Sobre a Auto-Ilusão

Estou a ler o último livro de ensaios de Jia Tolentino. Chama-se Reflection on Self-Delusion e é sobre as redes, o uso que fazemos das redes, a forma como estamos nós e os outros nas redes. Do primeiro ensaio:

Of course, people have been carping in this way for many centuries. Socrates feared that the act of writing would "create forgetfulness in the learner's souls." The sixteenth-century scientist Conrad Gessner worried that the printing press would facilitate an "always on" environment. In the eighteenth century, men complained that newspapers would be intellectually and morally isolating, and that the rise of the novel would make it different for people - specifically women - to differentiate between fiction and fact. We worried that radio would drive children to distraction, and later that TV would erode the careful attention required by radio. In 1985, Neil Postman observed that the American deisre for constant entertainment had become toxic, that television had ushered in a "vast descent to triviality." The difference is that, today, there is nowhere further to go. Capitalism has no land to cultivate but the self. Everyting is being cannibalized - not just goods and labor, but personality and relationships and attention. The next step is complete identification with the marketplace, physical and spiritual inseparability from the internet: a nightmare that is already banging down the door.