Apotheosis:
A philosophy for influencers
People say that the internet is not real life. This is a confusion worth teasing apart. It is true that Twitter, for example, is not representative of the opinions of the population. The vitriolic, atavistic performance art common across Twitter is generated by those people interested in behaving in this way. Most people, I believe it is fair to say, are entirely disengaged from online bickering. Therefore, the majority opinion, held by people with better things to do, is left unsaid, and as a result, anyone relying on the internet as an opinion poll is deceived into thinking that we all share the minority view. They are like Oz, small and hiding behind a digital curtain. In this way, the internet is not real life. Politicians, hellbent on misunderstanding technology and their constituents, who look to the internet for clarity – are idiots. Unfortunately, the death of the Statesman, a shepherd to aspirational goals, has left us with technocrats who behave like running a nation is a matter of mere arithmetic.[i] These technocrats cynically look to opinion polls to guide their decisions instead of standing up and bearing the responsibilities of leadership, crushing as they are.
However, it would be unwise to say that the internet is not real, insofar as what is real is what is of consequence. No one would argue that the internet, social media, and our interactions with both, have not impacted the world like a meteor. The internet is not representative, but it is real. One such consequence has been on our relationships with each other. Many authors have discussed this issue from its impact on teenagers to the dating world with remarkable clarity.[ii] Fredrick Brennan, the creator of 8chan, had to flee the Philippines for his life. Only after his avatar’s actions impacted his own, did he state, “the internet is real life.[iii]” Will it take a cataclysm for us to realize that real life is downstream from the internet? What impact does the internet have on our psychology? I will focus on a particular process which elevates an individual’s persona to the status of a pagan deity – and its colossal consequences. Here, we map apotheosis.
The Persona
Nature is a labyrinth for the blind. We do not know which way to go, we only hope that our map of the labyrinth matches the truth and does not lead us to a dead end. In nature, dead ends are literal. If we, as embodied representations of our environment, do not fit our environment, we die. If a species can sink nicely into the puzzle, matching its contours with their own, then they will survive and perpetuate.
What we are to nature, ideas are to us. In other words, we are the environment that ideas adapt to. Some ideas fail immediately because of physiological constraints; If I cannot hear what you are saying, if the pitch is too high for my ears to catch it, then it does not matter how profound what you said was. Other ideas fail because they are above our heads. I admit, I cannot make heads or tails of quantum physics. So, I make a poor host for that set of memes. Less obviously, some ideas fail to spread because they are beneath our feet, so to speak. Cliches illustrate this nicely. They are so boring, one cannot remember them. Ideas that are irrelevant, do not stick. Put simply, ideas do not transmit for many reasons, but suffice it to say we act as the environment that ideas evolve with.
The internet is the most unified form of this environment. The digital environment has removed many of the constraints to our communication; geography, timing, or the difficulty of reading, have largely been dissolved. In other words, the boundaries between our thoughts have fallen, and each individual behaves as a neuron in the collective brain. The internet is an array, or the collection of singular nodes aggregated, and unified insofar as they serve a common purpose. Humanity is the foundation of the digital environment, as well as the progenitor of the representations in that environment. Our children dance on our shoulders. In other words, we film ourselves, generating a representation which must survive on the internet, which transmits across persons.
This representation is not the individual his or herself. Instead, it is a persona, a character generated to interact on the internet. It is an avatar, complex of memes, an idea which often communicates meaning subtly. On one level, a digital symbol of this kind represents its creator (i.e., a video of a person is a representation of that person), and on another level, it represents a collective persona. Here’s a way of thinking about it: Human beings are very complicated. Most of the time, we interact using platitudes; “crazy weather we’re having!” These can be banal, but if I am at work and ask you how you are doing, I do not want to hear about how your boyfriend failed to block an Instagram model who sent him a direct message. This is more detail than I care about, and it is getting in the way of me continuing my work. Just say, “I’m fine.” Thus, a persona is a functional reduction of one’s self. At work, I play the co-working role, and you are happy to see that small part of me. However, many people can play the same role. Insofar as two different people enact the same idea, the same persona, then they are behaving as the same thing. Who cares who played Hamlet in the high school play, they’re Hamlet either way. They’re both running the same program.
On the internet, these representations take on a life of their own. They begin to adapt to the psychological environment, and people play a role that evolves. Once uploaded, a persona is subjected to the likes and dislikes, obstacles and boons, of the array. I will call this kind of living representation a “model” or “persona.” Later, I will describe an ideal, or the imaginatively generated reasonable extension of the persona which one can imitate or approximate. These personae have lengthy cultural lineages, the femme fetal reaches back to devouring mother goddesses. Thus, I will occasionally refer to these as a “sexual personae,” relying on Camille Paglia, or even archetypes, relying on Carl Jung.[iv]
Every individual who uses themselves as the basis for their persona (as opposed to a virtually generated one; e.g., “v-tuber”) has a collection of physical features which play into the look of the model. If a person has blue eyes, so does the model. The randomness of these traits are variations which map onto the environment to greater or lesser degree. As such, they contribute to the persona’s fitness. Some individuals will find that their biological features do not fit their niche. For example, a muscular comedian, perhaps with a preppy wardrobe, is often viewed as maladaptive to the comedic niche. He is not helped by his physical features. This is because the expectation of the audience does not align with what athletic features present; they may see him as a “jock,” and not a “funny guy.” As such, his features become a hindrance in the comedy-niche. Dane Cook was an example of this.
Enough obstructive features, and a model will simply ‘die,’ or fail to succeed in the competitive digital environment; They do not map onto the culverts of the collective psyche, and pass away as a result, never reaching the greatest heights of internet stardom. This is “feature maladaptation,” a subset of which are those phenotypic traits that are maladaptive to the psychological terrain. Of course, maladaptive features have their opposite: adaptive features. These are simply features that increase the survival and perpetuation of that particular persona.
However, there are features beyond one’s biology. Individuals can consciously exploit the preferences, once realized (in both senses of the word), of the collective psyche by building features for themselves. We do this all the time, often subconsciously. For example, makeup, namely blush, imitates the biological consequence of sexual arousal. We know makeup makes one look more attractive, but what is attractive? Why are people attracted to blush? In this case, it's because it mimics a sexually relevant stimulus. People like sex and things that remind them of sex. Who knew? This happens all the time, and believe it or not, not everything is about sex (though everything may be about creation). We can alter our clothing and hairstyle, even our patterns of speech. We can learn new skills and develop a more well-rounded personality. Plastic surgery or steroids are an option as well. Nothing is off the table. We will classify features that one leverages outside of the internet as “material tools.” I’m using this kind of language for two reasons. First, “material” helps distinguish between the physical world and the digital one. Even if the line between these concepts is blurry, for the ease of communication, and to avoid the risk of falling into a metaphysical argument, we can recognize that realness is on a continuum and move on. Second, “tools” is useful because it suggests that we can consciously manipulate them for a purpose. What that purpose is will determine which features are worth manipulating and in what way; in other words, which features are relevant.
A strange intermediary exists between material and digital: spiritual. By spirit I do not mean supernatural. As far as I can tell, there is nothing outside of nature. What that would mean is unclear, given that reality is synonymous with nature. Even our inorganic technologies may be natural progressions of a species. We cannot be sure until we have other highly advanced species to compare to. Time will tell. By spirit I mean a memetic pattern that uses, in the case of our discussion, the human body as a substrate. Hand gestures, facial expressions, intonation, and personality are all examples of this. Insofar as these patterns of behavior can be transmitted between persons, they are spirit. So, an individual can imitate a spirit, or utilize “spiritual tools,” to better increase their persona’s fitness. An extreme example comes from comedic impressions. Jim Carrey inhabited the spirit of Andy Kaufman with frightening fidelity. The Yukaghir will imitate the elk they hunt to the point that the elk are unsure if they are friend or foe.[v] One needn’t go so far. Have you ever found yourself taking on the mannerisms of another person? Or changing the way you talk around a particular group of friends? These are the adoption of spirit, or the adoption of behavioral patterns that are assumed functional in a social or natural context. In short, one can adjust their personality to better fit a niche.
These tools can become even more abstract. Mutating physical features and altering your personality requires significant effort. However, a major benefit (and danger) of the internet is that it is abstract. This makes the digital world more easily manipulable than anything in reality. A person can alter their persona by dying their hair, going to the gym, changing their clothing, role playing, getting plastic surgery, or applying Instagram filters. One can even create an entirely digital persona. An obvious example is a v-tuber. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, announced the Metaverse and has been actively creating tools for creating digital avatars – even ones that have no resemblance to reality whatsoever. A less obvious version of this is art. Different artworks are often inspired by that a portrait that came before it; Roberto Ferri has been inspired (read: in-spirited) by Caravaggio. One example from literature is the “mad-scientist” persona. It is not hard to trace Rick from Rick and Morty, back to Dr. Frankenstein, and even further back to Dr. Faustus. Paintings can play that same game. I recommend you read Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia for a detailed genealogy of many cultural models. In short, one compliment to material tools, are digital tools. These are features generated and manipulated in a disembodied environment such as the internet.
Therefore, we can understand a persona as series of nested layers. First there is the physical person with their unique features. On top of that are the various tools; material, spiritual, and digital. These align to form the persona itself. We will later discuss how this combines with the projections of one’s audience, but for now, this will do.
