Offline with Jon Favreau - Jia Tolentino on the Internet's Endless Stage

Episode Date: October 24, 2021

Jia Tolentino, New Yorker staff writer and author of Trick Mirror, talks to Jon about how the internet has turned life into an endless performance, why that makes politics hard and virtue signaling easy, and what being online during the pandemic has done to our collective psyche.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsaveamerica. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

What's that tweet again? It's a two-year-old had a fatal alligator accident in Disney World, but this woman tweeted, I'm so finished with a white man's entitlement lately that I'm really not sad

about a two-year-old being eaten by a gator because his daddy ignored signs. And it's like, it's amazing. I mean, it's beautiful. It's actually such a good tweet. It's the perfect tweet. It's the perfect tweet.

I'm so grateful for that tweet. Without it, I might have spent six more months thinking the internet was good. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hi. Welcome to the very first episode of the show. You might be wondering, what show? What is happening on my Pod Save America feed? Well, if you listen to the pod, you know we talk a lot about all the reasons democracy is in danger right now. The Republican Party, Fox News, gerrymandering, the filibuster.

But the one I haven't been able to stop thinking about is the internet. And what being online all the time is doing to our brains, our relationships, our jobs, the way we make decisions, the way we argue, the way we form our opinions, even the way we form our identities. I know complaining about the internet isn't exactly new, but I think it got worse during the Trump years, and I think it got much worse during the pandemic, when pretty much the only people we talked to were in our phones. I used to tell myself that all the extra screen time was just because of the election. But here I am a year later, still scrolling without a reason, getting pissed off over dumb tweets, checking

Instagram when my friends are right in front of me. Why? Is this healthy, productive, fulfilling? It certainly doesn't feel that way. So I want to do this podcast because I think the internet is pretty clearly not the place to have nuanced, thoughtful discussions about the internet, or really any issue. So I figured each week I'd bring on a smart, interesting guest to have a bit more of an unplugged, casual conversation about our hellish online existence. And the perfect person to kick that off is Gia Tolentino. Gia is a staff writer at The New Yorker who wrote the book Trick Mirror in 2019. It's a collection of essays that became a New York Times bestseller and landed Thank you. just co-wrote an episode of BJ Novak's new TV show, The Premise, in which a young woman becomes obsessed with a nasty anonymous commenter. It's great. You should check it out. In this episode,

the two of us talk about what used to be great about the internet, why it now turns life into an endless performance, why it makes politics hard and virtue signaling easy, and what it was like for each of us to become parents during the pandemic. It's a really fun conversation that lays the groundwork for all the future conversations we'll have on the show. I hope you enjoy, and if you have any questions, comments, or complaints about the episode, feel free to email us at offline at crooked.com. Here's Gia Tolentino. Thank you for doing this. Yeah, thanks for having me.

I have to say, I feel, I don't know if you feel like this after a year of baby in the house, but I'm like, I've never been dumber. So we'll see how this goes, you know? I feel like that all the time. It's baby in the house and it's pandemic. Yeah. And it's like, do I still know how to articulate a thought can i do i just like scroll through twitter all day well you don't which we're going to talk i'm relieved that

you're still feeling that too yeah it's funny that for the rest of our lives we will not be able to untangle the sort of mental like decrepitude of early parenthood from the mental decrepitude of the pandemic you know yes or Yes. Or just like all of the general things. All the time. Where like was this the pandemic. Or was this being new parents. Yeah like which accelerated my personal lameness. Either way.

Yeah by like several hundred years. It's hard to say. It is tough. So I wanted to do this show. Because I feel like. We are still collectively. Underest underestimating the extent to which our extremely online existence is making it that much harder to solve the world's problems. And you are the first person that I wanted to talk to for the show because you wrote what I consider to be the definitive piece about the Internet breaking our brains. A 2019 essay called The Eye and the Internet, which appears in Trick Mirror.

