Deactivating my Instagram (& other useless rebellions against the simulation)
How can we be so sure we’re not in a fake world?
A couple of weekends ago, as another wintry rainstorm passed over southern California, my partner and I decided to settle in and watch “The Truman Show,” the 1998 drama starring young Jim Carrey and Laura Linney. Neither of us had seen the movie before, and I hadn’t seen it because I had… somehow come to believe it was an old variety show, like “The Carol Burnett Show” (don’t ask me how). Some things can never be explained, like why I thought water towers on the side of the highway contained that town’s supply of milk.
Anyway, spoilers incoming. For almost two hours, we agonized along with Carrey’s character, Truman Burbank, as it became apparent to all of us that he had grown up inside of a massive, realistic television set. Without his knowledge, Truman’s life was full of actors, including his wife (played by Linney), and broadcast live to millions of viewers around the world. A horrifying concept! It takes a shared, heavy-eyelid gaze with a beautiful woman — Sylvia, an extra — on his “college campus” to eventually lead him to the truth: his whole life has been a setup.
Truman starts piecing things together. The same three people circle his block every few minutes. The building downtown is actually a green room for the actors that populate his quaint beachside town. His father, who supposedly drowned in a boating accident when Truman was a child, is actually alive! And so Truman slowly comes undone, searching for a way out and being blocked at every turn by the strategically deployed actors and crew, and a villainous director who’s spent 20-plus years exploiting him for ratings. Until, one day, Truman escapes.
After enduring the emotional upheaval of “The Truman Show,” we needed a palate cleanser. Something funny, or at least unserious. So we decided to finally watch “Don’t Worry Darling,” the scandalous and mediocre sophomore effort from director Olivia Wilde. If you’ve wiped this movie from your psyche, let me remind you: it features Harry Styles not-trying to sound American, and stars Florence Pugh as Alice, a well-coiffed housewife who unravels as she tries to figure out what the hell she’s doing there. (Florence, let me rub your shoulders because you carried this movie.)
Quality aside, it was a mental doozy to watch it after “The Truman Show.” At times, I felt the universes bleeding together, or my own grip on reality becoming looser. It got me thinking seriously about the concept of simulations, and how likely I would be to actually identify and break free from one, as Truman did and Alice maybe did.
And further, if we’ve already colonized (or been colonized by) an alternate online reality, what agency do we have to find the exit route?
In both movies, the trigger that caused the façade to crumble was pain. In “Truman,” his love interest breathlessly tries to tell him that his life is fabricated and sold for profit. She watches the broadcast through the years as Truman languishes in his fake paradise, longing for a lost love, for a more expansive life, a trip to Fiji. In “Darling,” it’s the traumatic suicide of Alice’s neighbor that sends Pugh’s character into a frenzy to find the truth, and that brings on the hallucinations that inform her search.
I think the best fiction grounds us in what’s real. On a walk the other day after watching the two films, I entertained a trippy question: what convinces me that the world I inhabit is truly the world, and not some painted-sky depiction of a life? The clouds looked suspiciously feathery against an especially-blue sky that day. I thought: How can I be sure I’m not a Truman or an Alice?
The answer I arrived at was friction. It’s the tension in my world. The ugly stuff makes me believe this is real. Because who would put horrors in a handcrafted, escapist universe? As far as I know, there’s nobody dying under a highway overpass in the metaverse. These are uniquely human horrors that would cause any simulation to fall apart, I thought.
But that’s so bleak, to think someone else’s pain or death is necessary for the rest of us to know we’re free. Because it’s not the anguish, after all. It was Alice’s empathy in response to her neighbor’s pain that had the force to tear the fabric of the simulation — to expose the exit route. It was a genuine gaze from a concerned extra, and Truman chasing that moment of connection, that led him out (through a literal door, in the case of his simulation).
We break out by being curious, and taking interest in the struggles of our fellow humans, cyborgs and actors. And, paradoxically, only by breaking out can we achieve the kind of deep connection to others that our future requires.
I consider it in the context of our current “simulation” — contained and algorithmically consistent universes of content, spoon-fed awareness, platforms full of increasingly uniform ideas and concepts smooth enough for the masses to swallow. If much of what we think and do is now decided for us and is served up at the perfect time in a seamlessly monetized way, then resistance is what frees us. Friction is our agency, and our power. Stepping away, changing the rules, separating our minds from the online Mind, making sure we have real-world, untailored inputs — that’s how we stay human, firmly planted on the ground.
That is so much harder than it seems. It’s everywhere. Even the idea that we live in a simulation is the product of the simulation: a punchy phrase adopted and shared by the demoralized and very online and convinced that “the simulation is glitching.” It’s that very sameness that troubles me about our residence in an online world.
Even genuine attempts at immersion in the here-and-now so often turn into what sociologist Thomas de Zengotita calls “mediated” life. The writer Alan Noble dives into the same idea in his book, “Disruptive Witness,” arguing that it’s more difficult than ever to be mindful, and to avoid mediation:
“... Our experience of nature is filtered through the Instagram pictures we take and our awareness of how our friends will experience those pictures, and how they will think about us in light of those pictures.”
As a person whose love language is sharing and suggesting, I fall prey to this. The branches of a fruit tree on my block quickly go from a tangible delight to an object in a snapshot that can be cropped and saturated with color and posted to my relatively small band of followers. It happens before I realize what’s happening.
