The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything by Kathryn Jezer-Morton

  Apologies to Kathryn Jezer-Morton: I read The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything immediately prior to going on vacation and now the distance is making this a challenging review to write. I would like to note, however, that when I was reading it and immediately after reading it, I found it endlessly reference-able. Jezer-Morton’s finger is so ‘on the pulse’ that I found I kept bringing it up in conversation to help explain so many of our everyday experiences.

Jezer-Morton’s approach is simultaneously academic and anecdotal. For instance, she may go from referencing Baudrillard to a famous influencer in the same breath. I appreciated that balance of ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’ throughout the text; it enriched the work and elevated our the discourse around phenomena as common as posting vacation pictures.

The book covers the phenomena we post, like vacations, birthdays, baby announcements, personal struggles and grief, and so on. While I don’t recall her mentioning Paul Ricoeur specifically, his notion that we understand ourselves through ‘life stories’ seems pertinent here. We edit our stories in a way that helps to shape our conceptions of ourselves. For instance, when we go on vacation, we post pictures of what we understand to be the purpose of travel and bring ourselves into the narrative of a life-changing trip, even if it disappoints us. In fact, everything we post, the author suggests, is part of our ‘brand.’ Each of us is a brand that we maintain by curating and posting details strategically, even when we don’t realize we’re doing it. The fact is, we follow conventions we’re not aware of, and it’s strange to see ourselves beholden to those social media patterns.

The chapters about ‘celebrations’ and ‘reproduction’ were interesting. In particular, I  learned that the whole notion of a ‘gender reveal’ party was born on social media as a way to engage with audiences. Jezer-Morton problematizes gender reveals (a misnomer in their own right, by the way…) and points to the harms that have occurred as a result—like people starting forest fires with their colourful fireworks. More interesting to me is that the first people to do it and post it on social media regret the direction it took. I’m interested in the long-term consequences of something that seemed innocuous to begin with.

Some chapters strike an interesting balance; Jezer-Morton is not of the mind that social media needs to be abolished, and it’s compelling to see how it produces access for some subsets of the population. In one chapter, Jezer-Morton talks about a restaurant in LA, I think The Sugar Factory if I remember correctly, and its strange place in culture. She describes the restaurant as not being particularly good but it gains notoriety because it caters so specifically to social media; all the food is ‘showy’ (even though it often goes uneaten, according to one of the employees). Servers bring out drinks with special effects and they do elaborate dances for the patrons. It’s a mid-level restaurant, a little pricey, but less expensive than, say, taking kids on vacation. The argument goes that taking photos there is a way of advertising wealth and glamour when one can’t fully engage in elaborate vacations. It’s a way of getting access to a wealthy conception of self when reality doesn’t align, exactly. Jezer-Morton describes going to the restaurant twice; the first night doesn’t have any instantiations of servers dancing, so her contact tells her to come back again the following night. One of the meals The Sugar Factor offers is a hamburger covered in 24K gold leaf (if that isn’t symbolic, I don’t know what is). The chapter ends on the server’s powerful line, told to her in secret, that tomorrow the family will “shit gold.”

The text documents a number of influencers’ perspectives and experiences, and one thing that comes up is that it is still gauche, verboten even, to display poverty online. One influencer describes really challenging experiences with two former partners who are both addicts, one of whom the woman sent to jail. She documents the abuses she was subjected to and puts it online to help process the grief and create connection. Among everything, though, she notes that you can never post about financial challenges. Audiences are not prepared for that. Of course, that extends into the posts of people who are using social media for business. Being honest about a failed MLM, for example, spells disaster for anyone trying to cling to the illusion.

The Story of Your Life also explores the haunting effect of monetizing our lives for others’ entertainment. For instance, a number of influencers make their living by posting their family content. From pregnancy announcements forward, couples will often share their experiences as parents and post their kids. The reality is, though, that after a certain age: audiences don’t care. Parents either need to have more children or pivot. It’s such a dark undercurrent to the family friendly content knowing that there’s an expiration date on the cute children that parents are profiting from. Let’s not even get started on trad wives.

One chapter that is particularly odd to me is the one on grief. Recognizing that we still must not show grief about lacking money, other forms of grief are acceptable and encouraged. Communities form around grief. I just have such a hard time seeing it as sincere rather than performative. If someone is upset and crying about traumatic loss, for example, I can’t help but picture that they recorded it in the moment, then took time to edit, then took time to post. To me, there’s so much distance from the actual grief and that performance of immediacy takes me out of it entirely. Jezer-Morton again points towards a balance; some people find genuine connection and community around grief.