As we touched on briefly, these personae evolve. The way in which they evolve has a lot to do with imitation. Each image behaves as what evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins calls a “meme,” or a cultural bit of information which evolves like genes.[vi] Heylighen and Chielens have described a four-step process by which memes are transferred: assimilation, retention, expression, and transmission.[vii] Assimilation is the impression, the initial experience or ‘multimodal perception,’ of the meme. Retention is the memory of the meme. Expression is communication, defined broadly, of the meme. And transmission is when one takes it up and starts the process again. Thus, each persona is a stacked representation thrown onto the internet. It can then be witnessed and imitated by others.
There are two types of imitation: cloning and reproducing. Cloning is replication without variation. This is obvious when one shares a meme. A funny picture of a cat can be launched across Facebook with no variation at all; it’s simply cloned. Reproducing is replication with variation. This is when one takes the picture of a cat and photoshops it onto the end of a table with an accompanying panel of a distraught woman yelling at it. Now we have a little story. Reproducing is much more applicable to our discussion here for several reasons. The first is that evolution requires reproduction. Replication without change is the antithesis of evolution, which is change. Additionally, individuals will find it difficult to perfectly imitate someone else. We all look different. Our features and tools vary, and thus, any attempts to clone the persona of another person, will inevitably fall flat. We each contribute something unique to our persona, even if our persona is an imitation of another. And this small amount of variation is what allows for personae to evolve.
There are two targets of imitation: personae and ideals. The first is more intuitive. When generating an online persona, one may look to those who have come before and reproduce their behavior. However, this can also occur cynically. A person may see a model as a means to an end. For example, one may be less interested in fitness, and more interested in making money. The persona and even the “ancestral supplements” they produce are subordinate to profit, or some unseen motivator.[viii] This person is a grifter, a fake or phony. They are not the “real thing.” Insofar as their performance approximates a successful persona, they should expect success, even if the performer does not understand why it works and has a general contempt for their audience. If the mimic remains there, if they do not progress beyond the persona they adopted and stay a simulacrum of someone else, then this is a form of parasitic lie. “Parasitic” in that it is wholly dependent on the creative work of others to survive, and “lie” because it is a performance that obfuscates the sincere beliefs, goals, and actions of the individual.
The alternative to this is admiration. Instead of cynically adopting the persona of another person, one can aspire to be the ideal veiled behind the model. In other words, the persona itself attempts to approximate an ideal, and thus becomes a representative of that ideal. Insofar as an individual shares in the same ideal as the persona or person they admire, then imitation of that persona is an obvious step.
In this circumstance, one needn’t be conscious of their ideal. To do so, the ideal is first psychologically generated in the individual. How this ideal is generated is largely a mystery. However, there are a few things we can say confidently. First, while it may find its expression in the culture, and that culture may reverberate back into the individual and inform them, these ideals stretch back through time. This is to say that our cultural ideals find their moorings in our relationships with reality, and those relationships whose rates of change were slow enough relative to ours to be considered stable, were adapted to. Thus, stable relationships find their substantiation in our biology. Those parts of our biology which are psychic in nature, but not under our direct control or awareness, are unconscious. Therefore, our ideals spring from our unconscious, and find their expression in a person or persona. Even if one may spin a rational conception of an ideal post hoc, this does not mean they have successfully identified what they idealize. When an individual encounters a set of stimuli in the environment, a cluster of features or “experiential gestalt,” which correspond with their ideal, the ideal-schema is activated. This makes these stimuli salient. They stick out and catch our attention. We may then approach. In other words, relevant stimuli activate an unconscious orienting complex, and that which is oriented towards is the ideal, be it as simple as a meal, or as complex as a lover. It is worth noting here that the ideal is both “internal” and “external.” Meaning that there is a neurological structure which underpins the psychology, and features that exist “out there.” The ideal cannot be reduced to either. Instead, we should recognize the ideal as a reverberative process and not an object constructed of building blocks, poised for the attribution of essential identities.[ix]
Moving on, this is most obvious in the case of a lover who stands out against the background; are you attracted to her, or is she attractive? You are compelled to approach. If you do, your eyes will dilate, and light will flood your experience. She will be radiant. You will be in awe. This is not because the individual you are witnessing is great in themselves, one could not be sure of their greatness without familiarity, but because what she represents is. More explicitly, you could not know if the person you are witnessing is great without having had experienced them. Given that you are seeing them for the first time, and are in awe, it cannot be the person in themselves you are interested it, but what they represent. You may object by noting that they have attractive physical features that you may be drawn towards, but I would counter by noting that what features one finds attractive are hypothetically infinitely variable. It is evolution that has decided that those features are worth being drawn to. Thus, those features, concrete as they are, are representatives of features association with survival and perpetuation across massive expanses of time and informed by cultural contexts. They are signs of the ideal mate.
Should you come to know this person, you will find that your model of that person becomes more and more sophisticated, it aggregates more information. Suddenly, the ideal is overwhelmed by a more detailed and realistic representation of the person, and some of this information will inevitably diverge from the ideal (to err is human). Often, when reality breaks through the projection, it is experienced as disillusionment. This is a remarkably appropriate word. The ideal-projection will dissipate like vapor as reality shines through the fog.[x] Thus, it is appropriate that Eric Neumann says, “the Great Individual is primarily the carrier of projections” (p. 427).[xi]
However, let me provide an ounce of hope for those jaded. It is not inevitable that we will be disillusioned. Just as our models of an individual can be informed, so too can our ideals, as is evidenced by experience and the shifting ideals of the culture. Thus, it may also be that our ideals are informed by those we love, and the projection may continue on. However, dialogue between an individual and your ideal must be maintained, and when it does it takes on the effect of a great friendship. You encourage someone to become more than they are. You encourage them to become what you see in them.
Given that the persona you were inspired by is not a perfect representative of the ideal, then a relentless and skilled pursuit of that ideal will result in the overtaking of the persona you approached the ideal through. In other words, ideals are internally generated and externally triggered eternal or aspirational goals; ever receding horizons that entice us further than we otherwise could.[xii] This is a driving force for human progress and achievement. Our constant movement towards ideals results in us passing by what would otherwise be possible, and leaving an example, a persona worthy of imitation, behind for the next generation. This signifies to them of where we are heading, where to aim at, or what to idealize. Thus, heroes beget heroes. Villains beget villains.[xiii] The danger for the individual influencer is that they will achieve success and begin to believe that they have fused with their ideal, that they have forever reached their destination. This is narcissism: the fusion of one’s self-image and ideal-image. In effect, the narcissist’s god is themselves. The assumption that one has acquired the unachievable, will inevitably result in stagnation, and an increasing fixedness on oneself in a desperate attempt to stave off meaninglessness.
Let me explain. A goal draws one forward. It also gives meaning to any action servicing that goal. An ideal is an abstract goal. If you “achieve” that goal, then nothing is drawing you forward, and no action is imbued with meaning as a result. Thus, you are left in a meaningless but “successful” state. Then, the only positive joy that can be had is purely hedonistic, or derived from the past, which you must increasingly mine for pleasure and stability. You become nostalgic. In the narcissist’s case, they must continually affirm their godhood to stave off the creeping fear of their life being meaningless. Day after day they will contort themselves to repress the burning question: “what was all of this for?” The answer: For yourself, and you aren’t worth it. Vanishingly few people, especially if they have a god-complex, are willing to do what is necessary to progress: admit their inadequacy, subdue their ideal, and reconstitute an aspirational pursuit more worthy than themselves.
Furthermore, the narcissistic influencer is vulnerable. First, because they are likely to rationalize their vices. This precludes any chance at course correction, which demands acknowledgement of one’s faults. Second, and more subtly, because narcissists increase the rate of their own demise. The narcissist confuses their self-image with their ideal. Thus, any alteration to themselves alters their ideal in turn. Should they become injured, sick, or mentally ill beyond their narcissism, they are likely to objective-fy that injury. Meaning, they will pursue that injury, chasing themselves in circles. This can escalate to the point of artistic self-mutilation. As Tobi Zausner has noted, artists like Bob Flanagan, a performance artist who struggled with cystic fibrosis, can descend into a form of self-obsession wherein their own bodies become the subject of their art.[xiv] Flanagan became known as a “supermasochist.” He installed a hospital bed in his exhibit. He pierced and suspended himself. In effect, Flanagan began depicting his muse, himself, using his art. Because his muse was injured, he had to depict that injury, in exaggerated form, in the art. This compounded the problem, adding new pain to the pain he already suffered. One can easily see how this would exacerbate the original problem and spin out of control. Examples of symbolic behavior are legion and not confined to narcissists. Consider the spread of Tourette’s-like tic behaviors amongst teenage girls during the Covid pandemic.[xv] I hypothesize that the tics behave like memes and are adopted because they fit the pained psychological environment of the individual. The individual then expresses their pain by employing the tic. Symbolically they say, “I am not well.”
We’ve reached a narrow peak in our discussion of models. From here, we need to pivot our focus and begin to flesh out the environment the model adapts to. This, in turn, will illuminate the model, and reinforce our understanding. Before moving on, let me briefly summarize. Ideals are generated bottom up. Both evolutionary and cultural history have aided in forming these ideals. A community forms around this ideal. In other words, amongst those with a common goal. One member of that community approximates that ideal. Others may imitate them. The thing that is imitated, which represents the ideal, is a persona. These are constituted of features and tools, both of which contribute to the fitness of the persona. Should a persona fit their niche, the role one fills in the psychological environment, they will survive and perpetuate. Thus, the persona opens a dialogue with the audience, informing its adaptation. If they fail to adapt, or the environment shifts and what was once adaptive becomes maladaptive, they will figuratively die (or actually die in a more concrete environment). The danger for successful individuals is that they come to believe that they are the ideal itself; they fuse their self-image with the ideal, leading to narcissism, nihilism, and collapse. However, the buck does not stop here. In the tragic end, the individual is not alone in her suffering.