If I can’t even connect with my immediate surroundings beyond surface level, how can I possibly foster the kind of attention and empathy required to lead an authentic life, one that survives and thrives outside of a biased simulation? Individual action isn’t sufficient. If the shops I frequent stock their shelves and racks with only algorithm-approved objects, if the tune I catch while walking down the street is only playing because it’s trending on TikTok, if the dish I savor with so much enthusiasm has been shaped by digital forces, I am as stuck as Truman.
Every person in history was molded by their environments, communities, cultures, years of birth and death. But the scale of our shared culture feels frustratingly enormous — like a pretend ocean I could set sail on and never reach the other side of — and at a time in history when it feels so urgent to escape. The work of connection feels more important than ever.
As Haley Nahman smartly observed in her newsletter, “Maybe Baby,” there is a growing awareness of how technology and globalization “has us all barreling towards a single unified personality.” This isn’t to vilify the Internet. It’s not Dec. 31, 1999. Plus, as my silver-linings-oriented partner noted, modern technology helps us reach the exact information we’re seeking more quickly. At their best, online universes can also offer the kinds of community and protection that people from marginalized groups might not have in the real world (like in this metaverse pole dancing club my friend Maddie Bender wrote about). Pretend worlds can be a shelter, albeit temporary, from the harshness of everyday life.
“What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?”
— Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing
But how much more powerful might these communities be if they shared real connections in the real world, instead of on a platform whose existence relies on tech overlords’ benevolence and bottom line? How could our world be more safe and sustainable than the simulation, and a haven for irreplaceable, person-to-person understanding?
In many ways, what Carrey and Pugh’s characters had was a safer, more pleasant, and more controlled environment than they’d be afforded in real life. Truman never got physically hurt, despite running in traffic and driving backwards and doing other shenanigans. As a simulation housewife, Alice was shielded from her real life, where she had a terrible relationship and an unglamorous, stressful career as a doctor. But Truman and Alice both lacked choice, and they therefore lacked dignity.
The most informed of us can and have learned to manipulate facets of our simulation. Of course, not all of us have such agency, and we definitely have not always had it (why was I on Facebook as a middle schooler?). But now, it’s commonly understood that by engaging with certain themes and content, we can get more of it. Newer features mean we can block, mute, and take other action to customize our online worlds. And at the end of the day, many of us can log off and even choose to log off forever.
But while giving us the appearance of choice, the algo-simulation commits something more gradual, and more sinister: it strips us of our humanity by deflating the process of investigation, and flattening the ride of discovery. In so many ways, a life lived online is devoid of the complications inherent to the endeavor of wonder, which is the rich, steady pulse of our lives. Nuance and body language and tone and gray areas disappear. Over time, we adopt this misguided sense of definitiveness, and become unable — or unwilling — to separate our own thoughts and choices and preferences from the ones we’ve been served. At worst, we aren’t surfing the web; we’re unknowingly being dragged by the undertow.
The effort it takes to really understand something — the openness, interest and patience it requires — is what equips us to understand and care for others. In abbreviating our natural process of curiosity, we are drifting further apart from one another, and losing our ability to find our way back.
I often think of people a few hundred years ago, laying awake at night, unable to easily or quickly find the answer to a question, no matter how burning. If they forgot a word, it might take them months or years to remember it. It could mean having multiple conversations to return to the answer (or, more likely, an answer). What an infuriating, delicious, slow burn. We no longer get lost down the alleys and random hallways of our questions because we can find the door we’re seeking within seconds.
Sometimes, I wait hours to Google something just to see what happens in my mind. I test my will over and over again, leaving and then rejoining various platforms, periods of compulsively oversharing followed by months of borderline-reclusiveness. I see how I feel. Both have their joys. Neither really matters. Because even if I divest from the simulation by deactivating my social media accounts and devoting more time to my present than the pixels that make up my phone screen, there’s no guarantee I’m free. And there is no collective freedom in that.
If all or most people I’m in community with are still engaged with a frictionless online universe of shared thought, then I am still tethered to that simulated world. I can dodge TikToks and spend fewer minutes on Twitter (remember the day we thought Twitter was dying?). But I can never fully separate myself from the air I grew up breathing. So there has to be an in-between. That’s where curiosity is our shield, our exit, our freedom.
It takes real work to find experiences that are authentic, happenstance and original.
When they occur, they are bewitching.
One day, while I was living in Santa Cruz, I walked into a record store that looked like it had been there since the town was populated only by surfers and banana slugs. I rifled through the bins of vinyl records, noticing the vibrance of the album cover art, the weird shapes and fun band names. I wasn’t looking for anything other than something to do on a Saturday afternoon.
That’s how I came across Super Elcados, a Nigerian funk/disco band that made three records in the late 70s, the one I held being their first. It is, according to the Internet, an “ultra-rare album.” But I just liked the cover of it. I didn’t buy it. But when I got home, I looked them up and saw they have about 2,000 monthly listeners on Spotify — and the music is super groovy.
That experience felt sacred and rare. Sure, it was exciting to find a great and relatively unknown (in my world) band. But what was really thrilling was that I had engaged in the winding journey of discovery, staying open to whatever came my way, and found a work of art that I probably never would have found otherwise. The idea that this record, made by musicians from an ocean and several decades away, wound up in my hand through total coincidence felt magical. The only influence was randomness, and the result was connectedness. Which is to say, it was the confluence of a million mostly-uncalculated moves that led me there, breathing in dust, feeling the thrum of my individuality and our shared humanity, admiring the vibrance of “Togetherness Is Always A Good Venture.”
Have a great weekend,
Isa
Rummaging is written by Isa Cueto and edited by Annie Cappetta.