Illustration By Gieneyra Lai Alvarez. Courtesy of artworxla.

The public square is the meeting ground where people make society happen. In these spaces, physical or metaphorical or digital, we work through our shared dramas and map our collective hopes. Ideally, the public square provides room to solve the problems we face. It is also where new, thorny issues often arise.

This “Up for Discussion” is part of Zócalo’s editorial and events series spotlighting the ideas, places, and questions that have shaped the public square Zócalo has created over the past 20 years.

Here, our contributors take on the virtual worlds where we connect, from internet discussion boards to “the fediverse.” These very online writers are scrolling the puppies of Instagram, building governance structures to regulate digital discourse, and breaking the spells cast by technological magic.

They were the perfect people to answer the question: What is the future of the digital public square?

The post What Is the Future of the Digital Public Square? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On a blustery day in early October 2023, half a dozen volunteers stood outside a street market in Łódź, Poland’s fourth largest city, handing out flyers, stickers, and cherry cakes. We were campaigning for Aleksandra Wiśniewska, a 29-year-old former humanitarian aid worker and political novice, who was running for parliament from the Civic Coalition (KO) list, the largest Polish opposition party. I was her campaign manager.

Unexpectedly, Zbigniew Rau, the Polish foreign minister and a member of the nationalist-conservative ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS), appeared. He interrupted the event and started a shouting match with several other opposition candidates campaigning at the market. Instead of engaging in the melee, Wiśniewska turned her back and firmly spoke to a camera held up by a volunteer.

“Poland deserves a real foreign service. Our ruling party does not represent us,” she said.

Within minutes, the video—uploaded online with the caption “#bazaardiplomacy”—had garnered hundreds of thousands of views.

Just a week later, Polish voters overwhelmingly backed the opposition in the historic elections, ending eight years of PiS rule. The turnout of more than 74 percent smashed all previous records. Ten percent more people voted than during the first partially free elections in 1989, when Poles ended communism at the ballot box. This election compares in significance: It was a case study of how a highly motivated and well-organized opposition can win, even against a ruling party that cheats. For that reason, it deserves to be better understood around the world.

For the past eight years, PiS has eroded media freedoms and undermined judicial independence, moving the country towards authoritarianism. Despite the opposition’s win, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) noted that “the ruling party and its candidates gained a clear advantage from the misuse of state resources,” meaning that the election was fought on a “tilted playing field”: taxpayers’ money donated by state companies and newly created “foundations” was used to back the ruling party. State-run media, the only broadcast media available in parts of the country, was more than biased. It has been turned into a Goebbelsian propaganda machine that twisted and manipulated video and spewed hatred against the opposition, minority groups, and civil society organizations.

PiS had also passed a series of restrictive laws, including an abortion ban so drastic that women with problem pregnancies died because they were refused abortions that would have saved them. A nationwide women’s strike followed: for many younger women, participation in that march was their first experience of politics. Polling data from election day strongly suggest that young and female voters, many of whom had not voted in the past, propelled the opposition to victory. Four years ago, only 46% of voters under 29 voted; this year, over 68% did.

The success of Wiśniewska—now the youngest woman MP in the parliament—was part of this change. Our team was entirely made up of young people in their 20s. None of us had been involved in Polish politics before. Despite our lack of experience and despite starting from a lower position on the party’s list of candidates, Wiśniewska received more support than four sitting MPs. We showed voters how an innovative, grassroots, and energetic campaign can change the political arena.

Three strategies enabled our success.

The first strategy was our team. Wiśnewska has charisma, international experience, and a compelling story, but the campaign was not only about her. We knew that our potential electorate consisted of many open-minded, young, and curious people who were looking for someone to vote for, but perhaps felt they had been overlooked by politicians or parties. We featured photos, ideas, and profiles of our team members in our online communications.