The Mob
The individual and their audience share in an ideal, and in dialogue, construct its representation. The mob, a subsection of the internet, or one’s audience, has an idea about what they like. They are interested in something which orients their collective attention. A persona may play the role of a “fitness influencer,” “streamer,” an “alpha male” in the “manosphere,” or even a “public intellectual.” As we will discuss in greater detail below, the persona must exceed the expectations of the mob to stay relevant. They do this by approximating an ideal, a version of their role which extends what the mob imagines possible. The degree to which a persona approximates the ideal is the degree to which an individual can expect that persona to succeed. However, the mob itself may be captured in the orbit of an ideal, drained of life, and forced to circumambulate as empty husks.
The fantasies of the mob, which persona hope to approximate, emerge bottom up. The ideal of the mob and the individual emerge in the same way, from the unconscious upwards. Only after a persona has appeared that approximates the ideal, do the mob begin to circle around it. They raise the model upon their shoulders and march with her, they are her palanquin. But where exactly do these ideals come from?
Ideals are a process catalyzed on two strata: collective and personal. Collective niches map on to the collective unconscious, à la Carl Jung. That is to say that these are complexes common across our species. Humans all have lungs, kidneys, and intestines that developed to account for one feature in the environment or another. For example, our auditory system accounts for and interprets vibrations in the air. We also have psychological organs, each with their own purpose. Our psychological commonalities are, in that sense, collective. Additionally, the sequence of generations, lives and deaths, contributed to what we have inherited. This makes the construction of our psychological organs collective, in that it is the compounding of a collective into a suite of genetic memories. These are broad niches common across the species.
Personal niches are those that grew from one’s collective capacities into unique expressions. They are branches on a tree, growing out of what came before. Which direction these branches grow in, and what shape they take is dependent on one’s personal experience. To use an example from human sexuality, one may give a partner a foot massage, which leads to sex. An association between sex and feet is formed. This is not something that came pre-installed in the structure of the psyche, but was an early association strongly formed. Over time, the individual may reinforce this association by having repeated experiences which result in a dopamine release. Upon witnessing this experience, one may become conscious of this association. They may note that they are sexually aroused by the stimulus. Thus, the concept will begin to climb up the abstraction ladder. The individual can use the experience of themselves to form an explicit abstract concept. They may even give it a name: foot fetish. Eventually, the individual may even have psychological, philosophical, or rational explanation for this association. Concrete, collective unconscious concepts grow into varying branches of personal concepts, which bud into semantic and conscious concepts.
This tree-like structure of the mind is not an idea unique to me. Implicitly, this is evident in Moral Foundations Theory, wherein peoples’ moral reasoning can be influenced by largely unconscious activation of the underlying foundations. For example, if you expose people to a terrible smell and ask them to make moral judgements, they will be much harsher than they would without the smell present.[xvi] Disgust creates boundaries between you and the stimulus that triggered the disgust response. Thus, when one is disgusted, they construct thicker boundaries between the perpetrator and themselves. Additionally, taking a known geometric pattern and breaking it up predicts greater condemnation of harm and impurity.[xvii] In this case, a broken pattern is either seen as being hurt and in need of care, or impure. Beyond moral reasoning, men who are hungry or poor prefer larger breasts.[xviii] They become attracted to abundance. Shake the branch, and the leaves will rattle.
For our purposes, it’s simply worth noting that our explicit semantic ideals, as rational as they seem, are rooted in primordial unconscious ones. If you understand the lineage of a persona, you can better understand what it means to the people who pursue it. If a persona is popular enough, it signifies what the culture pursues. If you know where that persona leads, you know where we are heading and what to avoid. This is largely the purpose of our wisdom traditions. Unfortunately for us, we have dismissed these traditions as superstition or failed sciences. In reality, they are poems from the unconscious, constructed over evolutionary timescales. They identify many personae and chart their course. They are maps of a labyrinth, and the dead-ends they warned us about have been forgotten alongside them. Today, deep archetypes have found new expression in digital models. What they mean, we’ll discuss later.
A woman puts on a persona, a digital mask that mediates the relationship between her physical self, and the collective psyche on the internet, buffering her real life from their eyes. The more she adjusts her persona to the fantasy of the mob, the more successful she will be at triggering their associations. In other words, the more she resonates with them by approximating their ideal. Given the increased availability of pornography, and the democratization of pornographic production via Onlyfans, we may be served by explicitly tying these dynamics to the sexual realm - though, not exclusively.
A young man may have a sexual ideal in his mind, derived from archetypes and informed by his life experience. A model may come along who, by chance and effort, resembles his ideal. He is attracted to her. Why he is attracted to her is largely unconscious to him. Her image activates the sexual complex in his mind and its associated behaviors. If one of these behaviors is masturbation, then he may masturbate. This releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter which reinforces those behaviors leading to its release. Thus, he becomes more likely to return to her image and enact the sequence of behaviors which led to the release. Given enough time, these behaviors will become ritualized.
Drawing on Jonathan Pageau, if you want to take a drink of water from a glass, there are a series of behaviors necessary for this to occur. You have to look at the glass, pick it up, hold it to your lips, and take a drink. A ritual is merely the sequence of actions necessary to bring about a state. In a more religious context, we engage in rituals to bring about a state of mind. In our example, the individual performs a ritual to bring about a physical state (orgasm) and psychological state (ecstasy). This ritual becomes associated with the model. Should many individuals pursue the same ideal, they may come across the same model – especially if she is a high-fidelity representation of the ideal. Given that people are largely similar (with obvious variation), they may arrive at the same ritual – especially if they are in communication with each other. Thus, one may say that there are common behaviors amongst her worshipers. These behaviors can be abstracted from the individuals and declared a feature of her spirit. If the sexual persona is potent enough it will act as a trigger for a distributed ritual; similar to triggering a fixed action pattern. The more the mob sees her as an idol, and circumambulate around her, the more they become a congregation, worshiping her as a magic idol which casts a spell on them (something more true phenomenologically if she activates something deeply unconscious).
The introduction of her persona to the psychological array, and its growing power, results in her environment adapting to her. The congregation adjust themselves to her image. This may escalate to the point of fetishization. Psychologically, this varies from a kink in that a fetish is required for sexual arousal. This is a reduction of any individual within the congregation to a single-minded fixation on the sexual persona. In a sense, the congregation becomes possessed by the spirit of the persona, they act out the sequence of behaviors which sustain it. For example, a congregation pays for an individual’s content, allowing it to sustain itself and expand (read: survive and perpetuate).
This is mythologically signified by castration. As I have noted elsewhere, castration is the loss of one’s will power. Like an addict organizes his life around a drug, the congregation organize their lives around an idol. This is “castration,” because it makes one impotent, in that they have sacrificed their will to the idol. Symbolically, it constellates with sacrificial animals like bulls and boars. In the story of Artemis and Actaeon, a man is turned into an animal at the sight of a nude woman, only to be torn apart. Men in heat are often looked down upon as “animals” or “pigs.” And male extramarital partners are referred to as “bulls.” This tearing apart is the disintegration – or dismemberment – of the ego. When one does not have a solid ego, reinforced by discipline, and expressed as will, then the individual becomes impulsive as it is the ego which regulates these impulses.[xix] This impulsivity, the many-mindedness of a person, is what is meant by mythic rending and tearing. Ritually enacted, this is sparagmos.[xx] Thus, those caught in the sways of the sexual persona must expect, “animal transformation, dismemberment, and death (p.81).[xxi]” Archaic themes emerge in modern times.
Despite the magnitude, and creeping glory associated with the apotheosis of the model, they are not inherently positive for the individual who wields the persona. Myriad dangers emerge with one’s godhood. We have already spoken about narcissism, and many have spoken about the dangers of the porn industry, its exploitation of, and reliance on trauma. One may reap the attention of many men with clear economic benefit, but the difference between identifying with and identifying as makes a difference.
Identifying-with is the recognition of something as being separate from oneself, while maintaining a sense of kinship. One may identify with a band, a friend, a t-shirt, or their apartment. The key feature is that one does not mistake the object for themselves; one’s self-concept and the object-concept remain separated despite their kinship. However, one may identify as an object. We identify as our bodies. If one loses a limb, then the limb becomes something one owned. The same effect may be had by bringing one’s relationship with their arm into consciousness or changing the circumstances. You may casually say, “my arm,” but you would never say, “my arm punched you.” Rather, “I punched you.” The moment you imbue your arm with will – it is you. However, this relationship can extend far beyond what us moderns would consider rational. Eric Neumann noted:
Contents of this kind [identify-as relationships] are recognized readily enough as projections when they derive from earlier epochs, from alien spheres of culture, or from other people, but it becomes increasingly difficult for us to do so the more closely they approximate to the unconscious conditions of our time, our own culture, and our own personality. The animism which endows trees with indwelling spirits, idols with divinity, holy places with wonder-working powers, or human beings with magical gifts is easily seen through; for us it is a transparent cause of ‘projection’… But when it comes to experiencing God’s intervention in world history, or the sanctity of the Fatherland symbolized by flag or king, or the devilish intentions of nations beyond the latest Iron Curtain, or even the bad character of those we dislike or the good character of those we love; when it comes to experiencing these as projection, then our psychological powers of discernment incontinently fail us… (p. 268).[xxii]
If we are capable of identifying with the world around us, even the prey we kill, then identifying as our own persona is hardly a breath away.[xxiii]
Every individual has a persona, and it is a necessary reduction of oneself. The details of your personal life, political views, and rich emotional life, insofar as they obstruct a task, must be put aside for the temporary pursuit of a concrete goal. For example, you do not share all of yourself with your coworkers, especially if the expression of your distress interferes with your coworker’s job and their ability to accomplish it. Instead, one reduces themself down to a persona. Rather, they express the narrow edge of their personality that is functional in a given social environment. However, if through the constant performance of one’s persona, reinforced by the approbation of the mob, one begins to identify as their persona, then, one’s fullness is stultified. The image overtakes the individual. What remains is narrow. If the persona is successful, the individual risks narcissism. Additionally, insofar as the persona’s features are dictated by the mob, then the mob will dictate the features of the individual fully identified with this persona. And just as the mob is castrated by the deified model, so too is the person whose body it overlays.