It's one of my all-time favorite books. And there's a great part where you write about coming of age with the internet, which I did too. And you talked about how it started off fun and cool and promising. Do you remember what you liked about the internet back then? Yeah, I do. What I liked about it was that there was an active sense of discovery and surprise and of a sort of limited sense of community. Like there was a way that you could find yourself within groups of people that it corresponded to the way that socialization works in real life, which is like, like everything was bounded and, and everything was surprising. And the things that I looked at

on the internet were completely different from the things that my parents would look at or my little brother or anyone else. And it was like this sense of wandering into kind of like a secret but ever-expanding neighborhood every day. The first time I was employed to be on the internet, I guess it was 2012, and I was blogging. And me and my friend Emma, we ran a blog called The Hairpin. And every morning, even till then, we would be combing through our separate sort of Google Reader, you know, RSS feeds, which feel so antiquated now. But Emma and I have very similar interests. We're very similar people in personality and whatever. And 85% of what we saw was different from the other person.

And now if Emma and I got on the internet at the same time, we would see 95% of the same thing. Yeah, I don't know what you were like as a kid, but I was always very social. And I can remember, you know, getting on the internet when I was in high school. And then in college, there was instant messenger. And that was a great way in college to sort of connect with other friends. And I just took to it immediately because of the connection it offered sort of in the best sense of the word. I don't want to make the mistake of where you think that the music that you listen to in adolescence and early adulthood is the best music of all time, right? I don't want to think that that internet was... But the time in which we came of age does line up with a particular point in the internet, college, whatever, the internet was trying

to take all of the normal things that are pleasurable about making friends and just sharpen it and make it more specific and make it more like here are the people that you actually wish you were hanging out with in real life, right? It wasn't I'm going to have more and more people look at me until the end of time, which is now the underlying sort of like algorithmic and economic driver of every social interaction on the internet. And I think the shift from, you know, I'm going to join X Facebook group and meet someone else that also like loves cigarose and Chipotle, you know, and the change between that and i am going to continually broadcast myself for an

ever-increasing number of strangers like it's they're they're completely worlds apart like one is serving kind of inherent human desires to be loved and be seen and to love other people and the other one is just exploiting it to the full extent possible, right? Yeah. I'm just trying to figure out when it actually shifted. I mean, I think about it in terms of my career and I was on the Obama campaign in 2008 and the internet was awesome, right? We were organizing online and it helped us win the race and everything was great. And I even think by the time we did the reelect in 2012, and maybe it's Twitter, maybe it's just sort of like social media taking hold more, that I even think by 2012, it started

feeling bad. When did you get to the point where you were like, this is actually so bad that I think I want to write an essay on this? Well, I, so I did the Peace Corps in 2010 to 2011. And so I didn't have internet for an entire year and change. And I was in this little village in the middle of nowhere, just dying to use the internet, right? I didn't have it. And all I wanted to do was send 5,000 word emails to my friends, you know, or whatever, or like look at Wikipedia, you know, like I was just, I missed the internet. And then I came back to it and it had already accelerated like the pace of conversation about it. And the emotional tone of it terrified me, you know, after however many months in the middle of nowhere.

And then in 2012, that's right, I'd started working for the Hairpin. And other people that I worked with, they were always like, man, another day on this cursed, you know, like. And I was like, what are you talking about? The Internet's amazing. Like it was, I still found it really fun. but every day they would talk about how awful it was. And, and then within about a year I got it. I was like, oh, I mean, I've tried for a really long time to, and I think it's possible to really try to only use the internet in ways that are fun to you, you know? And I still tried to do that and succeeded to a significant extent.

But Alex Balk, who I used to work with, he wrote something way back, maybe 2013 or something. He has two laws of the internet. And I forget, one of them is, it will only ever get worse from here. The thing that you think is bad about the internet right now will look like fucking Shakespeare in a decade, you know? And it's true. Yeah, I mean, so, well, the crux of your argument, right, is that all of us being on the internet all of the time forces everyone to be constantly communicating

in a way that makes us look good. And you equate that to an endless performance with no backstage, which I love. Can you talk about what you mean by that? Yeah. So I, you know, it's this, like Irving Goffman, his sort of sociological framework for the way that performance enters into everyday life. I mean, basically, it's, you know, when we're paying for something at the store, we are performing nice customer. When we are at work, we're performing this person at work, when we're with our friends, you know, and it's, you know, when we're paying for something at the store, we are performing nice customer. When we are at work, we're performing this person at work. When we're with our friends, you know, and it's like situation to situation, the audience changes over.