When we went to early morning markets or stood on street corners handing out flyers, we always went as a team. We spent countless hours on the streets, talking to people, proving that democratic engagement isn’t boring. At our events, we brought together musicians, artists, and other young experts to talk about issues in Polish society. Our idea was to talk about things that younger people care about, and by doing so, show that Wiśniewska was part of a greater movement of younger people who were daring to take the first step into the world of politics. We think that we succeeded because this was true: we were all committed to changing politics and we think we transmitted that commitment to people.

Our second strategy was to stay positive and patriotic.

PiS ran a remarkably nasty campaign. The day we announced Wiśniewska’s candidacy we made national news when PiS media accused our candidate of falsifying her entire life story, as well as insinuating that she was not a “real Pole.” Our social media was inundated with hateful messages. Some particularly aggressive people stopped us on the street, calling us frauds or Germans. But we knew politics would be dirty, and before the campaign started, we had created a social media campaign encouraging young people to be brave and get involved in politics.

We stuck to our strategy, proudly wore Polish flags, didn’t engage in shouting matches, didn’t reply to trolls, and didn’t dwell on the negative campaign of the ruling party. Instead, we focused on our values, urging our voters to vote not based on political promises that particular campaigns made, but based on what kind of people they wanted to represent them in parliament. For us that meant people who promote hope, responsibility, and kindness. We laughed and smiled through every campaign event, emphasizing personal conversations with voters over large rallies. Once again, this succeeded because it was real: We were enjoying ourselves.

Only once, when a prominent PiS activist shared racist memes implying our candidate was in a Russian pornography film, did we retaliate. We went straight to court, and within a week won a defamation case against the activist who had to publicly apologize. We found this was the most impactful way to deal with hate—by standing up for your values and for decency through established checks and balances.

The third strategy is perhaps the most obvious. But bizarrely, it was the one which so many Polish political campaigns lacked.

In order to convince people to vote for you, you have to reach them where they are. And every single young voter is online. We built an around-the-clock social media presence on every platform—Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, and YouTube.

We also took advantage of micro-targeted online advertising. Understanding that voters are different also means that you are forced to consider what different groups may need. Campaigns can send different messages—or the same message in different ways—to voters depending on their age, gender, income, neighborhood, or what they like on Facebook. We leveraged publicly available data about historical voting patterns to target particular areas with specific messages. It’s common sense too. Your message and tone to young people attending a music festival is going to differ from your message and tone to older voters and small businesses at an early morning bazaar. On the street, this tone shift is so obvious it is automatic. But it needs to happen online, too, and it allows you to more effectively convince voters that you have the ideas and values that can enact positive change.

Over the next year, voters go to the polls in India, Venezuela, Georgia, and Mexico, all countries run by authoritarian populists. In each of them, young people who want something different will be fighting incumbent parties that tilt the playing field, cheat, or steal elections. In the United States, the incumbent president is not an authoritarian, but in many states, younger, democratic candidates are also fighting in conditions that aren’t as different from Poland as many Americans imagine. They will work inside gerrymandered systems, fight off vicious smear campaigns, and face consistent media bias.

Winning in these conditions is difficult, but as the election in Poland shows, it is not impossible. Success comes more readily to campaigns that look like a team and work like a team, that project a positive message in an overwhelmingly negative atmosphere, and that make full use of the tools available to them.

The post How Poland’s Opposition Won an Unfair Election appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One of my best friends died recently.

It still doesn’t feel real. The last time I saw her was the day after the Fourth of July. Her smile always lit up the room, but that night, the joy seemed to seep out of her, so much so that even the person who took our order at dinner commented on it.

Life was coming together. She’d gone back to school to become a speech-language pathology assistant and was on track to complete her program in the fall. Unfailingly patient, positive, and compassionate, her teachers said she had everything it took to excel in the field. She’d just become an aunt for the first time, too, and made the four-hour drive from Ventura to San Diego whenever she could to get to know this three-month-old with a gummy smile and a pompadour, who was now a part of her. And she’d recently fallen in love, with a guy from Missouri, whose Hinge profile she’d shown me last Thanksgiving. They were talking about moving in together after she graduated. Our high school friend group had yet to meet him, but she promised we would soon.