These pockets of the internet are interesting to consider on their own, but I think the strength of Jezer-Morton’s book is in articulating how social media shapes the way we live. In some ways it’s like that classic debate of whether art imitates life or vice versa (do we count social media as art?). We have been conditioned to now see our lives through the lens of social media. We decide what is worth doing based on what is worth posting—what food we eat, what sights we see on vacation, how we choose to celebrate.

We also shape our lives around narratives that build; we act as if we’re building towards some kind of climax, as if our life is made of big moments. Towards the end of the text, Jezer-Morton makes a gesture towards ‘flat narratives,’ stories that are not decided by big moments. She thinks back to growing up on a commune where life was flat and where people shared notes in a guest book like an early form of social media. She imagines a world in which we share our quiet moments rather than emphasizing the big ones, a life where not much happens, but that we value those tiny moments. I’m not sure if the structure of social media will allow quiet living like that—it feels like the medium is geared towards subsuming everything into a grand narrative—but it does seem like a worthwhile aspiration. 

Happy reading!

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It by Cory Doctorow

     In the immortal words of The Descendents: “Everything sucks.” In the immortal words of Reel Big Fish: “Everything sucks.” In the immortal words of The Suicide Machines: “I hate everything.” Cory Doctorow’s book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It is an exploration of why these punk bands’ words are so immortal.

If you have Facebook, I offer you this challenge: go to your feed and start scrolling. Take notes of how many posts you’re shown are ads, how many posts are from people you actually know, and how many posts from people you actually know are from the same people you actually know. At least in my experience, most of what I see on Facebook is either an ad or a post in a group that is being recommended to me (not even a group I’ve joined). This is a far cry from the early days of Facebook when you would see posts from your friends and things that were posted on your friends’ Facebook walls.

Cory Doctorow explores how a number of megacorporations have enacted a four-step plan to make their companies awful for everyone except themselves. In the first stage, companies offer a service that seems valuable. Once they have the user base, they then sell out their users for profit. Consider, for instance, how Google has harvested information from its users, sold their private data to advertisers, made the top search results pay-to-play for companies, and so on. Or, how Amazon shows you products that they think you want rather than what you actually search for. In Step 1, companies tailor their services to the user. In Step 2, companies sell out their users for the sake of advertising dollars and private business. In Step 3, companies then sell out their corporate partners for their own benefit and to consolidate their power. Take the Amazon example. They start generating revenue dollars by selling ad space and “top results” to companies. Then, they start consolidating the distribution network, making their own products, forcing companies to ship through Amazon by running at a loss on some products in order to monopolize the entire process. In the end, businesses don’t even profit by selling products on Amazon. The system is rigged against them: what would be top results are pushed down, more expensive alternatives are presented, and they have to pay such a premium to be sold through Amazon that it’s not even worth it—except that you either sell a product for nothing or you don’t get seen at all. We’ve reached Stage 4: Enshittification. Nobody but the megacorporation benefits and the product continues to get worse.

Doctorow’s characteristic snarkiness helps to communicate seething anger with a humorous lens as he outlines a wide range of outrages in an informative way. For instance, he breaks down the laws around copyright and how that impacts his own work as an author. When Amazon owns the distribution rights to audiobooks, for example, the publisher or author are paying to be listed and often losing money. Moreover, if anyone replicates, downloads, shares, etc. the audiobook—including the author—they can be sued for copyright infringement. Essentially, the author can be sued for use of their own work. These legal loopholes are absurd and obscene and offers a pretty persuasive reason not to buy into megacorporations’ monopolies, especially over creative work.

I think the most egregious example that will stick with me is that of Adobe and Pantone. I hate Adobe, I have to say. Back in my younger years, you could buy Adobe for a single payment—it was expensive for the time ($300 for Photoshop?), but at least then you owned it until the next version came out. Now, you have to buy a subscription, which is another enshittifying problem in its own right. The subscription gives you access to the entire suite, though I suspect most people use two or three products at best. The subscription costs me over $50 a month and it makes me sick when I think of how many hundreds or thousands of dollars I’ve paid them over the years. But then, it gets worse when it comes to Adobe’s relationship to Pantone. Pantone makes colours and they were historically a part of the package with Adobe; the cost was built into peoples’ subscriptions. Pantone then started leasing the colours to Adobe and Adobe did not want to pay on behalf of their users. As a result, Adobe forced their users to pay an additional subscription cost for access to Pantone colours. The worst part is that it was retroactive, too. If you were a creator who had made products that used Pantone colours and refused to pay the subscription fee, even works you had already created would no longer load properly: Pantone-exclusive colours would appear as black. If you wanted to continue to profit from creative work you’d already done, you’d have to buy the colours. What. A. Shakedown.

