Zadie Smith saw all this coming more than a decade ago. Writing about the rise of Facebook, and by extension all the other social media platforms, she observed, “When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.” But we aren’t transcending to something higher, just less ourselves. And a flattened, reduced version of ourselves is easier to confuse with a flattened, reduced version of someone else.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of social media's flattening of identity, and to the idea that reduced digital selves blur distinctions between people.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 129