We never got the chance before she left us. It was a prolonged sinus infection that progressed into fatal meningitis. A “perfect storm” of events, a nurse later said. Everything went so wrong so fast that she was still wearing the magnetic eyelashes she’d put on to see the Barbie movie when she was brought to the hospital.

Perhaps inescapably, because we met in the 2000s, when social media was just taking off and phones had become cameras (and vice versa), the grief has taken on a digital dimension. To stop myself from being consumed by the questions around her death, the hows and whys of what happened, I’ve been trying to focus on remembering her life through these memories preserved in pixelated resin.

There is an overwhelming number of them to choose from, but I can’t help but feel what is missing. The Facebook replies I can no longer access because I deleted my account. The texts and videos I never backed up on the cloud. Obsolete media whose formats are no longer supported today. Underlying this sense of absence, of course, is the knowledge that as much as there is, there won’t be more coming.

Much of the digital ephemera I’ve come across so far I remember, even if the memories of what we were doing or where we were when we made them are just glimmers. But going through our old texts the other day, I found a few unopened voice messages I must have forgotten to play. Because I’d waded through so much of the annals of our lives at that point, I thought I was prepared for anything. But I haven’t been able to bring myself to listen to those recordings yet.

I think it’s because the medium feels like it picks up a conversation in real time. It’s the message in the bottle of the digital age. You share a thought without knowing when, where, or in what time zone it will find its recipient. In that way, voice messages feel alive in a way that video or a photo—where a haircut, a t-shirt, or a setting betrays its time stamp—does not.

Voice messages are relatively new. WeChat, the Chinese instant message and social media app, introduced them in 2011, and they have been available on Apple’s iMessage since June 2014. Over the past decade, the technology, which allows you to send voice recordings over messenger apps, has rapidly gained popularity. According to a recent YouGov poll for Vox, 62% of Americans say they’ve sent a voice message (or voice memo or voice note), and around 30% communicate this way “weekly, daily, or multiple times a day.”

But the basic idea behind the technology has arguably been with us since the mid-1800s when Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented the phonautograph, the first machine to document sound. This soon gave way to Thomas Edison’s phonograph, which allowed people to record and playback sound on cylinders, opening up the commercial possibilities of the audio medium.

It doesn’t surprise me that once people could get their hands on the phonograph, they instantly saw its potential for preserving the voices of loved ones beyond the grave.

“The phonograph was linked with death from the very beginning,” according to Jonathan Scott’s Into the Groove: The Story of Sound From Tin Foil to Vinyl, which notes that the “idea of the preservation of a voice after death was a common trope in the phonograph’s advertising copy.” Most famously, the iconic trademark and logo of Victor Talking Machine Company, later RCA Victor, seemingly depicts a dog listening to a recording of his late owner.

Nipper, the dog gazing at the brass horn of a phonograph in English artist Francis Barraud’s painting “His Master’s Voice,” was the real-life companion of the artist’s recently departed brother, Mark Henry. While it’s been debunked that Nipper was actually listening to Mark’s recorded voice in Francis’ original rendering, recording the “last words” of dying individuals was a real trend, as detailed in newspaper accounts, like this 1889 piece in the San Francisco Examiner about a family who took a phonograph to the hospital to “cheer their mother on during her long illness and also to preserve the tones of her voice to comfort them after her death.”

It makes sense that Victorians embraced a technology for preserving the voices of the departed. The culture was steeped in death due to high mortality rates, and from funerals to fashion, Victorians came up with a dizzying number of ways to commemorate those who had passed (what historian James Steven Curl has characterized as a “celebration of death”).

Rapid scientific advancement during the era, which comingled with a burgeoning spiritualist movement, seemingly made the Great Beyond more tangible to mourners. The invention of X-ray machines made the invisible visible. Modern camera techniques like double exposure allowed for “spirit photographs,” which hinted at a world beyond this one. The phonograph presented just another way to thin the veil between the living and the dead, to help those grieving find new ways to connect with those who were gone.

