The Mirror Self

If you’ve ever wondered why the world feels increasingly unreal, this piece invites you to explore how we got here. Blending reflections on creativity, agency, conspiracies, and the algorithms shaping our lives, we explore how modern systems bend our perceptions, narrow our futures, and lure us into mirror worlds that feel real but aren’t. Drawing on thinkers like Naomi Klein, Shoshana Zuboff, Jaron Lanier, and Jean Baudrillard, the essay traces how surveillance capitalism, conspiracy culture, and digital simulacra quietly erode our autonomy and distort our sense of reality.

Endless Possibilities of Choice

A friend once told me that writing is a universe-ending act. There are infinite directions a person can take the moment they touch pen to paper (or fingertip to keyboard). Will they write a paragraph? A sentence? One that begins with ‘the’ or ‘an’? The entire paragraph, and all the writing after, will be informed by that decision. Or how about a poem? Will the poem evoke anger or incite joy? Will there be rhyme schemes, obvious stanzas, made-up words?

Beyond a few sentences, nobody knows exactly what they’re going to write, whether composing a full novel or scratching down a quick journal entry. With the number of words in the English language (or any language; this need not be constrained to English), the sensical combinations a human can produce are limitless. The ideas and feelings that humans experience — then choose to nurture, expand, and commingle with other ideas and feelings — are a far greater infinity still. To write ideas (or to speak, paint, sculpt, photograph, sew, dance, build, cook, or plant them) is to arrive at only one of all possible expressions.

Then, right when the universe vanishes into nothing but a few words, it erupts into boundless opportunity again. The next lines must be written, and brand new possibilities lie therein. Writing terminates universes, then it creates them, kills them again, and births them anew. Potential disappears and reappears with every sentence.

In life, as in writing, the single path we navigate through infinity constellates gradually. One careful word here, subtly different phrasing there — any given choice can redirect the branches of possibility, pulling everything that follows into a new universal flowchart of opportunity. Even the most meticulous plans can only help us forecast so far into the future, and alternatives linger everywhere, just beyond us, past and future.

The choices closest to our current moment are clear reflections of options we could have taken or might yet take, and tend to only slightly deviate from the present. The choices that accumulate further ahead or behind — like our unreadable futures and unwinnable what-could-have-been ruminations — curve and darken into an indiscernible haze, like two mirrors reflecting to infinity.

Even relatively small, unconscious choices can redirect our trajectories through unfurling refractions of potential. Our immediate reactions to the world — how we respond world quickly and involuntarily —regularly split our futures into multiple paths. We can, and often do, end up taking whatever inclinations hit us first. It’s hard not to feel defensive or angry when someone challenges your sense of self, or merely cuts you off in traffic. What really matters are our secondary reactions, if we have the patience to get there: how we acknowledge, understand, and then intentionally respond to our initial reactions. Secondary reactions are how we intentionally choose our future reflections, and curve ourselves more towards the person we want to be.

If we resist the urge to take the easiest, quickest path our angry reflection offers, we can recognize the infinite branches still available to us — calmness, empathy, or forgiveness perhaps — and choose to refract in a different direction.

The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism

Fortunately, not all decisions are entirely universe-deciding or future-redirecting. We don’t have to bear the weight of changing our life’s trajectory every time we pick one word over another, just as we don’t need to worry about causing a hurricane because we made a butterfly flap her wings. Most decisions — which shirt to wear, when to swallow, whether to blink — become absorbed into the frothy chaos of our surroundings like fizzing flecks of water above the ocean. The presence or absence of a few adjectives or adverbs won’t likely change the meaning of a novel, just as a few moments of anger don’t make us angry people. If trivial decisions cause infinities to collapse differently, the differences tend to be equally trivial.