And also essential to this performance idea is that at the end of the day, you get to go home and you're backstage, right? It's the feeling of relief that anyone who's ever been on stage, it's like you get off stage, you breathe a sigh of relief, and then you're truly, truly yourself or whatever that is. And the economic incentives of social media are such that there is no context changeover, right? And this has been something that's written about for decades. you know, if you are obeying the incentives of what these platforms hope you do, you are performing an increasingly attractive version of yourself so that more and more people will stream into the auditorium. And eventually that auditorium goes for the, you know, 500 acquaintances that it's normal for people to have in their life to a thousand to 2000 to 3000 to if you're very, if you're incredibly lucky slash incredibly unlucky, millions, right?

And it's like humans, we're not meant to live like this. Sorry, you can probably hear this ambulance. That's okay. I'm in a ground floor apartment right next to a hospital. Yeah, it's like we're not meant to live like that. We're not meant to live in a realm where the obviously incredibly unhealthy mechanisms of celebrity of being visible to people that you don't know personally and that don't know you personally. This is what the internet makes sort of inherently desirable, where existentially,

I think we are all understanding that it's inherently, you know, really corrosive. It's also exhausting, right? Because like the more time that we spend on the internet and on these platforms, and you know, like you said, at the beginning, it was sort of by choice because it was fun. At this point, you know, it's like a prerequisite to like be a member of society that you're on a lot of these platforms. And if so, if we're on all these platforms all the time, and we're performing this identity for the public all the time, I just like, what do you think that does to people? So we've gotten like a sort of unholy extended experiment in this over the last 18 months, right? I mean, obviously not everyone, far from everyone, actually like quite a,

you know, distinctly small minority of people has been able to work from home. But me and I would say most of my friends have. And it has become quite unequivocally clear that to me at least, that the things that are truly satisfying are unmediated, right? Like everything that is truly, truly satisfying

and pleasurable to me is unmediated. A meal at a restaurant, like a conversation face-to-face, like dancing, a protest, being in the park. Like not to make a really simplistic analogy, but I do, I have been thinking this whole pandemic about, you know, in the same way that it's like surveillance capitalism does to human desire and to love and to personality and to

like impulse, like all it does to that, what, you to that what coal mining does to a mountain. It's every single... I think that under the strictures of surveillance capitalism, we are the raw material. And not just that, our thoughts and our whims and the things we look up late at night and the things we look up late at night and, you know, the things we search for on Google, like these, and again, our desire to be seen and to be loved, like this

is the coal that's being mined and we are the mountain and our heads are going to be taken off, you know? And again, I say this as someone that has benefited immensely from the internet and wouldn't have a career without it. Like I've benefited from it, you know, as much as really any person could. And I still think that the trap of the internet is that so much of its surface layer is built around sort of like individualizing affirmation and the shadow layer underneath it, the one that makes money for other people. And sometimes for us, if we're lucky, the shadow layer underneath it is built on deep depersonalization

and sort of like existential strip mining. And I think that's the problem because we feel the one part of the dopamine, the surface level dopamine, but deep down and in the deadness in our eyes, we feel the other part, you know? Yeah. I mean, you're right. Like you have the quick hit of like, oh, I got a bunch of RTs and likes and someone liked my photo and I got a fun comment, right? Or even just the stimulation. Like

I haven't used Twitter on, like I got off Twitter a year ago and I haven't been able. I got off Twitter a year ago and I haven't been able to rid my brain. I instantly lost the need for RTs and whatever. I'd been trying to talk myself out of that for years anyway. But I can't shake the desire for that dopamine, the basic rat-level dopamine. I can't get rid of it. It has nothing to do with personal affirmation.

My brain wants new information every second of the day and i'm fucked i i always wonder with myself if it has to do with like i'm always a i always had fomo as a kid right like i i hated being late for school because i didn't want to miss class and my friends and i just always needed to be connected yeah i, I always needed to be connected socially. But I have found that sometimes when I'm not near my phone, like picking up my phone and figuring out what everyone's doing online, meaning what's happening on Twitter, has become like an equivalent to what are all my friends doing?