Historian of sound John M. Picker has also made the case that because the phonograph was the first technology that let people record sound at home, its embrace by Victorians was “inherently more personal and interactive” than consumer responses to audio technology that followed (such as the gramophone, which allowed playback only).

We’ve come a long way from that initial liberation of the voice from the constraints of time and space. But holding my iPhone in 2023, the distance to these earliest phonographic recordings feels closer.

Like the Victorians, and many, many people since, I share that same human want that drove us to record sound from the beginning: to hold on to those we’ve loved and lost and miss.

The post Her Voice Memos and My Grief appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This summer, a record-breaking, estimated 220 million U.S. tourists—85% of American adults—have been on the move. Many of them will head to Tulum, Mexico, which I also recently visited. Businesses across Tulum cater directly to U.S. tourists’ Instagram accounts. They offer decorative twinkle lights to provide flattering lighting, swings instead of seats, and neon signs—like the bright pink cursive at a bar on the town’s main drag that declares, “I’m in Tulum, Bitches!”

Where tourism was once a way to broaden our horizons and gain a deeper understanding of other cultures, social media, and the global economy together have changed that. The point is no longer just to consume new experiences—it’s also to be able to show that consumption to followers back home. Now, traveling often feels like an Instagram feedback loop. Meanwhile, our search for Instagrammable views has remade whole local economies and environments, and changed the lives of thousands of people in the process.

Tulum is in southeastern Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, in the state of Quintana Roo. The region’s original inhabitants are the Indigenous Maya. The stunning archaeological ruins at nearby Chichén Itzá—a UNESCO World Heritage Site—are an accomplishment of their civilization. The ruins show an astronomical acumen, including an ability to predict celestial events such as eclipses, which they incorporated into their architecture to stunning effect; sophisticated agricultural techniques that allowed them to farm the seaside land; and a road network system that predated the European road network system.

I’m a third-generation Mexican American who’s been traveling back to my family’s hometown of Acaponeta, Nayarit, my whole life. I’ve been to plenty of other destinations in Mexico, too, including Tulum in 1988, when it was still a small fishing village. Then, in 1999, hoping to ride the tourism prosperity wave underway in Cancun, the government rebranded the region the Riviera Maya. Entrepreneurs, developers, and immigrants from the U.S. and Europe soon followed. They set up hotels and residences, and hosted yoga festivals and dance parties. In 2004, the New York Times dubbed Tulum a “countercultural haven,” even as it pointed out the dangers of commercialization.

Since then, development—often fueled by foreign investors—has unfolded without much forethought, government oversight, or planning so fast that it has outrun the local government’s ability to provide basic services like electricity and sewage. You won’t see the squatter camps where imported workers find themselves living on Instagram. And stunning images of divers and snorkelers in the Mesoamerican Reef System, the second largest coral reef in the world, rarely feature the human waste that’s increasingly turning up in its underground rivers. The impacts of tourism will only get worse, with a train project connecting Tulum to Cancun on track to bring more people, plow through the jungle home of endangered habits, and destroy caves that may contain important Maya relics.

In the face of such massive changes, locals find themselves—as Matilde Córdoba Azcárate’s marvelous book about Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula puts it—“Stuck with Tourism.”  Contemporary Indigenous Maya have few options but to work as construction workers, maids, and taxi drivers serving the 22 million people who arrive each year at the nearby #cancunairport. When we spent the day at a beach club, I met Rodrigo, a charming 22-year-old bartender from Tulum. He told me that the days were long, and the tips were often lousy—but he still feared the day when some new best thing would take Tulum’s place. Rosalya, my guide at Chichén Itzá, likewise told us that when she began giving tours 17 years ago—as the first woman to do so—fellow locals critiqued her for joining the tourism industry. But, she said, she didn’t see any other options.

What are the responsibilities of U.S. tourists in the face of this global inequity? Multiple articles published this summer have proposed that we stop traveling. But mitigating the negative impacts of unchecked development requires larger, structural changes, including investment in local markets and government oversight.