Enshittification covers a range of companies that have increasing influence with diminishing benefits to our lives. Facebook. Amazon. Apple. Google. Twitter. These bastions of popular culture and consumption are progressively more useless to us—worse, they are outright exploitative. Doctorow’s framework is persuasive and productive. We can see the process everywhere with clear delineations. I can already see it at work in the supposedly revolutionary AI companies like ChatGPT and Grok. They’ve enticed you with free cheating. They’ve sold you out to private interests that can influence the information. I’m not sure yet how they’re betraying their investors and the companies they’re profiting from, but I’m sure it’s coming. The bubble is going to burst and it’s going to happen fast. What an enshittifying situation.

Happy reading! Hope it doesn't suck!

Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic

         Editors often give writers the advice to “kill your darlings”, meaning that all excess, no matter how much you like it, should be cut from the final version of the book. Privately, I’ve also always thought of it as being unsparing in your treatment of characters. You might love your characters, so you don’t want them to experience pain, but for the sake of the story, your characters need to experience conflict and suffer. Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic has a lot of positives, but stops short of sticking the landing, taking an otherwise very good book and ending on a “mid” note.

The premise of Sympathy is actually really compelling. Alice, an adopted Black girl with an absentee adoptive father, gets obsessed with a woman via social media: Mizuko Himuro, a woman about ten years her senior who is a successful writer and instructor at Columbia University. It’s one of those books where the characters are all frustrating and unlikable, though compelling. Alice is largely irredeemable, but Mizuko is also flawed, thoughtless, and self-serving with a kink for other peoples’ tears.

To focus on Alice first, she is far more outwardly egregious in her behaviour. She has some wonderful moments, like when she recounts a tutor that she loved and how the tutor told her “to ‘go have fun, go wild,’ and [she’d] burst out crying” (37). At the same time, she moves into her grandmother’s house and is meant to take care of her but is essentially useless. Meanwhile, she infiltrates Mizuko’s life, engineering situations for them to meet and spend time together. One night, Alice spends the evening with Mizuko while Mizuko is in conflict with her boyfriend, Rupert. Alice, also in a relationship, manipulates the situation to put distance between Mizuko and Rupert to insert herself and make Mizuko reliant on her. As she latches on, she is able to share a charged kiss with Mizuko and then share her bed—a high that she continues to strive for afterward. Meanwhile, she snoops through Mizuko’s phone, finding nude photographs and videos of her and Rupert and other partners, to which she self-satisfies. She lies about her intentions and lies about her life to keep Mizuko around, perpetually omitting the fact that she has stalked Mizuko on social media for ages.

The obsessiveness of the book is pretty compelling and there are a ton of wonderful features in the text. There are lots of great parallels and patterns. The motif of opposite atoms and the Higgs Boson speaks to Alice’s obsession. The aftereffects of a Japanese tsunami feature prominently, especially the detritus that remains afterward. The themes are developed with a great deal of clarity. 

One of the other layers to the text is the disruption of time. It’s a little bit difficult to follow the timeline of events; there were times that I was unclear which happens first, who is dating who when, and so forth. Alice reflects on this disruption to time a few times throughout the text. Mizuko writes a story about visiting Japan with her grandmother after the flood, which she also video recorded in full: “Mizuko wonders if the GPS is still monitoring their progress. She has the distinct feeling of being watched by something in the darkness. This makes watching the footage and reading the story at the same time a strange experience, as if she can sense me, a menace from the future, following them along the dark road” (217). Alice is that dark force from the future rewriting Mizuko’s history, which also makes sense given what happens to Mizuko a little later on…

Towards the end of the book, Alice becomes increasingly disassociated from herself. She describes writing as follows: “Writing in short bursts usually made me feel ordered and together, as if I had just taken a shower. If I did it for too long, it started to feel like I was having a nightmare. I would start to feel like it wasn’t even me writing it, like watching someone access your desktop remotely, or the drawing of the hands that are drawing each other” (405). Sudjic uses tech-based similes to explore the idea of not feeling in control of your own reality, but Alice also reflects on the idea of how actual experience becomes derealized through technological intermediaries. The passage continues as follows:

My reflections amount to a love story that is mostly made up, from memories that are mostly false, between people who were mainly not there. The things for which she was not there have her in them now more deeply because of her absence, and her affect on my way of seeing them. Anytime I note her absence from a thing, she arrives at once, as if summoned, entrenching herself more deeply than she exists in my memories of times when she was there, so that time, the sequence of what really happened, seems to curve around her (405). 