Or what are my family doing? Like there is that, you're right, that doesn't necessarily have to do with affirmation, but you're just really interested in knowing what's going on in the world. And also, you have a professional, somewhat of a professional requirement to do that, right? I mean, I think if I was still blogging,

I would have to be, if I was still editing, I would have to be on the internet. And it's hard to, I mean, and that's always how it is. It's like there's this sort of neurological compulsive, you know, dopamine incentives, and then there are the real professional or paraprofessional needs. Well, let's talk about the professional side of it, because there's what it does to us individually.

And there's also what it does to society. I mean, one reason I found the essay so compelling is that every time you identified a different problem with the Internet, I think like, oh, this isn't just why the Internet sucks. This is why politics. Yeah. So, for example, you know, you point out that the internet encourages us to overvalue our opinions, which cuts deep because I offer opinions. Same. I mean, that's same. That was my whole job. But I was like, it doesn't. Right. But it's something I wrestle with all the time because on one hand, you want to believe that what you say and write can persuade at least some people to think a little differently or act a

little differently. On the other, it can be tempting to think that tweeting a political take is a substitute for action and grassroots organizing, which is obviously much tougher. Have you wrestled with that tension in your own writing? Yeah. I mean, and it's funny, like as a writer, I'm like everything I do is fucking useless and I've never liked anything I've done in my life. As a consumer, I'm like there are so many writers whose work has clarified usefully things for me that have actually changed my material and active life. Like they're and so like, yeah, I think that the internet is

necessarily structured to value the representation of something over the thing itself, right? The representation of happiness, the representation of a sunset, the representation of action, representation of justice, of, you know, of the representation of equal representation. Like it's the same reason that we like conversations about diversity and representation get tied up so much in like film and TV and not in economics and not an actual sort of material empowerment. It does seem like we've, we've sort of lulled ourselves into the belief that,

you know, making statements about politics and politically righteous statements is, is enough, or at least is something that can lead to, or at least we overestimate how much that can lead to real social change. Do you think that too? Of course. And I think that to some extent, we are the way we are on the internet because of like weakness and compulsion. To another, we are the way we are because the same mechanisms and the same sort of stage of capitalism that we're at consumes, I think, more and more and more of people's days. And the internet steps into the 15 spare minutes

that you might have commuting from one job to another or, you know, laying on your couch for five seconds before you get up to answer the next email. The internet slides into that and it's like, okay, you don't have time to go to this community board meeting because you can only afford childcare three days a week. So you don't have time to go to the meeting. You don't have time to do this thing you wish you could do. But instead you can at least tweet about it or like, you know. You can post. You can always post. You can always post, you know, and I and it's yeah, I wonder if it makes it it makes people think that civic action, political action is as easy as posting or going on the Internet. Like it's like a security blanket, you know, like, OK, well, I don't have to.

It is hard to go to that protest, to go to the march, to do the organizing organizing to go door to door and sometimes i think about the contrast between um you know i've knocked on doors for elections and like speaking to individual people and trying to persuade them to think differently or come along with you or take an action and it's it's a lot harder to do it one-on-one than to just hit hit tweet and then be like well that opinion was certainly correct. And I'm sure a bunch of people are going to be convinced by that. And so now I can just sit back and take it easy. Yeah.

But I think, you know, it's many people want to be good and want to be civically active and want to be like just good citizens and good stewards of this tiny little speck of life that we have on the earth. But and the desire that goes into like, you know, I want to make sure that I am living a good life. It is really, really cleverly harnessed by the internet into like, I want to make sure that people know that I am good, you know?

And then the difference between that is an almost unreachable, because it's like, I want to stand for something, right? It's like this is a real and valuable and genuine and important and often productive impulse. But the internet just drops a piano on it. It squashes it into nothing, a little silhouette. It leads to virtue signaling, right? The practice of virtue signaling that you are, that it's, it's, it's almost more important to

communicate that you are good than to actually do the work of being a good person. Can you tell the alligator story that you brought up there? Cause it was just, that's like my favorite example. What's that tweet again? Oh, it was about that sad case where like a two-year-old, was he, yeah, he was a two-year-old at a fatal alligator accident in Disney World. But this woman tweeted, I'm so finished with a white man's entitlement lately that I'm really not sad about a two-year-old being eaten by a gator because his daddy ignored signs.

