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- We reduce ourselves to the image of ourselves; believe in our own propaganda — this is what we use social media for: the printing of counterfeit selves; the fake currency with which we purchase ontological stability. Who I am does not matter; what matters is who I project, the platforms I’ve mastered. (And the irony does not escape me: I say this on a platform; under a pseudonym — as my pseudo, social self). We are indifferent to authenticity; we’ve transcended the need for it (or so we think).
- Sartre wrote that we are the sum of our actions; defined the existentialist as the thinker who accepts this ethical burden (that we are what we do; what we commit to). Thus, we cannot — we counterfeiters — be existentialists: because we believe that we are more than our actions, our commitments; because we believe that we are the sum of our digital fictions. Individuals die the way birds do: out of sight, almost invisibly. Our individuality dies without the pressure of the ethical, of existential burdens; without the pressure of trying to be what we say we are.
- The Real is drying up. We externalize everything, internalize almost nothing. I notice that what people say they are — how they advertise their education, success, beliefs — is less and less indicative of who they are, or will turn out to be; of the depth and quality of their soul.
- Goethe: “The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the…