The notion that time becomes totally derailed through her experience of this real-unreal person is a compelling way to reconceptualize the core of the story (and also justify why I found the timeline so confusing). While Alice is derealized and while Mizuko is derealized, Alice still seems to demonstrate some insight into her own ethical slippage: “I found it hard to write the bits where the things that were at first surprising or even shocking became normal incrementally until I couldn’t see that they were anything but normal, because everything else had shifted just one centimetre here and one centimetre there, moving at the speed fingernails grow, until finally everything just clicked into exactly the wrong place” (405). There’s a little echo of the earthquake and tsunami loom under the surface.

In the end, though, the book reads as a message to someone who might not even read it. The book opens with Alice “unfriending” Mizuko in a fraught moment of uncertainty and the ending of the book is somewhat about getting her back, or at least giving her back to herself: “The purpose is no longer just to possess Mizuko but to give back what I took from her. The law of opposites says don’t send a message to your intended recipient if you want her to read it. So I am making it public. This rule has also been at work on me while writing. At first I thought I was writing to her, for her, about her. It is still all those things on the surface, but now it is deeper, wider” (405). It’s an effective closing statement for the book. 

For me, the book grows reasonably organically and builds its tension only to get derailed three quarters of the way through. Alice, through a series of bizarre coincidences, ends up going to stay in the Hamptons with Robin and Ingrid and various other friends and family. Robin and Ingrid are an older couple (60 and 40?). After doing a DNA test, Alice learns that Robin is Mizuko’s biological father, who she has never known. But, because Alice is a weird creep, she keeps the knowledge to herself. Incidentally, one day she takes a nap by the pool and awakes to find Robin touching her between her legs and they never address that ever again. Meanwhile, Alice’s boyfriend Dwight is a tech developer and works on an app called TriMe, which is a Tinder-like app designed for people seeking threesomes. At one point, Alice brings Mizuko to a masquerade play with Robin and Ingrid. Following the play, they go to dinner. In the washroom, Mizuko shows Alice that she has just matched with Robin and Ingrid on the TriMe app. Remember: Robin is Mizuko’s father. From there, Mizuko and Alice get separated. Alice ends up on drugs at an orgy where she is aggressively raped while she’s insensible (and consequently loses a fetus she had intended to abort the following day). It’s a bit excessive there. You might be thinking: Jeff, you told us people should be harsher to their characters. Well, here’s what happens next.

Alice gets increasingly obsessed about Mizuko, trying to track her down. Fearing she’s been ghosted, Alice sends increasingly desperate texts: WHERE ARE YOU WHERE ARE YOU WHERE ARE YOU I NEED YOU and so on. Then, Alice goes on an ADHD med bender and gets hyper-focused, writing a lengthy confession letter to Mizuko. She explains all the ways she infiltrated Mizuko’s life, the betrayals she has hidden, and the secret she has kept about Mizuko’s parentage. The whole letter is a scorched earth letter and the tension is high for when Mizuko receives it. After not hearing from Mizuko for some time, it turns out that she had a brain parasite that made her have a public seizure and then she needed surgery. Alice arrives at Mizuko’s apartment and has found the letter has been opened (!) by Mizuko’s estranged mother, who has come to nurse her back to health.

At this point, I had two different endings in mind that I thought would be excellent extensions of the tension. In my first idea, Mizuko’s mother is primed to expose Alice. I could easily see it being a direct conflict or something more like blackmailing her out of Mizuko’s life. That doesn’t happen. Instead, Alice catches a break where, following her surgery, Mizuko is essentially “soft reset” and does not remember anything (time collapses inward again). Alice once again is able to nurse her back to health and keep her isolated from the world. She prevents her from contacting her ex, using her cell phone, or any other contact with the outside world. Alice encourages Mizuko to write a book in isolation. The second ending I had in mind is that, knowing that Mizuko is self-serving, it would have been excellent to see that Mizuko is the one that has actually engineered the situation to see how far Alice would go and to write a book about her. How desperate is this younger woman to care for her Misery-style? How pathetic is she? Instead of Alice being the one manipulating Mizuko, having a reversal at the end would have been a beautiful touch.

But none of that happens.

Instead, after thirty days in isolation, Mizuko’s ex shows up at the door. He bangs on the door and Mizuko wants to see him, but has to get ready first. Alice then sneaks out the window and runs away. She keeps pausing, hoping that Mizuko will follow her, but she never does. So instead Alice runs away, finds that her grandmother has died (she was supposed to take care of her), and then goes back to England and cries to her no-longer-estranged mother, starting a gardening business and then still creeping a now no-longer-available online Mizuko. It just felt that there were so many opportunities for the conflict to come to a boil but we missed every one.