And it's like like it's amazing i mean it's beautiful it's actually such a good tweet it's the perfect it's a perfect tweet we should have twitter should have been shut down after it's really so good i'm so grateful for that tweet it without it i could i might have spent six more months thinking the internet was good. So like, I keep finding myself thinking like, what is the point of my engagement? Am I doing something? Am I fixing something? And I, I felt especially over the last couple of years that like the more time I spend on platforms, like I might be knowing more about shit, but it's not really changing anything. Yeah, I remember I wrote about this for The New Yorker in 2016 when it was like, I remember that was the year that people were tweeting at the end of the year. They were like me at the beginning of 2016, me at the end. And it was like a beautiful hummingbird and then like a

crow clutching a bloody knife or whatever. And I remember then it seemed to me, and I think I still feel this, that every year would only ever feel worse than the last one forever, as long as we were spending more and more of our time on the internet. Because I think the condition of being on the internet, which increasingly feels like the condition of contemporary life, is that you can know an unlimited amount of information. our ability to actually change things, our margins of action and resistance, will at best stay static and possibly, and certainly for a considerable south of the population, perhaps shrink. And it's like that condition of being able to know anything about anything, about anyone,

in such intimate, like the intimate detail of a friend sending you a selfie while nothing changes or perhaps only gets worse in the actual, like that's like a recipe for just absolute madness. And like, I've been trying to, I've been writing about this for a while and I was like, okay, Gia,

you do have a modicum of agency. Like you can do something about this. And I've like, but it's taken me, like my only solution is like be smooth brain to try to know as little as possible. And that's not actually true, but try to avoid the sort of

constant barrage of things you can't do anything about directly except for like throw a little money at. And try to know a little bit less about that stuff so that you have time to like use your actual time better and i think that's the only solution i mean how has that how has that worked for you during the pandemic because i know that you had a pandemic well i was wondering about your experience because you so you got off twitter when

like at the beginning of the pandemic? Well, I've been slowly, slowly, slowly trying to get off the internet. During the pandemic, I would get on for like 10 minutes a day. And I was like, this sucks. I miss my friends. Like I'd want to go out to dinner and stop listening to these fucking strangers. And then I knew that after I had a baby be I would be up at all hours of the day and I would I would be staring at a screen you know while I was like nursing her at all hours

of the day and night and I was like I I can't spend this time on Twitter like I can't all of the things that come with a baby but also the things that Twitter had made me hungry for just like total ego death like an absolute existential reset. Like I wanted a sort of psychedelic, absolute change in my life. But then I got back on the night that Trump got COVID. I obviously got back on for the election. I got back on around the Gaza stuff. But I was mostly able to stay completely off of it.

But then for some stories, like I wrote that Britney Spears story with Ronan and I had to check Twitter a lot because I had to follow certain things. And I guess I have to admit that I'm re-addicted. I log on every day now for like... Oh. Yeah, for like a minute. Oh no, they got you. You're back. I log on every day now for like a minute.

Oh no, they got you. You're back. I log on probably every day, never for more than a minute. But it's back and I have no desire to say anything. But it's exactly what you were saying. It's like, what are people talking about? And like, what's going on? I've had a theory I don't think this is like a very original theory but that the pandemic has made it all worse like much worse yeah because we have it has just forced us all online and then like the only escape we usually have which is like going out and seeing

people in person and socializing and talking to new people and saying things to the people we should be saying it to right and yeah exactly working out our thoughts in conversation like humans do um that hasn't been possible and i think it's not just affecting us individually but i think it's made like civic life worse i I think it's made politics worse. And it is sort of like the boiling frog story, right? Like that we might not have noticed it at first. And it's sort of been an understated thing during the pandemic. But like one of the reasons everyone is so pissed off lately

is because we've been spending all this time online and not with each other. It's like it's five years of internet use all crammed into the last 18 months. Like it's the same. It's the level of, you know, I think it also is, we see what our social interaction is like when it's primary mediation is not,

