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three thoughts concerning the internet, Angela Chase, and ways to learn about game theory

agrammar:

1.

The internet teaches people various ways to present portions of their lives as fun and interesting. Much like with television and advertising, this can create acute self-consciousness in any given internet user, who is constantly presented with visions of other people’s lives that seem way more fun/interesting than his or her own — except, in this case, without the reassuring knowledge that those lives are at least fake. A given internet user might, in fact, start to develop some really visceral form of resentment toward those groups of people who seem, on the internet, to have charmed or enjoyable lives. (One good way to experience this might be to look at pictures from foodies and apartment-decor hobbyists while eating macaroni and cheese on a bare mattress — or even just flick through the Facebook photos of someone who’s mostly pictured at parties.) This feeling may even harden until the given-internet-user is vastly overestimating the amount of fun/interest/self-satisfaction in those people’s lives, simply because the only part of those lives they’re exposed to is the bit that photographs well. That is my best explanation of a funny paradox: when you hear people ragging on, for instance, “Williamsburg hipsters,” they often wind up alleging that the lives of “Williamsburg hipsters” are actually way, way, way cooler, more fun, and more interesting than those lives could possibly be in reality.

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