We do get a revelation at the end that adds a dark twist to the book. As it turns out, Alice found out that Mizuko’s estranged mother had left a letter. Himuro reveals that she had never wanted Mizuko because she was a child produced by rape. Himuro gives the story of how Robin raped her in university, how she got pregnant, and never wanted to find him again because she was never believed and he claimed it was consentual. After writing the letter, Himuro walked into the river and drowned herself, leaving also Mizuko’s grandmother to care for herself (and die alone and unfound for some time back in Japan). It’s unclear whether Mizuko knows this information. So, there is another turn at the end but the central conflict is not the one that is most effectively developed.

One other thing that I liked about the book is the characterization of New York. Alice moves to New York from the UK to be with her grandmother and Sudjic gives a great description of walking in New York:

You don’t have to have any idea where you are going; you can advance without being aware of anything but the vague progress into time stretching out before you. In this way I discovered moments of light-headedness, which led to a feeling that my body was somehow becoming less and less material. The exact opposite of what had happened to me at home in England, when everything had become gloopy and masklike. I felt, after a time, like I could float upwards, into the air, as well as down. At its most intense, I felt like I was only a heartbeat inside my brain.
You can also cope better with strange things when you are slightly tripping out like this. It is certainly easier to fall in love with a stranger. You can answer the question “How you doing today, senorita?” in a way you never would in England, if you were asked, which you wouldn’t be. You can get talking to a woman who is wearing a smart grey suit but sitting on the sidewalk, begging. There will likely be a snappy dachshund parked beside her in a pram when you realise you have no coins in your purse, only dollar bills. This will not embarrass you; you’ll just give the bills.

You can wonder with detached amusement what a Philly cheese steak is and make your mistaken judgment based on the smell of spicy sausage in the air, which in fact comes from an adjacent cart you should have gone to instead. People will make comments about how slowly you count the change. Doesn’t matter. It’s novelty. It might as well be another language. You can pass a man holding something strange and highly personal in the street and look away because it feels like he is doing it on purpose to make people look. You can sit in a cafe downtown whilst a family holds in prayer and gives thanks because somebody graduated today, and you can watch them unselfconsciously because they are so deep into it. On the Lower East Side, you can count the ornamental cockatoos within dusty windows. In midtown you can buy something for allergy season when you see a warning about it outside a juice shop. You can do whatever you like—you can go completely mental—and no one gives a shit. (50-51)

I include that passage just as a taste of the flare in Sudjic’s novel. There are some details that really linger and standout, connected to a larger thematic framework. On the topic of New York, there’s a tense moment where Alice has to take her grandmother to the hospital but there’s confusion of where is where. In the cab, her grandmother gives the name of the hospital she is meant to go to, and Alice thought it was a different one. Her grandmother “sweating, eyes bulging” asks if that’s where she’s supposed to go. Alice narrates, “I thought Griffin wanted us to go to a different place—a hospital—but I didn’t know where it was, so I hoped I’d misremembered the address of the surgery the previous night and we were going to the hospital, because after a while the numbers and avenues all blurred into one. I hoped that Silvia was right, because otherwise it would be my fault that Silvia was right, because otherwise it would be my fault for not intervening. I hadn’t because I didn’t want to be wrong. If I was wrong, I didn’t want to be culpable for what might happen to her as a result of wasting time” (145). This ambiguity and tension and her resistance to taking definitive action reads as so relatable but also raises the stakes for the scene.

I also appreciate how Sympathy is deeply rooted in reality but at the same time exists in unreality. In one part, Alice discusses a plastic storage box that used to house memorabilia of her lost father, which she then fills with artefacts of her time with Mizuko. She describes it as a “mini-museum” and the heaviest thing in it is Mizuko’s copy of The Golden Bowl. Alice describes how Mizulo “often said that novels were dead because we have the Internet everywhere we go now and we can find out anything we want to know straightaway, which tends to kill a plot. That was why she wrote just about real life. It feels true in some ways. In other ways, I reassured her, stories must be more like chess, a game of perfect information in which all the moves that can be made are right there in front of you, but the problem is knowing what your opponent knows and what she plans to do” (79). In that way, I appreciate that Sudjic is trying to write a novel that incorporates technology as a device while also retaining the uncertainty and dramatic tension at the core of human existence, especially when it comes to love and obsession.

Overall, I would say that Sudjic has a good book here. There was a lot to like and the thematic and psychological exploration in the book is really worth the experience. It’s only slightly marred by the fact that the ending falls flat after such a build-up. If only the climax paid off more powerfully, I think the book would be one of the best I’d read this year—and yes, I leave the verb tense ambiguity in place intentionally.

Happy reading!