That is, they used to be. Our forgettable, quotidian choices were once too small, too unimportant, too untraceable to be understood, never mind valued. Over the last few decades, however, a handful of corporations — first advertisers, then tech companies — recognized that our trivial choices could be intentionally deflected towards particular ends. Initially, we were subjected to marketing’s thoroughly studied intrusions into our cognitive biases, twisting psychological tendencies — loss aversion, priming, framing, heuristics, mere exposure effect, bandwagon effect, in-group/out-group associations, and blind spot biases — to make us spend money. Tech corporations then drastically exceed these manipulations by extracting unprecedented amounts of data, applying billions of dollars to even more meticulous studies, and devoting billions more to supercomputers and algorithms. Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, calls the agency we exercise when navigating our infinite futures our “right to the future tense.” Surveillance corporations — marketing firms, big tech companies, and governments — harness more money and computing power than at any point in history to subtly usurp agency over our own futures.

It’s our immediate reactions (which tend to lean more negative, towards the likes of self-consciousness, jealousy, defensiveness, indignation, and entitlement) that these algorithms snatch and rechannel, intentionally interrupting our slower secondary responses and confusing our navigation through the mirrors of potential ourselves. Tech critic Jaron Lanier describes the process well; “The algorithms that are following you respond very quickly. They’re looking for quick responses. And the negative responses, like getting startled or scared or irritated or angry, tend to rise faster than the positive responses like building trust or feeling good; those things rise more slowly. So the algorithms naturally catch the negativity and amplify it.” Other algorithms track how we respond to refraction algorithms (including the most granular of our online activity, like where our cursors linger) to build proprietary profiles of each of us. These are our digital mirrors, hundreds of distinct, uncannily accurate — though always partial — reflections of every single person that different corporations (and governments) have built (and keep closely guarded) to better understand, predict, and manipulate us.

As former Google exec Eric Schmidt once noted, “Everything you do [online] becomes someone else’s business model.” Entities snatch the digital imprints we leave, stretch them, fill in details, and create replicas of us entirely without our informed consent.

They fine tune their algorithms to our digital doppelgängers in the hopes of engineering our behavior, our buying, and even our bodies in real life. And just like our daily universe of decisions, algorithmic nudges accumulate over time. If corporations want to make us angry people, they simply identify what incites a few immediate moments of anger, then repeat and amplify those triggers bit by bit, and ultimately bend our futures towards angrier versions of ourselves without us ever knowing. This applies across demographics, populations, and entire societies.

The 74 million children under 18 in the USA spend on average one quarter of their waking hours on social media, many of whom have been turned into addicts, become depressed, and suffer heavily from body dysmorphia. (Facebook makes an estimated $10 billion a year from these children despite their own own internal findings that their platforms increase depression). Cambridge Analytica, infamous for its publicly denied but secretly admitted global election interference, targets people with misleading information (based on the digital profiling they’ve perfected) to change their political affiliations, successfully influencing whole societies and their politics, from American presidential campaigns to Brexit.

Refraction algorithms and surveillance capitalism aren’t lone agents colonizing our right to the future tense; in pernicious feedback loops, they incentivize, magnify, and radiate the universe of warped realities that have long existed. Your algorithm might send you to hard-right podcasts or conspiratorial YouTube videos, but it can only do that because talk show hosts, podcasters, influencers, and product hawkers have already meticulously crafted all that disorienting content.

The Mirror World

In her impressively wide-reaching book Doppelgänger, Naomi Klein wrote about some of the distorted reflections she encountered in what she calls the mirror world: an uncanny, mostly online universe of conspiracy theories, alternative facts, and, confusingly, many of the same observations, arguments, and feelings common in popular discourse. Like the familiar distortions of a funhouse mirror, understandable and widely shared beliefs in the real world become twisted into bottomless spirals of extremism in the mirror world. What would otherwise be a healthy skepticism of a powerful government and medical industry gets warped into paranoia of pedophile rings and microchipped vaccines, stolen elections, and engineered bioweapons. Valid criticisms of massive tech companies, oligarchs, and globalization flip into the rise of the antichrist, the New World Order, and the occult’s plot to destroy Christianity, all treated with the same earnest, level-headed sobriety of a 60 Minutes interview. Previously left-wing topics split and scatter into hard-right ideological labyrinths. Alien coverups, Satan-worshipping elites, school shooting actors, and Jewish space lasers appear in conversations about back-to-the-land homesteading, spiritual meditation, psychedelic visions, and higher consciousness. Alex Jones pushes the same products as Gwyneth Paltrow, but with the promise of protecting you from invaders instead of making your skin radiant.