Castration, the loss of ego and will, runs both ways. The mob loses it in the transition to congregation, worshiping at the feet of their deity, and the individual loses it when the persona overwhelms the self, leaving nothing but the fantasy of the mob to define him. We will call this case, to cleanly contrast it with the mob’s, “possession.” Ultimately, the sexual persona of our era is vampiric, draining the life blood of many and one.
The Medium
As you may have noticed, the dynamics I have laid out are not exclusive to the internet. A group of competitive bodybuilders may idolize Arnold Schwarzenegger and alter their physical features through tough workouts and pharmacological tools to better approximate the ideal he represents. Thus, we need to take some time to discuss the unique consequences of the digital medium as it exaggerates some information while diminishing others. This, in turn, has lasting psychological and physiological effects on those most caught in a persona’s orbit.
The pursuit of a functional internet persona results in the peculiar transformation of the person herself. Unless one is cursed with a beauty that perfectly resembles that era’s fantastic ideal, then any individual hoping to embody that ideal will need to adjust their image. As previously discussed, this can be done in many ways; clothing, makeup, steroids, plastic surgery, and Instagram filters are all means by which one may contort their image to fit a mold. However, one subset of these is beyond the transformations of one’s image, easily cleaned at the end of the day or vaporized when the filter is removed but produce lasting effects on the body. The mob conforms the individual their desires via likes, retweets, subscriptions, money, and comments. This positive reinforcement subtly guides the individual towards their ideal. However, when one gets plastic surgery, it is no longer just the persona that is being molded. It is the person himself.
Reality is an ocean of information. As Albert Camus and others have noted, we are very small, and reality is very big.[xxiv] It is a titanic, swirling kaleidoscope, and we are obnoxious little theorists writing essays about the internet. Ultimately, we cannot hope to process its enormity, in part, because the act of observing the world changes its appearance. Our perceptual systems seriously constrain reality. Thus, it emphasizes some information, that which can be heard, seen, smelled, tasted, or touched, over others. Additionally, given the energy constraints put on the human machine, we also downplay information within each of these domains. This is to say that some information, relative to an equal consideration of all information, is exaggerated. Instead of equally attending to everything, we privilege some information over others, enabled by the functionality of this approach.
The same thing occurs on the internet. At a fundamental level, the internet is binary. It is ones and zeroes. Up a level, the digital world is a coding language. Unlike human language, codes have an explicit, unchanging meaning. There is no poetry in code. On a psychological level, the digital world is objective, populated by objects. Relying on the process ontologists generally, and Iain McGilchrist, objects are patterns in reality that progress slow enough, relative to our own progress, such that we can grasp them.[xxv] Take for example, a chair. It appears as if a chair is solid. It is manipulable. It may be moved here or there, taken apart and reconstructed. It may be utilized for firewood, or sat in. This makes its object-nature apparent. However, if we could watch the life of a chair sped-up in a time lapse, where every month was a second, we would quickly see that the chair flows like water. Its materials grow from the earth; a tree springs to life. Then it is cut down, transported, purchased, and carved. It is sold, sat in, and bleached by the morning sun. In time, it breaks. It begins to decompose. It may be left in a field, surrounded by the growing trees, where small vines rise up its legs, and the rain withers it away. Eventually, it will crumble back into the earth, where it will be taken up again by the soil. It is because the life of a chair moves so slowly that we mistake it for a frozen object. What defines an object is not a set of material properties (e.g., 50% carbon, 6% hydrogen, 44% oxygen, and trace amounts of other compounds), but its tempo. Some objects last for a lifetime. Others, for millennia. Should a process be slow enough, evolution will consider it a feature of the environment, and we will account for it in our biology. Even social dynamics may become objects we adapt to (an argument for Jungian archetypes).
Ideas themselves can become abstract objects, poised for conceptual manipulation. Clinical psychologist Wilma Bucci has traced the standard sequence for trauma processing, wherein patients move from distant and reluctant language (e.g., “you know”), to incredibly vivid language of the traumatic event, to the abstract reorganization of the event.[xxvi] In short, patients would undergo a meaning making process wherein they identified each element of the traumatic event, and then conceptually reorganized them as a means of arriving at a new perspective. In a McGilchristian model, one’s conception of the trauma moves from the right hemisphere to the left, spiraling up the abstraction staircase. Scholar and art critic Nick Sousanis said, “Understanding is grasping. We grab hold of an idea and enclose it within a firm grip. Now within our reach, we can manipulate and turn it over to get at all its aspects” (p. 78).[xxvii] In doing so, we can discover new hypothetical realities wherein the trauma could have been avoided. In other words, we identify where we went wrong and derive a lesson. Freud noted that this frees one from the emotional burden of the event:
The psychical process [trauma] that had originally taken place has to be repeated in as vivid a way as possible, brought to its status nascendi, and then ‘talked through.’ This makes any phenomena involving stimuli – cramps, neuralgias, hallucinations – appear once more at full intensity and then vanish forever” (p. 10). [xxviii]
In a way, we take apart our experiences in order to know them, like a child takes apart a remote control.
The internet is entirely populated by objects. A cursor, window, application, folder, and picture are all frozen digital things. Not a single object is born and dies before our eyes, they are only lost in the sea of information. Many of these abstract objects, seemingly divorced from reality, can be manipulated. They are digital tools serving our ends. However, an important difference stands between a concrete tool and an abstract one: Concrete tools can immediately hurt you. This means that if I recklessly use a table saw, I may suffer the consequences of my actions quickly and severely. I will learn a hard lesson. Consequences teach us the appropriate behavior for survival and perpetuation in the long term – particularly in the social domain. Abstract tools can be used without immediate or obvious consequence. This is a benefit insofar as it allows us to take risks without dying, but a danger insofar as it tricks us into believing that we are above consequences. Political scientist William Ophuls said this about the economies of collapsing empires:
The higher the level of economic development, the more money tends to become an abstraction rather than a counter for something concrete. Thus the economy can boom as the ecology disintegrates. This is particularly true if the society resorts to currency debasement or loose credit as a way to evade encroaching physical limits and foster an artificial prosperity, for then the economy becomes completely unhinged from concrete ecological reality. Overshoot and collapse is the inevitable result (p. 12).[xxix]
The power of abstraction is its downfall: separation from reality. If these abstract objects become ubiquitous, painting over the natural world, then we may become so accustomed to an easily manipulated, consequence-free, and therefore meaningless world that we begin to take natural processes as instruments for our pleasure. Thus, we’ll treat human beings, oscillating and extending, as means instead of ends. And Baudrillard will have the last pitiful laugh.[xxx]
Objectification in the digital realm has begun to bleed out into the physical one. Daily, the fiends of Twitter treat each other like abstractions. They argue with their own conceptions instead of a living person. In other words, they attack a man to hurt Republicanism or Democratism. Truly, they behave as if there is no man there at all. Instead, there is only an object which must be fixed or destroyed; made to do what it is “supposed to do” or discarded. What Pluckrose and Lindsay have called “reified postmodernism,” colloquially known as Wokeism, categorizes people by their group affiliation, and then seeks to annihilate these abstract categories by canceling the individual hosts.[xxxi] They attempt to do away with the abstract idea they do not like, not by arguing against it, but by destroying those who host the belief. They have reified their categories, dangerously reducing people to the stereotypes they hold in their heads. Thus, Ibram X. Kendi can seek to balance the power inequities not by seeking justice for individuals, but by minimizing myriad persons to a flat representation and attempting to balance injustice by committing injustice: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination” (p.19).[xxxii] This is not an arbitrary decision without benefit to the perpetrator. Hyperreality and its concomitant nihilism begs for a reestablishment of meaning, and hatred is a means of accomplishing this; hate of collective groups, but not individuals, predicts a sense of meaning in life mediated by feelings of determination, eagerness, and enthusiasm.[xxxiii] As it so happens, hating a group spurs one to action, and generates a sense of purpose. Ultimately, this is a practice in dehumanization.
