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 without 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