While I don’t want to suggest that people simply stop traveling, I do want visitors to understand our impact—especially the very material impact of our use of digital technology. Social media now drives tourism at an unprecedented pace and volume. Government tourism boards hire influencers and celebrities, from Lionel Messi to TikTok’s “Corn Kid” to brand and promote destinations. Travel bloggers and TikTokers make their living using algorithms and hashtags to guide travelers to remote sites of natural beauty or supposedly unknown, authentic restaurants. Businesses race to make themselves ever more attractive to visitors’ phone lenses. As visitors follow and share their experiences in real-time, the images circulate faster and faster, like an accelerant to a bonfire. While governments and developers rake in foreign dollars, locals—many of whom are poor and/or Indigenous in the case of Mexico—pay the price.

But there are other ways to travel, too, including with an understanding of its impact and sustainability, with a curiosity about the history of a place and its people, and by making conscious choices about where your money is going. So instead of staying home, consider another, perhaps equally unthinkable, proposal: traveling without posting to social media. If we focus more on inquiry and less on how our trip looks to others, we can be not just consumers but participants in a cultural exchange with those whose labor makes our experience possible.

The post What Should We Do About Instagram <br>Colonialism? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My best friend’s 13-year-old son recently asked me to friend him on the social media app BeReal.

She had decided to let him download BeReal partially because it lets users post just once per day and has very limited chat features, and only under the condition that they had to be friends. But he was free to choose what and when to post, what to comment, and whom to befriend (including, to my amusement, me). My friend was treating it like a learner’s-permit version of Instagram or Facebook. Her son could drive his social media car, but only with an adult present in the front seat.

Like many parents and caregivers, her aim was to develop a way for her son to safely learn about and prepare for our increasingly virtually connected world, while still respecting his right to speech and self-expression in an age-appropriate manner. This vision of adolescence as a driver’s permit to adult-sized rights regularly emerges in my work as a historian of law and childhood. Throughout histories of childhood and youth, my profession is examining the boundaries of young people’s rights in various contexts, from medical consent to due process rights that have contemporary political implications.

But in some states, the law may soon criminalize these very actions.

In the wake of remote learning’s increased screen time and the rise of anti-LGBTQ legislation, predominately conservative lawmakers have been raising a new round of moral panic over young people’s mental health and their exposure to adult content. Their push for a radical new vision of internet access is rooted in political fears about youth and social media, and threatens decades of free speech protections.

There is a long history of moral panics around youth and the popular technology of their eras. The Victorians worried that bicycles enabled teens and unmarried adults to avoid chaperones, and that they contributed to a growing popularity of bloomers over dresses or skirts. For Cold War parents, comic books symbolized the rise of the violent and crazed juvenile delinquent and sparked a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigation. These panics were less a reaction to reality, but rather, they represented cyclical anxieties of generational segregation and control over young people.

Foundational child protection law is already in place in the United States. In 1998, the Federal Children Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) prohibited the collection of online data from online users under the age of 12. In 2013, it was amended to expand its reach. But now, state lawmakers want legislation that would criminalize internet access for millions of Americans.

For adults, this legislation has focused on limiting access to pornography. But more changes in process are targeting young people’s social media usage. In Texas, state representative Jared Patterson filed H.B. No. 896 last December, which would have banned any person under the age of 18 from using social media apps, and allowed parents to request the removal of their children’s social media accounts. Though the bill failed to pass, undeterred conservatives in Utah pushed forward a similar bill, quickly passed and signed into law this March, which prohibits minors from having any social media accounts. It also has created a nearly unenforceable “internet curfew.”

While the Utah and Texas cases represent the most extreme measures in the new efforts to control youth internet access, a bipartisan group of federal lawmakers has also introduced the more seemingly palatable Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, a revamped version of the previously rejected Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which aims to censor material considered potentially “harmful.” Yet, as law and technology expert Mike Masnick has written, with no clear definition of “harmful content,” state attorney generals can define the term as it suits them, and use it to target websites they want blocked for ideological reasons. Last year, over 90 LGBTQ+ and human rights groups signed a letter in protest of KOSA.

