject had already found evidence of this interference. (And then Facebook hired a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit the growing opposition to the company.) Facebook has allowed other companies, like Netflix and Spotify, to view its users’ private messages. It has tricked kids into spending their parents’ money in Facebook games through tactics that the company internally referred to as “friendly fraud.”

  But even when Facebook isn’t deliberately exploiting its users, it is exploiting its users—its business model requires it. Even if you distance yourself from Facebook, you still live in the world that Facebook is shaping. Facebook, using our native narcissism and our desire to connect with other people, captured our attention and our behavioral data; it used this attention and data to manipulate our behavior, to the point that nearly half of America began relying on Facebook for the news. Then, with the media both reliant on Facebook as a way of reaching readers and powerless against the platform’s ability to suck up digital advertising revenue—it was like a paperboy who pocketed all the subscription money—Facebook bent the media’s economic model to match its own practices: publications needed to capture attention quickly and consistently trigger high emotional responses to be seen at all. The result, in 2016, was an unending stream of Trump stories, both from the mainstream news and from the fringe outlets that were buoyed by Facebook’s algorithm. What began as a way for Zuckerberg to harness collegiate misogyny and self-interest has become the fuel for our whole contemporary nightmare, for a world that fundamentally and systematically misrepresents human needs.

  At a basic level, Facebook, like most other forms of social media, runs on doublespeak—advertising connection but creating isolation, promising happiness but inculcating dread. The Facebook idiom now dominates our culture, with the most troubling structural changes of the era surfacing in isolated, deceptive specks of emotional virality. We see the dismantling of workplace protections in a celebratory blog post about a Lyft driver who continued to pick up passengers while she was in labor. We see the madness of privatized healthcare in the forced positivity of a stranger’s chemotherapy Kickstarter campaign. On Facebook, our basic humanity is reframed as an exploitable viral asset. Our social potential is compressed to our ability to command public attention, which is then made inextricable from economic survival. Instead of fair wages and benefits, we have our personalities and stories and relationships, and we’d better learn to package them well for the internet in case we ever get in an accident while uninsured.

  More than any other entity, Facebook has solidified the idea that selfhood exists in the shape of a well-performing public avatar. But Zuckerberg, in picking up on the fact that we would sell our identities in exchange for simply being visible, was riding a wave that had been growing for a long time. The Real World started airing when Zuckerberg was eight, Survivor and The Bachelor while he was in high school. Friendster was founded his freshman year of college. Soon after Facebook came YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, Instagram in 2010, Snapchat in 2011. Now children are going viral on TikTok; gamers make millions streaming their lives on Twitch. The two most prominent families in politics and culture—the Trumps and the Kardashians—have risen to the top of the food chain because of their keen understanding of how little substance is required to package the self as an endlessly monetizable asset. In fact, substance may actually be anathema to the game. And with that, the applause roars, the iPhone cameras start snapping, and the keynote speaker at the women’s empowerment conference comes onstage.

  The Girlbosses

  The superficially begrudging self-styled icon Sophia Amoruso was born in 1984, the same year as Mark Zuckerberg. She appeared on the cover of her 2014 memoir #GIRLBOSS in a black deep-V dress with structured shoulders, short hair blown back by a wind machine, hands planted on her hips. She was the CEO of Nasty Gal, an online fashion retailer that she’d started in 2006 as a shoplifting anarchist who sold thrift-store clothes out of her San Francisco apartment. Eight years later, Nasty Gal was doing hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, and Amoruso, who had managed, impressively, to build the business witho
ut taking on debt, was being hailed as the “Cinderella of tech.”

  #GIRLBOSS is an extended exercise in motivational personal branding, in which Amoruso strives to idealize herself while denying that she’s interested in any such thing. “I don’t want to be put on a pedestal,” she writes. “Anyway, I’m way too ADD to stay up there. I’d rather be making messes, and making history while I’m at it. I don’t want you to look up, #GIRLBOSS, because all that looking up can keep you down. The energy you’ll expend focusing on someone else’s life is better spent working on your own.” The book was marketed with the language of pop feminism—Amoruso was successful, her readers wanted to be successful, and becoming successful was a feminist project—but Amoruso disowns the label: “Is 2014 a new era of feminism where we don’t have to talk about it? I don’t know, but I want to pretend that it is.”

