My Brain Finally Broke

The headline for Jia Tolentino’s latest could double as a category heading for a certain type of essay—think the titular essay from Joan Didion’s The White Album—in which the flotsam of our cultural wreckage resists, by rate or by scale, the author’s abilities to make conventional sense of it. “I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility,” Didion wrote in that earlier essay, “but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical.” Tolentino describes a moment in which the passage of time has taken on the monstrous qualities of a social-media feed. “There was once a time when my physical surroundings felt more concrete than whatever I was looking at on my phone,” Tolentino writes. “Now the cognitive tendrils of a phone-based psychosis frequently seem more descriptive of contemporary reality…than the daffodils I see springing up in the park.”

Fake images of real people, real images of fake people; fake stories about real things, real stories about fake things. Fake words creeping like kudzu into scientific papers and dating profiles and e-mails and text messages and news outlets and social feeds and job listings and job applications. Fake entities standing guard over chat boxes when we try to dispute a medical bill, waiting sphinxlike for us to crack the code that allows us to talk to a human. The words blur and the images blur and a permission structure is erected for us to detach from reality—first for a moment, then a day, a week, an election season, maybe a lifetime.