This state is not unique to our age. Time and again throughout history ideas have usurped corporeality. Jung notes in his discussion of psychological types that,
certain groups of men for whom the accent of value lay on the idea, so that the idea represented for them a higher reality or value for life than the reality of individual things… had an ideal, and not a sensual, concept of the real (p. 40).[xxxiv]
The spirit of our age is a similar one. We have ensconced ourselves in objects, and now obliterate the sensual with our reckless objectification. It may be that our object ontology is animated by the societies we have created:
As people spent more and more time inside artificial environments, such as houses, cities and offices, their interactions with the environment were increasingly restricted to the perception and handling of such passive objects. This stands in sharp contrast with the natural environment inhabited by hunter-gatherers and early farmers, where most phenomena, such as plants, animals, forests, rivers and clouds, are intrinsically animated. Those, such as pebbles or sticks, that do behave like inert objects appear to be the expectation rather than the rule. In our present environment, on the other hand, we are surrounded by passive objects, and it are non-human agencies that have become the exception. As a result, we have great difficulty conceiving and experiencing nature as fundamentally active and relational (Heylighen, 2022, p. 9).[xxxv]
The internet, with its digital objects poised for manipulation, aided by the ubiquity of the smartphone, has taken this dynamic further than ever before in human history. What percentage of total social interaction is on the internet? How might this effect your view of the world and people? Keep in mind that practice makes permanent. Frequently, we see this object-behavior extend beyond Twitter. In recent years, we have seen nationwide campus shout-downs (e.g., Nicholas Christakis at Yale, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying at Evergreen), cancellation of Mexican American immigrants (e.g., the story of Emmanuel Cafferty), and even the raid of the Capitol Building on January 6th, 2021. Regarding January 6th, the ridiculous costumes and confused mob who meandered into the Capitol, some of which were motivated actors, betrays an air of hyperreality. Many of these individuals acted like they were in a video game, a meaningless simulation instead of living an insurrection which could have rippling effects the world over. Having practiced an inconsequential way of being while surrounded by digital distractions, they simply behaved as they always had, but in our nation’s sacred halls.
Something powerful is lost in the objectification of things: Relationships. Processes are when one thing leads to another. They are the connectedness of things, a participation in a current. And meaning is an emergent property of these connections. Take, for example, that meaning of a word. If I say “emerald.” The meaning of the word emerges as a product of its relationship to its referent. In other words, the sounds and symbols that create “emerald,” have no meaning without their connectedness to something else. Nor does the emerald have meaning without being in relationship with me, or some other process. Thus, the severing of these connections, releases meaning to the waves, and should we cut our ties to reality, history, our individual pasts, then we will find ourselves tossed about in an ocean of information.[xxxvi]
If we come to believe the lie of another person’s object-nature, then influencers, life coaches, pornstars, and gurus only exist as inherently meaningless toys, whose purpose is generated by their strictly instrumental use, and not their embeddedness in the cosmos. I fear that this mentality, which shatters the world into an infinite mirror, meaningless reflections of truth, has spread into our daily lives. Today, the bank teller or fast-food clerk is not a person. They have already been automated. Even our dating habits commodify each other. The most intimate relationships that human beings have are becoming increasingly transactional – annihilating any chance at love, which demands a wholistic understanding of the other, the exposure of oneself, and the risk that entails.[xxxvii] Objectification, rapidly spreading as a result of the internet, destroys relationships in that it draws boundaries between things, dispelling the processes inherent in nature which we ourselves exemplify.
It gets worse. It isn’t just that we have objectified everything, including people, but that we can modify these tools in service of an ideal. If an object is inherently meaningless, and a person is an object, then manipulation of that person is justified. There is nothing wrong with contorting, manipulating, lying to, or exploiting that person, unless doing so explicitly contradict your aims. Only if one’s ideal precludes the harming of other human beings, should we expect freedom from this consequence. Thus, it is unsurprising that the audience and influencer alike are willing to exploit the other for the purposes of pleasure and resources. They are two leaches intertwined, a parody of the uroboros. Only by recognizing that human beings are currents in themselves, and contained within the current of history, can we see that they are not ours to manipulate.
On the internet, any information that does not serve the purpose of a persona must be culled. Therefore, some features will be exaggerated, and others will be lost. The loss of information in the formation of representation comes in two forms: dimensional loss and disembodiment. I will begin with dimensional loss. The human being is image, but also smell, sound, texture, and taste, as well as the context in which they are placed. The internet is a disembodied eye, flickering and fixating. The only additional sense is sound, which, like sight, is flattened down. In other words, the world is multi-dimensional. The chirping of birds comes from my left. The distant talking of strangers, muffled behind an apartment wall, comes from behind. The sound of the world reveals two things: first, there is depth to reality, space to move through, a whole world out there. Second, the world is outside of our control. These sounds, sirens in the background and the barking of a dog, occur without our suggestion. The music of the cosmos sings a humbling song. However, digital sound comes from a speaker. Unless one invests in an expensive setup, it emanates from a point. It is one dimensional. Additionally, we can put on headphones. While we may enjoy surround sound which reintroduces a sense of depth, we cordon ourselves off from the world and dictate exactly what we want to hear and when. Thus, we are deceived into believing that the world is manipulable, while we opt-out of nature’s spontaneity.
The same reduction can be committed against a human being. By flattening a person to an image-object, much of their substance is carved away. The person moves from three-dimensional space, in which the contextual can be held and appreciated, to a flat and distant reflection. The subtle echo of a lover’s voice, the shifting of the light as they move around the room, the soft touch of their hair against your hand, the natural aroma of their body, and the taste of their kiss are all lost in a digital parody. The human weight is alleviated, dispersed, dissipated. The loss of substance amounts to a disembodiment, as if one’s consciousness had floated away, roots pulled from the ground and leaves snipped from the tree. As a viewer, as a participant in hyperreality, we find little use for our hands besides typing. Our eyes only need to see a thin sheet of glowing glass. Our ears narrow to a point. Taste and smell are of no use in the race for more digitally distributed dopamine. Consequently, we practice dissociation and find ourselves unable to connect to the world-surround. We are disconnected from experience, which is crowded out by representations.
All of this loss is paired with the relative exaggeration of what remains. We have discussed exaggeration generally, but the internet exacerbates this problem. With each kind of reduction, the psychological impact of that information is lost. What excitation came from a friend’s laughter is gone. The thrill of looking someone in the eyes, vaporizes. Each stimuli have their paired reaction, and if those stimuli are lost, so are their consequences. Should one hope to feel an equivalent impact in the digital world as they feel in the real one, they must turn up the volume. Thus, the loss of this information results in the exaggeration of relevant information. Quickly, representations cartoonishly exaggerate reality, inflating features and the flat surround. Stanislav Szukalski, the great Polish sculptor, said knowingly, “Art cannot be proper. Art must be exaggerated.[xxxviii]”
As some information is exaggerated, some must be suppressed. Thus, backgrounds will be generalized. A mise an scène directs our attention to what is relevant. It may be an actor or object, perhaps a rifle hanging over a mantel piece, or the sly expression of a villain. Regardless, that which is not the center of our attention is relegated to the periphery. À la Jean-Paul Sartre, that which we focus on is more valuable to us than that which we do not focus on, by definition.[xxxix] Therefore, in the combat between representations, what is devalued is flattened; the background, the periphery, is minimized. It is there, on the outskirts of our objective, that the most information is abandoned.
In the digital world, this often results in the background become monochromatic and bright. In the concrete world, a particular shade of green, for example, does not exist by itself. Whenever one sees green, there are many shades and highlights interweaved with it. It is not stable, but blowing in the wind, in and out of the cover provided. Each blade of grass is unique, and breathes as the wind rolls it over. It is also surrounded by the brown of the dirt, or the blue of the sky. It is a small part in a large view. Producer Rick Rubin notes,
If you’re picking colors based on a Pantone book, you’re limited to a certain number of choices. If you step out into nature, the palette is infinite. Each rock has such a variation of color within it, we could never find a can of paint to mimic the exact same shade. Nature transcends our tendencies to label and classify, to reduce and limit (p. 52).[xl]
In contrast, within an abstract medium, one can paint over the cosmos with a single hue. We can abstract out a general green and place it on billboards or use it in traffic lights. This abstract color has the benefit of being clear, it is by and large, indisputably green, leading to agreement about its meaning – a necessity for traffic intersections. In our images, the abstractness of color or the reduction of the depth of field, obscures the background, reducing the amount of information we will need to process. In short, we remove the nuance of the periphery. This, again, reinforces the notion that the world lacks the disputable. The uncertainty of reality, wherein much of interest and meaning will spontaneously capture our attention, has been glossed over by abstract colors. There is nothing outside of our objective. There is no intrusion by the divine. The neon addition to the simplification of colors emerges in order to catch one’s attention. Think of the bright orange construction vests, or the pink lights from a sleazy bar. Each utilize bright shades to quickly catch your attention. Whether our backgrounds will fold into bright monochromatic panels, or blur their details is secondary so long as we recognize that the purpose of this process is to minimize the cognitive load attributable to the information the background provides, while continuing to perpetuate down the memetic chain. In doing so, simplified objects are exaggerated.
If disembodiment is the loss of information directly pertaining to what Freud called the “sexual object,” then distension is its counterbalance.[xli] The abstraction process is the compounding of common features of idiosyncratic objects. For example, if one wishes to represent a beautiful woman, one may look at one hundred different beautiful women, all with their own forms of beauty, find the commonalities in their allure and amalgamate them into a single image, embodied by the model. The commonalities are compounded while the idiosyncrasies are suppressed. Which features are exaggerated is dependent on the ideal they serve. This creation is an imago dei. Paglia says of the stone Venus of Willendorf,
In it we see all strange laws of the primitive earth-cult. Woman is idol and object, goddess and prisoner. She is buried in the bulging mass of her own fecund body… Her fat is a symbol of abundance in an age of famine. She is the too-muchness of nature, which man longs to direct to his salvation (p. 54-55)[xlii].