why it's so much harder to door-to-door canvas and to like send people to the right places to donate or whatever and because there's friction right and we forget how like we're not meant to have most of our communication be through mediums that are making five companies a huge amount of money like we're meant to be unmonitored and just saying things to each other. Right. And not to not to everyone all at once publicly. Right. I mean, it's so interesting you made the point about the friction when you're going door to door canvassing. And in my former life, I was a speechwriter. And so I tried to help Barack Obama write words that would persuade people. And I thought, OK, maybe you would persuade people. And I thought, okay,

maybe you could persuade people. And I thought that at first that Twitter was a place where you could like have debates and persuade people and work things out. But the more I did that, you realize like, as you try to persuade an individual, what you'd say to one individual to persuade them isn't what you'd necessarily say to someone else. And then someone else jumps in your mentions and suddenly you're in this bad fight and it's terrible. And I think what it's done over the last several years, especially today, is it is people think that like being right is enough.

And like no one's even trying to persuade other people anymore, because when you spend time on these platforms, you know, you have a really good idea what people who think just like you think. Like I know how online liberals think. I'm pretty good about that. I also know how like like Trumpy MAGA people online think because I spend a lot of time seeing them on Twitter. But I don't know how most of the rest of the country thinks because they're not sitting there on Twitter broadcasting their thoughts all the time. And the truth is a lot of them have like some pretty complicated thoughts about a whole bunch of different issues.

And if we saw that more, we would probably work harder to persuade people. But instead, we think, you know what, everyone's already made up their minds. And so I'm just like, like, being right is enough. And I think that if we have the mindset that being right is enough, and that we're not supposed to be persuading people, then that makes democracy pretty difficult. Yeah. And also, like, I think that in the absence of satisfying civic involvement, I think people, you know, will settle for it being pleasurable, but I don't even think it is. No. Like, I think that's why I wrote that, like, you know, the idea that we're overvaluing our

opinions. It's like my job for a while was literally to, like, write what I thought about things. But I was like, this is like, like I, the pleasure that I got from it was clear. Like the only pleasure I've ever gotten from writing is like understanding something a little better privately. Like the idea that the, I don't think there's any pleasure in being right at all. Like it's like, so what, then what, what the fuck are you going to do? It's the same kind of do it's the same kind of it's the same kind of dopamine hit that you get from the internet right like it's a it's a brief fleeting moment when you hit that tweet that you think you're something you're right about something

you're like yeah yeah i told them i was right and then it goes away and you're like okay well what did i get from that so i think that our kids are like a few weeks apart. Yeah, when was yours born again? He was July 23rd. Cool. What about yours? August 7th. Yeah, Emily's due date was originally August 9th, so very close. Has that affected the way you see these problems

with the internet, given that this is how our children are going to grow up into the world? Well, now I really want to know what, has it changed the way you think about the internet? Has it changed the way you think about work? It has affected me particularly over the last several months. So like, you know, Charlie was born, he's like a little alien, you know, and you're like just trying to keep him alive, right? And then we get to like seven or eight months and suddenly then you start seeing the personality.

Right. And he is this just joyful, happy kid. And he's now he's a toddler and he's bounding around and he's starting to talk, you know. And I'm just I watch him and I'm like, he's so happy being like undistracted by any internet or screens or all this kind of stuff and i was it made me think of like what it was like to be a child without all of the distractions of modern life that mainly come from the internet now and as i watch him and you know i'm doing this series so i guess it's on my mind anyway but i start thinking to myself like oh how long until he is just like has a phone and is hooked on these screens and is part of this world and there's just this innocence now at this

age that um i sort of i i worry will go away once this once the screens really come into play but does he also already know that phones are special? Because Paloma really knows that the phone is special. Really? Like in what way? She'll crawl over to the couch and be like, mine! And I'm like, no, get the book! I do think about a lot,

it's always been really, really obvious to me that the internet was a source of pleasure, but there were a, there was a real set of things in real life that were always more pleasurable, like eating dinner, walking the dog, like getting high and like just looking at people, you know, like it was always, they were all, you know, going out, like it's like it was always more pleasurable to me and they were things that held my attention that could keep my attention that could rescue me from what the internet does to my attention

