Part of using social media is just an endless attempt to understand social media. This invisible place where we all talk to each other, it tells you, 200k people saw this thing you said

That's a drop in the bucket for bigger accounts, but when you say something that radically exceeds your own follower count, it's dizzying. My brain can't begin to conceive of 200k people, let alone larger numbers

You end up modeling a crowd as a single person, there's no other way to do it, that's the only hardware you have. If you're smart you're able to perceive a few subcrowds, maybe as many as five https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1034163171454410752

Anthropmorphization, pareidolia: When the only tool you have is a mimetic monkey brain optimized for groups of five, everything looks like another monkey

"A person" is an interface for an idea, a machine, a movement, a country, an immutable law of nature...

The face you show to the world is only one of many faces. For each social context you make a new face, subtly different from all others, attuned to the group.

That's what it means when they say you're the average of your five closest friends. The things your friends reward, you become. The things they punish (or ignore), you discard. We change slowly in directions set by social feedback loops

When you meet a romantic partner you both construct a version of yourself in accordance with the social performance of each other. A good marriage is one where you and your spouse have constructed mutually enriching behavioral scripts and roles

In every social context you have a different "self", including when you are alone. There's nothing truer or realer about your private self, the self you construct with yourself, for yourself, it is one among many

All social roles are performative, and yes, there is a core of tendencies and ideas and fixations that all your played roles have in common, but the idea of the self cut free from all context is foolish https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1025738636250116097

When we react to the whims and moods of the singular, schizophrenic person we imagine twitter to be, we construct a version of ourselves.

These days when I write, I feel less and less that I am [name redacted], and more and more that I am simply Zero HP Lovecraft.

Borges wrote about the distance that grows up between the man-himself and the man-as-meme. Adapted and condensed from "Borges and I" (1960):

"I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors... I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others

Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things.

Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page."