It’s true that there is content on the internet that poses dangers to minors. The media has featured heartbreaking stories of cyberbullying and online predators. But it’s because of those dangers that nuance in lawmaking is so critical. Blanket bans replicate the very dangers they are designed to prevent: Strict parental controls create a ring of invisibility around domestic abuse, while increasing data collection from all Americans, child or adult.

Likewise, while studies have pointed to social media’s impact on mental health, banning it won’t solve the youth mental health crisis, as the legislation suggests. Social media is just one part of American childhood today, alongside rampant gun violence, anti-LGBTQ+ fascism, and endemic economic inequality.

And then there’s the First Amendment. By seeking to purge children from the internet, conservative lawmakers are denying young people the right to expression, speech, and creativity. Stripping them of their right to speak out on platforms, often about issues that impact them directly, runs counter to decades of precedent for young people.

Young people had their earliest First Amendment victory in Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), when siblings Mary Beth and John Tinker, who had been expelled for their silent protest of the Vietnam War, argued that their rights to free speech did not end at the entrance of their public school. The Supreme Court agreed. Subsequent decisions, Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier (1988) and Morse v. Frederick (2007), upheld Tinker’s basic ruling, while carving out caveats in favor of school administrators. But until 2021, the Supreme Court had yet to deal with a case regarding youth free speech and the internet.

Then came the memorably named “Cursing Cheerleader” case, Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. After a student recorded and uploaded a Snapchat story featuring a caption cursing and criticizing her high school, school administrators suspended her from the junior varsity cheerleading team. The case asked the Court if Tinker applied to a student’s social media post. With an 8-1 decision, the Court found that it did. (Justice Clarence Thomas, the sole dissent, argued for a chipping away of Tinker in favor of schools and parents.)

When Utah’s latest social media ban is inevitably challenged in court, the state will need to argue against these Supreme Court rulings that uphold youth First Amendment protections. But it takes time for a case to make its way through the courts. Until then, this law and others like it will deny young people their right to be online, while creating a much more dangerous digital landscape for the very children they allege to protect.

Though the internet isn’t perfect, it can be a space of creativity and intellectual engagement for youth. Ranging from budding craftspeople learning to operate a business, to youth activists working on climate change and LGBTQ rights, young people wield their digital literacy for positive efforts, often using social media in the process. Banning their social media use will merely push them to further hide their online activity, and to speak less freely about the issues they face in digital spaces. It criminalizes their attempts to learn to live in a virtual world and ignores the necessity of the internet for modern life.

It’s better to arm the young people in our lives with digital literacy and open dialogue. Take a page from my friend’s parenting book, give them space to learn, post silly pictures, and teach you a thing or two. And, while we’re at it, encourage them to get outside and ride a bike—no matter the legwear they choose.

The post Let the Kids “BeReal” on Social Media appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You could argue that the teenaged Elagabalus deployed proto-whoopee cushions solely for his own amusement. Or maybe they provided a way for him to put stuffy dignitaries in their place.

Pranking has always made space for the above and more—offering us a source of entertainment, amusement, humiliation, and embarrassment. The most radical can even educate and activate us. As the organizer Nancy Kricorian once put it, pranks—like her group CODEPINK glitter-bombing a presidential hopeful for his anti-LGBTQ politics—give us “an alternative version of reality visible on the streets and on the news.”

But has the digital age ruined pranking?

Social media has certainly opened up the prank—allowing anyone with a camera to upload a stunt with the possibility that it could go viral, which led to something of a cash grab in the aughts as creators made a fortune posting sensationalist clickbait (sometimes real, sometimes staged) on monetized prank channels.

Whether it was making crank calls, performing bizarre acts in public, or provoking strangers, these entrepreneurial prankster accounts generated millions of page views at their height, becoming “one of the major contents of social media landscape … purposively designed [for an] economy of pay-per-click/view,” researchers report.

