Last Saturday, the YouTube personality Nikocado Avocado surprised his 4.27 million followers by losing more than 100kg overnight. Having gained notoriety via “mukbang” — that is, filming himself eating — his audience was amazed to find he’d gone from morbidly …
Momfluencers won’t absolve your guilt
Maternal guilt is a bottomless resource. Enter the momfluencer. She’s like an influencer — but her particular genius is to target the most vulnerable, the most guilt-ridden the most exhausted consumer. New mothers. The genius of the momfluencer is to …
Who will rule Twitter next?
It is often declared that Twitter is not real life; too rarely does anyone add, because it’s far more important. As the primary vector for the construction and dissemination of political narratives, social media has become the central battleground where …
Stop pretending to be authentic
In one of my first acting classes at college, we performed a Stanislavski exercise. “You’ll come up to the front of the class and perform an activity,” the professor said. “Something mundane. Something you do every day.” One classmate brushed …
Selfies have made you ugly
Modern man, wrote the social psychologist Erich Fromm in 1956, “has been transformed into a commodity”. Scroll through social media, and you will see this transformation is absolute. On one side, we are asked to rate glamorous, increasingly similar-looking people …
Have the Republicans gone too far?
How far is too far? From the Access Hollywood tape that many felt sure had sunk Donald Trump’s presidential hopes to the violent crescendo of January 6, this is the existential question Republican politicians have been forced to ask themselves …
Ukraine is winning the online war
The internet is a chaotic place, but it is nonetheless ruled by a series of iron laws, especially when it comes to what we put on it. Perhaps the most important one is that whatever you post, try to make …
Women can’t be beautiful
I don’t care that much about my appearance. I don’t waste time chasing after arbitrary beauty standards. I get my hair done, though, and I’ve started to have it coloured since I turned 40, but that’s very low maintenance: four …