  #GIRLBOSS pays enjoyable and genuine tribute to the value of menial employment: during her crust-punk period, Amoruso worked at a plant store, an orthopedic shoe store, a Borders bookstore, an outlet mall, a Subway. Briefly, she worked as a landscaper. But she approached the jobs as if they were a “big, fun experiment,” she writes; deep down, she knew that something great was around the corner. The story does have an odd Cinderella aspect to it, with money replacing magic. “I entered adulthood believing that capitalism was a scam, but I’ve instead found that it’s a kind of alchemy,” Amoruso writes. (Scams, of course, are also a kind of alchemy, spinning horseshit into gold.) For a while, she stole to support herself, because her political ethos “didn’t really jibe with working for the Man.” Her first eBay sale was a shoplifted item. What magic! That sale turned into a dozen more, then hundreds, then thousands, and then, soon enough, Amoruso stopped seeing money as a “materialistic pursuit for materialistic people….What I have realized over time is that in many ways, money spells freedom.”

  Upon release, #GIRLBOSS received reflexive hosannas. Amoruso was profiled in New York. Billboards and taxis advertised the book with a cute slogan: “If this is a man’s world, who cares?” A few months later, Amoruso’s company laid off twenty employees. The next January, she stepped down as CEO. In 2015, a handful of ex-employees sued her and Nasty Gal; several claimed that they had been fired because they were pregnant, and one woman claimed she had been fired because she was laid up with kidney disease. In June 2016, Amoruso was named to Forbes’s second-annual list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women. In November 2016, Nasty Gal filed for bankruptcy. In 2017, the TV adaptation of #GIRLBOSS premiered on Netflix. Amoruso had thought the series would be free marketing for her brand and her company, she told Vanity Fair. She clarified: “It still benefits me, of course.” #GIRLBOSS was canceled during its first season. By then, Amoruso had already left Nasty Gal, cruising away like a shuttle detaching itself from a burning space station. She’d started a new company, called Girlboss, whose slogan was “redefining success for ourselves.”

  Girlboss is “a community of strong, curious, and ambitious women,” the site announces—a company that’s “unapologetic in our beliefs and values of supporting girls and women who are chasing dreams both big and small in a shame-free, lame-free zone.” Its website features blog posts like “4 Things I Learned as a Millennial Workaholic” and “How Rupi Kaur Built a Career on the Relentless Pursuit of Creativity,” but the company is geared toward events: Girlboss holds conferences, or “Girlboss Rallies,” which sell VIP tickets for $700 and digital access for $65. “Part conference part experiential inspiration wonderland,” the website proclaims, “the Girlboss Rally has taken the tired conference world by storm, creating a space for the next generation of entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and thought leaders to meet, hatch plans, and thrive together.”

  The basic idea here is that, for women, photogenic personal confidence is the key to unlocking the riches of the world. In her memoir, Amoruso writes, “In the same way that for the past seven years people have projected themselves into the looks I’ve sold through Nasty Gal, I want you to be able to use #GIRLBOSS to project yourself into an awesome life where you can do whatever you want.” The Girlboss Rallies are supposed to work the same way: you pay to network, to photograph yourself against millennial-pink and neon backdrops, to take the first step toward becoming the sort of person who would be invited to speak onstage. This is meant to scan as a deeply feminist endeavor, and it generally does, at least to its participants, who have been bombarded for many years with the spurious, embarrassing, and limitlessly seductive sales pitch that feminism means, first and foremost, the public demonstration of getting yours. (Later on, The Wing, the wildly successful and meticulously branded women-only coworking space founded by Audrey Gelman and Lauren Kassan, would simultaneously harvest this acquisitive, performative energy and attempt to make it ineligible for criticism through its self-aware membership, savvy branding, and stated commitments to inclusion, community, and safe space. In December 2018, The Wing, by then operating in five locations, raised $75 million, bringing its funding to a total of $117.5 million. Many investors were female—venture capitalists, actresses, athletes. “This round is proof positive that women can be on both sides of the table,” Gelman said.)