The Weapons of Refraction

The precession of reality to simulacra mirrors a common trend by a different name: enshittification – an especially colorful term coined by Cory Doctorow. Originally developed to describe internet services like social media, the process of enshittification follows a trajectory similar to simulacra. First, an internet company will develop a product to service its individual users (Facebook in the early days, for example, which did a far better and simpler job of allowing people to stay in touch) — this is the reality that users come to expect. Then the company shifts to servicing its business users (Facebook getting filled up by ads) — this turns the product into a simulation of what it once was to everyday users. Finally, the company shifts to maximize its own profit (Facebook harvesting as much data as possible, filling up with TikTok reposts and AI slop, lying to advertisers about reach, and abetting international political disinformation campaigns to alter users’ beliefs and affiliations) — this is the product’s final transformation into simulacra.

Enshittification exists across industries and culture. Corporations alter recipes, decrease sizing, reduce quality, minimize service, and dilute claims. Male wellness and identity become supplement and device consumption (biohacking), foregoing balance to work longer hours (“the grind”), and immersion in the manosphere. Government becomes a blatant cash-grab for officials and a demeaning meme-ridden joke for everyone else.

We can no longer write the stories of our lives freely. By inserting a few adjectives here and modifying a couple of adverbs there, they dictate our stories for us, completely changing their direction and eliminating whole universes of our potential. In a final twist of cruel irony, as these weapons of refraction alter our vocabularies and push us away from self-authorship, artificial intelligence algorithms now create billions of stories with trillions of new words, mimicking the voices we put to our own experiences and further channeling us towards alternative realities.

The internet is flooded with simulations — stories and conspiracies from large language models, corporate or intentionally inflammatory bots impersonating humans, AI-generated images and websites taking up top search results. Added to slime-flavored cereals, New World Order conspiracies, people spending only minutes outside each day, and the 118 years worth of content uploaded to YouTube every day, and reality starts to feel outcompeted by its reflections.

When the dominant culture’s simulations can recreate themselves in accelerating fractals of distortion, how do we keep ourselves grounded and sane? How do we keep ourselves whole when there are so many entities trying to grab bits of our reflections, or to fully redirect our lives down their rabbit-holes of manipulation? How do we know we’re interacting with reality, and not some warped, mirror world reflection or simulacra of it? How do we keep our right to the future tense?

Death of the Internet

A conspiracy theory of sorts, the dead internet theory, gets the feelings right, if not all the facts: as the internet fills with more simulations, it withers and dies. It becomes a less desirable place to spend our time, and a less enjoyable character to write into our stories. Like our dominant economy, dominant politics, and dominant culture, maybe the digital world — or perhaps, especially the digital world, since it’s the reflection of our economy, politics, and culture — cannot be easily fixed. It seems, much like modernity, that the internet and its algorithms are undergoing their own collapse. As with the collapse of modernity, stepping away won’t nearly solve our predicament, but it’s a first step. To regain our agency as authors of our own futures, we should probably step away from as many reflective surfaces as possible — our screens, social media, algorithms, and shiny, glitzy marketing campaigns. The less they know about you, the better. The less you glance into the warped mirrors they hold up to us — slightly angled to focus our attention somewhere slightly else, be it underground Satanists, pink syrup, or our own wrinkles — the more you can focus on your own, and all the infinities that will open back up to you.