The Venus becomes a totem, an embodied presentation of the ideal-complex latent in oneself. Today’s influencers play the same iconic role. She is an idol, an exaggeration of features that gives rise to equally exaggerated appetites. She is an impossible beauty, a totem that, like Circe or Artemis, magically turns men into animals. It is sex that reminds us of our animal nature, of behavior before words, meaning before language. Thus, we would expect many individuals who pursue their ideals via their personae to become distorted forms of themselves. Take one persona as a clear example: The bimbo. Her lips, breasts, hips, and any feature relevant to the sexual game are inflated to resemble a doll, a toy, a sex-object more than a breathing person.
This distension is impacted by the competition between personae and their hosts. Competition increases the rate of memetic reproduction and exacerbates the proliferation of personae. Simply, it results in very abstract memes, and lots of them. This rapid invasion of personae has dangerous consequences.
As the number of representations begin to crowd out referents, as our experiences become of ideas instead of nature, we will find ourselves more likely to imitate representations of people rather than people. This is a matter of probability. The more time we spend on the internet, the more representations we encounter. The more representations we encounter, relative to flesh and blood human beings, the greater portion of all persons we see are abstract. Then, we become more likely to imitate representations over their concrete counterparts. Thus, our models for human behavior are derived from the digital world. Ask yourself, is Twitter where we should learn to converse?
While there may be psychological reasons that we would not imitate digital images, this has already begun. Recently, I noticed an outbreak of videos across social media where individuals exaggerated their expressions to imitate animations. In other words, people were mimicking Disney characters’ overblown behavior. These abnormal emotions of the character compared to the behavior of a human being is itself the result of abstraction. Individuals mimicking the overstated behavior of animated characters is like making a copy of a copy. Instead of imitating the emotions of another person, we have begun to imitate the obviously unreal. We are impersonating homunculi.
If this rapid reproduction continues, we will become blind to others and ourselves. First, let me discuss others. Insofar as our expressions evolved to signal important information to one another, and our habituation to exaggerated expressions decreases the likelihood that we will find subtle emotions salient, then our sensitivity to others will be blunted. In other words, we will become accustomed to the exaggerated expressions of abstractions and be unable to detect the subtle beauties of another’s face. The portal to their soul will be closed.
Second, we will become blind to ourselves. Speculative as it is, I worry that as we inorganically act out emotions, we will obscure our feelings to ourselves. Should we incessantly practice our personae, then we will find ourselves unpracticed in controlling those unconscious elements of our psyche that do not break through the constrained surface of our personality. We will be sophisticated on the surface, and infantile beneath. Within this, we see that the connections necessary to establish dominion over our unconscious will entropy. And we may come to identify as our performance while being divorced from the totality of ourselves. We will always be on stage, always pretending, always performing emotions instead of feeling them. Instead of spending our lives seeking greater authenticity, discovering ourselves, we will master anxious presentation. We will master the lie. And as this performative lie becomes more and more pervasive, it will become expected. When everyone is acting, the real ones are madmen.
This rapidity of reproduction is aided by openness. The internet is so spectacularly open that any new innovation can be quickly disseminated. We don’t just imitate upwards, but sidewards as well. In a recent interview with Lex Fridman, Aella, a sex worker and researcher, noted that online sex work facilitates this exaggeration.[xliii] The reason for this is that when one individual adopts a new tool or feature which better approximates an ideal then other individuals can quickly learn from them. They can imitate this pattern, either by admiration or exploitation. As the pattern spreads, more and more members of the audience witness it. If they witness it enough, they will habituate to it, and it will cease to be novel, and novelty is a driving factor in human sexuality, evidenced by the Coolidge Effect. Thus, the once innovative behavior becomes commonplace; the once great persona is lowered when the floor is raised. In effect, the innovation is taken back up into the expectations of the mob, and individuals are forced to pursue new means of approximating their ideals again. While this is a driving force in innovation from hammers to automobiles to fashionable jeans, now, we sell ourselves.
The mob will respond to the conflagration of personae with boredom. Meaning, that the mob will have near infinite access to increasingly narrow and intense idols. Frighteningly quickly, even the most extreme of behaviors become cliché, boring, banal. And thus, the individual will cease to gain the attention she garnered from her previous sacrifice. The hungry congregation demands more. Herein lies an inflection point – if the individual chooses to ignore the mob, or properly subordinate their opinion, then she may find herself drawn ever more towards a higher and higher ideal, and her past self will be assimilated into her conception of who she could be. In effect, this form of idealization is the self-transcendence of the individual, an increasing expansion of oneself and the embodiment of something more than one once was; it will be positive – assuming the ideal isn’t thanatotic. However, should the individual begin chasing the high of positive reinforcement, confusing the approval of the mob with the ideal itself, then it will be the mob that dictates her being. As the rate of adaptation increases, the individual finds herself contorted into an objet d’art. The mob becomes a castrated congregation, while the individual becomes an idolic marionette.
Predictably, the online idol loses her individuality in the apotheosis. This is because the abstraction is inherently impersonal; rather, transpersonal in that he or she becomes a representation of those features most commonly thought relevant to the aim by many persons. Like the Venus of Willendorf, she becomes all breasts and pregnant belly. She is an image of worship that triggers unconsciously, ‘magically,’ a state of being, while simultaneously a canvas to be projected on. She is deindividualized enough to become a canvas of personal fantasy projection. Should too much of her true self break through the façade, some of which will inevitably deviate from the ideal she serves, then she will slowly fail. Thus, her own personhood must be sacrificed on the altar of the image she will become, lest she fail to become a resident in the fantastical minds of her followers. Seeing through one’s imagination to the individual influencer is disillusionment, but her power depends on the illusion. Her success is dependent on her reduction to totem, both object and idol, and while she enjoys the luxuries of her dark divinity, it is on her own grave that they are formed. It is only in rigid compartmentalization, rationalization, and self-deceit that the individual may suspend the consuming maw of her persona.
The Death of Pygmalion & Galatea
In ancient Greece, on the island of Cyprus, the artist Pygmalion and the muse Galatea were married. They had been building a relationship since they were children. Every flickering glance, sharp giggle, or embarrassed look away was a small act of connection. Over the course of years, their childhood play evolved into adult flirtation. They were in love. The soft tempo roar of the ocean waves, the smell of salt in the air, and distant laughter, frequently warmed them as they laid on the shore together. The soft intimacy of their connections, the way Pygmalion would grab Galatea’s hand and trace the valleys between her fingers, or how Galatea softly pressed the curve of her lover’s ear, were the small moments, unseen by anyone but them, that made their relationship remarkable. They were alone together. In a way, they owned the each other’s secrets.
This love endeared Aphrodite to them. As protector-goddess of Cyprus, she relished her shores, west winds, and island landscapes being used to worship her. She continued to bless them, and in short time, they were married. A lifetime of commitment to one another had been declared in their hearts long before a public ceremony had been made. It was a description before it was a declaration. Yet, the gesture was welcomed by the goddess, honoring her as it did.
Following their marriage, they discussed having a child. However, Pygmalion flinched. Food came at a cost, and a child needs food. He began selling his many sculptures and artworks. While Pygmalion had been an artist for years, he sold his works only when absolutely necessary. Their subtle meaning and relatedness to his life demanded an appreciation that was hard to find in a buyer. He had been granted all that he had needed from Aphrodite, and the provisions from his art always lasted long enough for the next perceptive purchaser to arrive. Occasionally, he had time to create new works for himself and for his love, which he hung on the walls of his studio, each one memorializing intimacy. When he, with a warming chest, agreed to become a father, he sold many of these paintings, and news began to spread of Pygmalion’s talent. The world noticed the brilliant depictions of simple joy evident in his touch.
Initially, Galatea was unnerved by Pygmalion’s sudden success. A rock began to form in her chest, heavy and cold, that warned her about the dangers of high attention. She listened for a time. And when she saw how much pleasure her husband gained from his art, even his fixation, she felt conflicted about confronting him. He was in love with his projects, and she was happy he had this love, despite her loneliness.
For his part, Pygmalion saw how his wife was concerned, how their time together had begun to wane as each new commission was placed on his desk. He began to miss her, and yet, was proud that he could provide for her the luxuries of his success. With every painting completed, with each sculpture polished, an ambition rang between his ears. He had become the best sculptor in Cyprus, perhaps Greece. But more than that, he began to see incredible beauty in his artworks, unlike he had ever seen in any sunset, open plain, or pristine face. There was something else in the marble, an angel, a spirit more perfect than anything concrete.
Aphrodite damned them. The love she had given Pygmalion and Galatea was something few human beings ever found. In a world in constant war, where Ares played with mortals like toys, where trickster gods and chthonic daemons haunted starving persons, who was this couple to take their love for granted? Who were they to play so recklessly with a gift so divine? The goddess of love was more serious than any other god, and she cursed them proudly.
Pygmalion became obsessed. A single block of marble, gifted from an anonymous patron, had been given to the young man with the understanding that he would carve it into the most beautiful woman he could possibly imagine. So long as he continued his work, the patron would shower him and his wife with pleasures. Every snap of the chisel, every cracked corner leading closer to the angel in the stone, sent a pulse of enjoyment through every nerve in Pygmalion’s body. And every new gift that arrived at the door lit the eyes of Galatea. She became ensconced in beautiful trinkets, robes and pearls and gold. While her pleasure from these exploded with every encounter, her hunger grew larger. She feasted on her wealth and persuaded her husband to continue working.