  The ever-expanding story of Girlboss feminism really begins with Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 manifesto, co-written with Nell Scovell. Lean In was sharp, sensible, and effective, urging women to take ownership of their ambition. Sandberg was the chief operating officer of Facebook, and, writing years before the Facebook backlash, she had impeccable mainstream credibility: she was a powerful, graceful, rich, hardworking, married white woman, making an argument about feminism that centered on individual effort and hard work. Early in the book, she acknowledges that her approach presents a partial, private solution to a huge collective problem. She believes that women should demand power as a way to tear down social barriers; others believe that barriers should be torn down so that women can demand power. Both approaches are “equally important,” Sandberg writes. “I am encouraging women to address the chicken”—the individual solutions—“but I fully support those who are focusing on the egg.”

  Unfortunately, the chicken also happens to taste better. Provided with a feminist praxis of individual advancement and satisfaction—two concepts that easily blur into self-promotion and self-indulgence—women happily bit. A politics built around getting and spending money is sexier than a politics built around politics. And so, at a time of unprecedented freedom and power for women, at a time when we were more poised than ever to understand our lives politically, we got, instead of expanded reproductive protections and equal pay and federally mandated family leave and subsidized childcare and a higher minimum wage, the sort of self-congratulatory empowerment feminism that corporations can get behind, the kind that comes with merchandise—mugs that said “Male Tears,” T-shirts that said “Feminist as Fuck.” (In 2017, Dior sold a “We Should All Be Feminists” shirt for $710.) We got conferences, endless conferences—a Forbes women’s conference, a Tina Brown women’s conference, a Cosmopolitan Fun Fearless Females conference. We got Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global, which aims to end the “stress and burnout epidemic” through selling corporate webinars and a $65 velvet-lined charging station that helps you keep your smartphone away from your bed. We got the full-on charlatan Miki Agrawal, who was regularly given media tongue-baths on the subject of Thinx, her line of period panties, until it was revealed that Agrawal, who proudly called herself a “She-E-O,” was abusive to her employees and didn’t know much or care about feminism at all. We got, instead of the structural supports and safety nets that would actually make women feel better on a systematic basis, a bottomless cornucopia of privatized nonsolutions: face serums, infrared saunas, wellness gurus like Gwyneth Paltrow, who famously suggested putting stone eggs in one’s vagina, or Amanda Chantal Bacon, whose company Moon Juice sells 1.5-ounce jars of “Brain Dust” for $38.

  On the wings of market-friendly feminism, the idea that pe
rsonal advancement is a subversive form of political progress has been accepted as gospel. The trickiest thing about this idea is that it is incomplete and insufficient without being entirely wrong. The feminist scammer rarely sets out to scam anyone, and would argue, certainly, that she does not belong in this category. She just wants to be successful, to gain the agency that men claim so easily, to have the sort of life she wants. She should be able to have that, shouldn’t she? The problem is that a feminism that prioritizes the individual will always, at its core, be at odds with a feminism that prioritizes the collective. The problem is that it is so easy today for a woman to seize upon an ideology she believes in and then exploit it, or deploy it in a way that actually runs counter to that ideology. That is in fact exactly what today’s ecosystem of success encourages a woman to do.

  I know this because my own career has depended to some significant extent on feminism being monetizable. As a result, I live very close to this scam category, perhaps even inside it—attempting to stay on the ethical side, if there is one, of a blurry line between “woman who takes feminism seriously” and “woman selling her feminist personal brand.” I’ve avoided the merchandise, the cutesy illustrated books about “badass” historical women, the coworking spaces and corporate panels and empowerment conferences, but I am a part of that world—and I benefit from it—even if I criticize its emptiness; I am complicit no matter what I do.

  The Really Obvious Ones

  What a relief, within this world of borderline or inadvertent or near-invisible scamming, to have a category delineated by egregiousness: the obvious, unmistakable scams. One such scam surfaced in the brief Silicon Valley interest in “raw water,” which is untreated and unfiltered spring water—teeming with bacteria, and free from all the tooth-strengthening minerals that come out of the tap. In 2017, the Times Styles section ran a piece on the Bay Area raw-water enthusiasts: