Trick Mirror Reflections on Self-Delusion

Gia Tolentino is a staff writer at the New Yorker, a screenwriter and the author of the New York times bestseller trick mirror, which everyone just needs to get right now.

trick mirror was a finalist for the national book critic circles, John Leonard prize and the pen award and was named one of the best books of the year by the New York public library, the New York times book review, the Washington post NPR, the Chicago tribune GQ and the Paris review.

It was right around when I started writing my book, which was 2017.

my book came out 2019.

And then my book came out and all of the things I'd written about in critique, I got swallowed in.

So you've written about social media companies and how they monetize rage.

It's like cheaper to be shitty, right?

Like it is in their financial best interest to just keep poisoning the river until someone makes them stop

It's all designed to make you feel like the best person possible and that everyone else is a dumb piece of shit.

I think that as long as these companies, the primary way they make their money is for us to spend as much time as possible on them. And the best way, as you were saying in that segment for us, for them to ensure that we spend as much time on them as possible is through all of the emotions that make us feel as bad as possible.

She's here to talk about social media companies monetizing hate and how we can use the Internet as a force for good. Please welcome Gia Tolentino.

So you've written about social media companies and how they monetize rage.

She doesn't just talk about that she just she talks about like the internet as a concept which is great and then like the rest of the book sort of Is in that neighborhood, but just you'll love it. It's great. She writes so well

You you'll really dig it reader.

It's Trick Mirror by Gia Tolentino. Isn't that crazy? Literally, you've been saying for me to get this on this pod and now I get it on the pod.

I'm gonna read is Trick Mirror. It was just gonna it was gonna come weeks weeks weeks weeks weeks in the future.

I've been telling you to read this damn book, Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino.

It's truly rocked my world and I don't trust anybody. I don't trust the internet. I don't trust the vectors by which we have been deceived.

It's the first thing in her book. It rocks your fucking world. And so funny. So funny.

It's called 'The Eye on the Internet'.

She fucking shits on Barry Weiss for like a whole three pages, which we love. And Niamh Schulman. And Niamh Schulman. There's an incredible parenthetical after a sentence about Niamh Schulman where she says 'he punched a girl in college'.

Not since Matt Rodgers has been Has not read but has been told about Trick Mirror by Gia Talentino

You wrote a book three and a half years ago, it came out, Trick Mirror, Reflections on Self-Delusion.

And I want to ask you about some of the themes from the book.

I don't remember writing that but I bet it was in a blurb for Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which I think is pretty much the ur-text for all of this.

I think that's pretty much the ur-text for all of this.

I really buy that model that you kind of naturally, but like performing, performative has kind of a deservedly bad rap as a word, as a bad connotation. But, you know, I do think we are performing in real life when we're on the subway.