Mountains of gold surrounded them, obscuring one from the other, and neither could see the metamorphosis that was occurring. Whenever Pygmalion trimmed a piece of marble from the block, that same weight became stone in Galatea. As crumbles fell, her sides began to seize. Her hair became stiff, and her lips stopped turning. Yet, the riches, diamonds more beautiful than any man, still spoke to her. Whenever she dawned her robe, or clutched an amethyst, Pygmalion shifted. His hair became course, and his teeth grew into tusks. He began snorting and drooling, whining like the boar he was becoming. In her mind, the husband she once loved had become a stranger, a detestable animal whose only service was what satiation he could provide. He was the meal she feasted on, feeding her riches and resentment.
The pig, the boar-man who was once Pygmalion, lost all memory of his wife and could only see the statue he had carved. And when a whole woman had emerged from the stone, in his animal rampage, burning and screeching, he destroyed it with his tusks. His concupiscent fixation on the art could never cease, and his pleasure drove him to animal madness. Therein, he ground the marble to dust. He slobbered and snorted over the rubble of an artwork scattered in the dark. In the other room, where blinding light shone, completely divorced from the screeching animal by the lifeless riches they had conspired to obtain, was the cheap statue of a marble woman, frozen baby in her womb.
Conclusion
Humanity has created a technology which facilitates an ancient and powerful process. From our tribal beginnings to the present moment, we have elevated individuals who approximate our ideals. Romulus approximated the values of Rome, Socrates and Jesus formed the Occident. As the lives of those exemplary individuals faded into historical memory, we quickly filled the gaps with the fantasies associated with such figures, in effect, mythologizing them. Thus, the Capitol building in Washington D.C. has The Apotheosis of Washington painted on the rotunda.[xliv] “Mythologize” is not a pejorative. It is necessary for us to fill the vacuum of our knowledge with our imagination. The reason being, those men of the past, are in the past. The lives that they lived, and standards they held, are long outdated. Should their image be too concrete, too tied the circumstances of their age, then their image would evoke nothing like resemblance in our minds, as their age only faintly resembles our own. However, in spirit, these heroes hold the power of our imagination, itself informed by the present and our hopes for the future. Thus, the hero becomes a representative and canvas for your dreams. The exemplary figures of our past live to update our fantastic conceptions of what we can become; they are personified aspirations, leading us down the infinite horizon of history. The fact that these figures are part historical and part fantasy only shows the staggering impact they have had on our collective psychology, culture, and history. Today we are overzealous in our historical criticism of our heroes, forgetting that these are the giants whose shoulders we stand on – without them, we would not stand so tall. This does not mean that critiques of their character are unwarranted, only that it risks missing the point. Our historical heroes, often flawed when they lived, are valuable in what they represent: a north star.
This process is similar to the topic of this essay. One may ask, if the same process is occurring on the internet, then why critique it on the internet and praise in reality? My worry is not about mythologizing per se, it is a reasonable impulse designed to draw us forward. My concern is with the ubiquity of abstraction, such that our various heroes, ideals personified, have become cheap imitations of the real thing. Just as the internet replaces fellowship with social media, or romance with commodified sexual encounters, it takes heroics and bends its light around a black hole.
The digital medium has uniquely dissipated the body of mythics, it has raised heroism off the ground and reduced it to hot air. In other words, the internet has converted the process by which one ascends the cultural and historical mountain, into an imaginary replica, a childish representation of wish fulfillment. George Washington, mythologized though he may be, remains far more concrete than many of the warped performers on the internet. Washington led a revolution and ceded the seat of power. When he did so, King George III said of his resignation, “if he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.” When he had the opportunity to seize a nation, its wealth and glory, he let it go – signaling his character and the reason he was exemplified.
Personae, each specialized to a niche and stripped from their natural context, provide only what the user wants to see, when the user goes through the trouble of seeing them. Thus, only if the individual seeks out someone who has high character, will they find it, and seeking is no guarantee of success. Camille Paglia said, “ Absolute power is a door into dreaming” (p. 136). By this she means that power can be measured by the degree to which one can manipulate the boundaries around them. How much do these boundaries apply? When enough boundaries are removed between one’s desires, conscious or not, and reality, then saying the word is the only obstacle. The internet manages to remove much of these boundaries, albeit in digital space. Nearly anything a woman or man could want is available to them: entertainment, sex, gore, horror, and an imitation of connection. In effect, the internet gives us what we want, not what we need. And ultimately, only a semblance of what we want.
Thus, the only means of avoiding the consequences of dissolving external boundaries, is by setting internal ones. In a word, discipline (bordering on ascesis). Insofar as external boundaries reinforce, even mandate, our internal boundaries, their removal would predictably result in the dissolution of our justifications for acknowledging such obstacles. In those moments, when one can act out their fantasy, they learn if they were a good person authentically or because they had been unable to get away with what they truly wanted. I hope that very few people are ever placed in such a position.
The only remaining alternative is an unreal one: Sainthood. Should both external and internal boundaries be removed, then only pristine fantasies of the highest moral order, existing at all times, without the reprieve of darkness, can result in an outcome approximating good. Only one with constant dreams of heaven can blissfully walk with power. This is extremely unlikely, if not impossible. Us, being merely human, do not need an absolute to be corrupted; incremental power corrupts exponentially. And the internet provides a form of power by way of abstraction. Thus, unless we desire to find an exemplar of character, wisdom, and prudence, more than those dark dreams with chthonic force, we will fail encounter such a model. The rest find their vices reinforced by sirens.
The rapid reproduction of personae has made locating models of character all the more difficult, such that any individual who sincerely aspires to be something higher must sift through a desert of unreality. In an era of press secretaries, where each individual has curated their persona, even one worthy of admiration may be cloaked in plastic. This is especially concerning when over half of 13 to 38-year-olds would become an influencer given the chance.[xlv] What are the consequences of imitating a fraud? If one conflates their ideal with the persona who represents it, and if that persona falters, leading to the disillusionment of the individual, then one may abandon their ideal alongside their model; never meet your heroes.
The speed at which one can ascend as an exemplified persona is greater than the slow march of time with its constant testing, teasing, and judgement. Time crushes and reveals. 99.9% of all species have gone extinct; the same is true for ideas. Thus, any persona that has survived has done so because it fits our psychological environment. Given enough time, it may survive because it better fits us to our physical environment. None of the digital persona that are impacting our society have led their fellows through civil rights movements, the labyrinth of international politics, the tragedies of war, nor the centuries of reconciliation that follow. None have lived long enough to be deserving of so many eyes by historical standards. Many have not sufficiently demonstrated their abilities in concrete reality to be deserving of a level of acclaim once reserved for titans of history.
By removing our heroes from concrete reality, we decontextualize them in a way unprecedented in human history. In the past, our exemplary figures were exalted by a community who had a concrete relationship with them. The community’s relationship with that individual allowed them to gauge the degree to which the individual was a sincere exemplar of their ideals and worthy of admiration, or a psychopathic mimic exploiting their initial attraction for personal gain. While a man may be able to fool you once, his continued mistreatment under a variety of conditions and times reveals the malice in his heart. Thus, we can appreciate Giorgio Vasari’s Allegory of Justice, wherein Time presents Justice with Truth.[xlvi] Online, a man may be a consummate mimic on video, and an exploitative nightmare in his behind-the-scenes practices. Our inability to witness his varying selves through the keyhole screen of our computers is a disservice. Every word delivered by an anonymous psychopath is considered equal to that of an anonymous friend. How many lunatics are masquerading as clerics, and how many more could we have identified if only we spent an evening with them? Inversely, how many friends might we find if we break through the representations we project onto them?
Additionally, our ancestors could take one’s faults with their virtues. While a man may exceed all others in one domain, and be admired for it, his shortcomings in myriad other domains were also evident. The constant failures in one’s personal life, and deep moral struggles, allows for their neighbors to take their successes with the salt of their life. Today, any individual who hopes to compare herself to another in a bought of melancholy, has at her fingertips a master in every domain, without access to their faults. Only perfect personae are available for her to understand herself against. Thus, in every domain she will see herself as less than. On every path, she is behind. And all too often, those performers who admit their faults do so in a way that flatters their image. However, in nature and community, admirers, as enamored as they may be, are gifted with the faults of their heroes. The mature admirer is presented the opportunity to grown in grace, forgiveness, and understanding. By living with someone, by coming to know them, to become familiar with them, we track the whole of their personality, and then exemplify them with all things considered, blights, bandages, and bravery. We are losing our ability to humanize others and find the heroes amongst our uncommon neighbors.
How might one determine if the character they are attracted to is good or bad for them? What we intend is what we idealize. Those individuals whose dreams align naturally with the desires of the mob, will be more likely to succeed in that psychological terrain; they do not pay the enforcement costs necessary to contort oneself into something they do not believe in. Thus, an individual who truly believes in his or her ideal, whose intent is to converge on it, is more likely to succeed and creatively innovate. Therefore, we can infer the intent of those most successful individuals, as unconscious as it may be, by what their persona portrays. Some will represent self-improvement, spirituality, or even death. With the obscuration of intent by the decontextualizing of our relationships with other individuals, inferring their intent cannot be done by repeatedly interacting with them over expanses of time and varying contexts. Instead, we see objet d’art. The reading of this art is done by identifying the exaggerated features, and inferring the ideal they are relevant to; it is a process of triangulation. If one has a psychoanalytic or artistic bend, they may be well prepared to read these images. If not, “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits” (NKJV, Matthew 7:15-16). And because you are a participant in the reading of these art pieces, certain features will become salient to you, reflecting the nature of your own mind. If you have the courage, you can acknowledge what these are and infer your own intent from them.