and to my sense of the world which is like chop it up and make me feel terrible and I am so glad that I spent a lot of childhood reading books for six hours, you know, running around outside for six hours straight. You know, I'm glad that I spent so much time as an adolescent partying, you know, whatever. Like, because I gained access to things that were so self-evidently more pleasurable than anything you get through a screen as much as I. And that's been how I think about it vis-a-vis Paloma. Like, I mean, the dream is that she becomes some sort of Luddite, like, you know, like, fuck you, mom. Like, you know, the world that you guys built is garbage and I want to be like a communitarian

farmer and blow up pipelines, you know, like that's my dream for her. But my true hope is that she's able to find real life more pleasurable than this and the friction and the danger of it right and the the opportunities for discomfort and and the lack of slickness and the the inconvenience and the confusion and the surprise of real life yeah i want her to find it more physically pleasurable than the internet and then maybe that'll help when they're, you know, hooked up to their chips in 20 years, right? And like blogging, you know? No, I think that's right. I thought that too, as I've been like reading Charlie bedtime stories, and then I've gone from reading him bedtime stories to like just telling him stories and making them up, like trying to get him to sort

of use his create, you know, be more creative, be more present, have more conversations that aren't based on like seeing something or watching a screen or stuff like that, like that, you know, we might be able to avoid it a little bit in the way we raise them. You've talked a lot about how you sort of wrote Trick Mirror to clarify your own thinking, like you really wrote it for yourself and yet it became this book that was a bestseller on tons of bestseller lists best book lists barack obama puts it on his uh 2019 you know favorite book list um do you do you get some sense of hope from the fact that at the very least, like this struck a chord with so many people who all sort of recognized, yeah, this is a problem. I actually identify with this problem that maybe the awareness of how awful the internet is and why it's so awful is a first step towards

something. I don't know what. Yeah. I mean, like I still really haven't accepted or understood it, but I, I, I did feel, and I feel really lucky, especially like being in bookstores, you know, with a bunch of other people and feeling that we were all in search of the same thing together, like exactly together, you know, that, and, and feeling like I had no answers from them. All I could do was like, try to give them a map of one version of the problem, you know? Yeah. Interesting that the, I've never articulated this thought to myself even. So it's, it's interesting thinking about this now, The book even in itself became a representation of something that it wasn't.

It got swallowed into the mechanisms of the internet that I wrote about. People Instagrammed it next to their succulents. West Elm used it in a freaking furniture ad. I was like, yeah. You're like, yeah. And yeah, but being in the same room with people that were all there to ask the same questions really of each other, right? Like not even of me, they were there to ask it of the people around them. That felt incredible. I mean,

the starting ground for everything good that's ever going to happen in the future is being physically in a room with other people and ready to work it out. You know, last question I'm asking all our guests. What's your favorite thing to do to completely unplug? And how often do you get to do it? I want to plug Internet things. There was one Internet thing that I did all throughout the pandemic. Did you did you know that website that would show you out other people's windows? No, it's called window swap. No, that's amazing. Yeah. I really love like aquarium cams and stuff and like, like little like walks through forests and stuff like on YouTube. But there's this place called window swap and you can just look out someone else's window and, you know, anywhere in the world at any time. And it just, it gives you

a new one. It's like chat roulettelette but for nature and no penises and it's just so pleasurable good use of technology i like that that's great yeah um the honestly like any um this is like kind of a gross like i'm like drugs but like the thing that gets me away from screens for loggist like doing mushrooms, you know? Oh, yeah. I made my triumphant return post-baby recently and I was like, oh, yeah, here we go. This is the good stuff. I get it.

Gia Tolentino, thank you so much for being the first guest here on Offline. Oh, my God, I'm the first? You're the first. You're the pilot episode. This is it. This is the pilot. You're kicking it all off.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate this. It was lovely to talk to you. You too. Take care. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. Our producer is Andy Gardner-Bernstein.

It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Tanya Somanator, Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, and Sandy Gerard for production support, and to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Milo Kim, and Narmel Konian, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.