Too often, the internet makes a mockery of human relationships. The medium flattens heroes into idols. It reduces community into a mob by fracturing us into hyper-specialized niches that give back to us our own thoughts, and by organizing us into disparate solipsistic religions with no means of connection except to the exaggerated deity in our heads and on our screens. It takes the individual as they ascend, and whittles away at their core until a husk remains. As it stands now, the influencers’ ascent is a parody of apotheosis.
[i] The philosopher Chantal Delsol has lucidly depicted this in her fascinating Icarus Fallen.
[ii] See The Coddling of the American Mind, or the work of Louise Perry.
[iii] Q: Into the storm. (2021). HBO documentary.
[iv] Paglia, C. (1991). Sexual personae: Art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Vintage Books.
[v] Willerslev, R. (2004). Not animal, not not-animal: Hunting, imitation and empathic knowledge among the Siberian Yukaghirs. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 10(3), 629-652.
[vi] Dawkins, R. (2016). The selfish gene: 40th anniversary edition. (Original work published 1976). Oxford Landmark Science.
[vii] Heylighen, F., & Chielens, K. (2008). Evolution of culture, memetics. Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science, ed. B. Meyers (Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Brussels: Springer)
[viii] Readers are welcomed to consider the “Liver King.” Brian Johnson is a Youtuber and supplement salesman. For years he touted an “ancestral diet” as a means of obtaining the peak masculine physique. In 2022, a scandal broke. The Liver King was using steroids. This does not mean the Mr. Johnson was uninterested in fitness, only that fitness was subordinate to something else. I suggest that the disappointment his followers may have felt was the result of reality misaligning with their representation of him. Insofar as they believed he approximated the ideal they projected onto him, and that ideal did not cluster with steroid use, then we would expect them to feel disoriented (a loss of him as a guiding light towards their ideal) and disillusioned (the breaking of their projection by the emergent reality).
[ix] McNamara has expanded further on nature of “i-memes” and “e-memes,” if you’re so inclined:
McNamara, A. (2011). Can we measure memes? Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience, 3(1), DOI: 10.3389/fnevo.2011.00001
[x] If you are interested in this process, I recommend you read Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning, a sophisticated update of Jungian thought. Peterson, J. B. (1999). Maps of meaning: The architecture of belief. Routledge.
[xi] Neumann, E. (2014). The origins and history of consciousness (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). First Princeton Classics. (Original work published 1949).
[xii] I borrow the term “eternal” from Anthony T. Kronman’s After Disbelief, and “aspirational” from Chantal Delsol’s Icarus Fallen. If you are interested in the importance of unreachable goals, for oneself and society, I recommend these books.
[xiii] It is worth noting that heroes and villains do not reproduce at equal rates. If they did, human progress would remain at a standstill – at best. This is, in part, because to become a true villain one must sever much of their humanity. The inputs from their inhibiting parts must be dissociated. This likely requires a staggeringly high degree of trauma, mixed with a genetic predilection. Simon Baron-Cohen touches on this in The Science of Evil (2011).
[xiv] Zausner, T. (1998). When walls become doorways: Creativity, chaos theory, and physical illness. Creativity Research Journal, 11(1), 21-28.
[xv] In these cases, clinicians note the interplay between pandemic related stress and social media. I hypothesize that the stress renders these girls vulnerable, a tic is a meme spread across social media which represents a form of injury or need to be cared for, the girl adopts it and impulsively acts it out to signal her distress.
Heyman, I., et al. COVID-19 related increase in childhood tics and tic-like attacks. (2021). Archives of Disease in Childhood, 106:420-421.b
[xvi] Schnall, S., Haidt, J., Clore, G. L., & Jordan, A. H. (2008). Disgust as embodied moral judgement. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(8), 1096-1109.
[xvii] Gollwitzer, A., Martel, C., Bargh, J. A., & Chang, S. W. C. (2020). Aversion towards simple broken patterns predicts moral judgement. Personality and Individual Differences, 160(1). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.109810
[xviii] Swami, V., & Tovée, M. J. (2013). Resource security impacts men’s female breast size preferences. PloS One, 8(3). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0057623
[xix] I say “reinforced by discipline” because discipline sets boundaries, and “expressed as will” because will is the conscious direction of energy.
[xx] The maenads, female worshipers of Dionysus, would work themselves into a frenzy before tearing animals, and people, apart with their bare hands. Then, they would consume the flesh. See Paglia (1991).
[xxi] Neumann, E. (2014). The origins and history of consciousness (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). First Princeton Classics. (Original work published 1949).
[xxii] Neumann, E. (2014).
[xxiii] The Yukaghir in Siberia will imitate their prey to the point of identification. Anthropologist Rane Willerslev has documented this fascinating phenomenon here: Willerslev, R. (2004). Not animal, not not-animal: Hunting, imitation and empathetic knowledge among the Siberian Yukaghirs. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 10(3), 629-652.
[xxiv] Camus, A. (1955). The myth of Sisyphus. Vintage Books.
[xxv] Francis Heylighen and Jason A. Josephson-Storm, from a biological or social perspective, respectively, have discussed process ontology and informed my thinking. McGilchrist, for his part, beautifully details how the left hemisphere of the brain grasps things – including abstract concepts. It deals in certainties and stabilities. Ultimately, an object is something that is stable enough for use to manipulate, including concepts.
[xxvi] Bucci, W., Maskit, B., & Murphy, S. (2016). Connecting emotions and words: The referential process. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. 15(3). DOI: 10.1007/s11097-015-9417-z
[xxvii] Sousanis, N. (2015) Unflattening. Harvard University Press. I must apologize to Dr. Sousanis, as his book contains images as a means of expanding our perspective. The irony of quoting him without accompanying images is not lost on me.
[xxviii] Freud, S., & Breuer, J. (2004). Studies in Hysteria (N. Luckhurst, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Original work published 1893).
[xxix] Ophuls, W. (2012) Immoderate greatness: Why civilizations fail. CreateSpace.
[xxx] In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard details out a process whereby images begin to overtake reality. This is the “precession of simulacra.” In the end, all of reality is overlayed and contorted by our images, making it impossible to see reality through the omnipresent web of curated lies. In fact, natural reality is obliterated by their contact with the simulacra, like an archeologist forever changes the grave he robs.
[xxxi] Pluckrose, H., & Lindsay, J. (2020). Cynical Theories: How activist scholarship made everything about race, gender, and identity. Pitchstone Publishing.
[xxxii] Kendi, I. X. (2019). How to be an antiracist. Random House Publishing Group.
[xxxiii] Elanakouri, A., Hubley, C., & McGregor, I. (2022). Hate and meaning in life: How collective, but not personal, hate quells threat and spurs meaning in life. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104227
[xxxiv] Jung, C. G. (1923). Psychological Types. Princeton University Press.
[xxxv] Heylighen, F. (2022). Relational agency: A new ontology for co-evolving systems. Manuscript submitted for publication. In P. Corning (Ed.), Evolution ‘on purpose’: Teleonomy in living systems (Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology). MIT Press.
[xxxvi] Psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl said in Psychotherapy and Existentialism, “Ever more frequently psychoanalysts report that they are confronted with a new type of neurosis that is characterized mainly by loss of interest and by lack of initiative. They complain that in such cases conventional psychoanalysis is not effective… the psychiatrist is consulted by patients who doubt that life has any meaning. This condition I have called ‘existential vacuum’” (p. 33). It is shocking to hear that this was written in 1967. Our collision with meaninglessness has been a long time coming.
[xxxvii] The philosopher Alain Badiou discussed how we have constrained love nearly out of existence in In Praise of Love (2009). For Badiou, love is a boundary transcending force. There is an inherent risk to boundary violation. The commodification of love, via dating websites and applications, minimizes this risk (or pretends to), precluding the transcending of boundaries. Thus, our encounters are dulled, and love is precluded. Alternatively, one begins to deny love as a reality altogether. In short, through our technology we destroy or deny love.
[xxxviii] Dobrowolski, I. (Director). (2018). Struggle: The life and lost art of Szukalski [Film]. Netflix.
[xxxix] Sartre, J. (2007). Existentialism is a humanism. (A. Cohen-Solal) Yale University. (Original work published 1947).
[xl] Rubin, R. (2023). The creative act: A way of being. Penguin Press.
[xli] Freud, S. (2021). Three essays on the theory of sexuality (A. A. Brill, Trans.). (n.p.). (Original work published 1920).
[xlii] Paglia, C. (1991). Sexual personae: Art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Vintage Books.
[xliii] Lex Fridman. (2023, February 10). Aella: Sex work, OnlyFans, porn, escorting, dating and human sexuality [Video]. Youtube.
[xliv] Constantino Brumidi. (1865). The Apotheosis of Washington. [fresco]. Washington D.C., United States of America.
[xlv] Morning Consult (2020). The influencer report: Engaging gen z and millennials. https://morningconsult.com/influencer-report-engaging-gen-z-and-millennials/
[xlvi] Giorgio Vasari. (1543). Allegory of Justice. [panel painting]. Napoli, Italy.