It can be depressing to think of the modern prank primarily serving as an engine of page views. But commercialized pranksters are nothing new. As Kembrew McLeod, author of Pranksters: Making Mischief in the Modern World, tells me: “It’s just that our new media environment has probably made us pay attention to especially the strain of hucksters and hoaxers who are in it for the money.”

All the way back in the 18th century, prankster Benjamin Franklin drummed up sales of his Poor Richard’s Almanack by starting a trolling war with rival printer Titan Leeds. By using astrology, “Richard,” Franklin’s pseudonym predicted Leeds’ exact time of death in the papers. When his prediction didn’t pan out and the publisher remained alive and producing pamphlets, “Richard” hen kept the gag going by insisting that Leeds’ ghost was now in charge. (Like most pranks, Franklin wasn’t the first to pull this gag; 25 years earlier, Jonathan Swift, looking to stick it to astrologer John Partridge, published his own prediction of the astrologer’s time of death.)

But it’s also important to remember that pranking is an ecosystem, and as tastes and trends change, so too will the pranks that rise to the top.

From fake kidnapping to straight-up harassment, modern pranksters pushed the boundaries so far in their quests for stardom that by 2019, YouTube was forced to clarify what could—and could not—be posted on its platform. Its community guidelines no note: “We don’t allow pranks that make victims believe they’re in serious physical danger – for example, a home invasion prank or a drive-by shooting prank. We also don’t allow pranks that cause children to experience severe emotional distress.”

It was clear that the joke had started to go too far online, and fan backlash, coupled with YouTube’s policy changes, once again has started to shift the prank landscape.

NBC trends reporter Morgan Sung called attention to waning interest around the aughts YouTube prankster in 2022, observing that “the pranks that truly flourish online today are the ones trolling political establishments as a form of social activism.”

Activist pranksters have a rich lineage all their own. In 1991, members of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) pranked then-U.S. Senator Jesse Helms by installing a giant condom over his home to draw attention to his vocal opposition to funding safe-sex education. And in the 1960s, Youth International Party (better known as Yippie) activists pulled pranks like throwing money onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and nominating a pig for president at the Democratic National Convention.

One of the most impactful pranks of late in this vein came when a Twitter user impersonated the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. On their fake account, they announced that insulin—a life-saving medication for people with diabetes—was now free. Just months after the stunt, and after three decades of raising list prices on its most widely used insulin product, Eli Lilly was seemingly shamed into announcing that it would cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $35 per month.

Viewing the landscape of pranks from the lens of 2023, it may be most useful to see the trickery afoot operating amid a larger ecosystem. As McLeod put it: “The socially conscious pranksters and the hucksters and P.T. Barnums of today have continued to operate essentially in parallel with each other.”

But McLeod has noticed one recent change in the prank world today that has less of a precedent: the danger that people take on for the sake of the prank.

Having once dressed up as a robot to confront Bill Clinton, McLeod is no stranger to the risks inherent in his craft. But he’s noticed that there’s been a heightened danger of physical violence around pulling political pranks in the past decade.

“It’s just this much more charged political environment,” he said, which leads to more altercations, making it “much more dangerous to engage in these sorts of disruptive pranks that are intended to be social commentary.”

But such a volatile political atmosphere, of course, suggests that causing some good mischief is all the more vital.

Should you want to try your hand at something a little more complex than a whoopee cushion this April 1, McLeod has some advice for you: to pull off a good prank, he shared, all it takes is “a little bit of planning, a little bit of bravery, and some imagination.”

The post Social Media Won’t Kill the Whoopee Cushion appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Synonymous with the highly edited lifestyle post, Instagram has long functioned like a high school in a John Hughes movie: accruing “likes” is a popularity contest for visibility—except that if you’re voted “prom queen” on the platform it can translate to some serious brand and sponsorship deals.

But TikTok has tailored its algorithm in a radically different way. A home for short-form videos (the concept first pioneered by its predecessor Vine), its aim is to deliver “content to each user that is likely to be of interest to that particular user.”

Of course, the real goal of all of these platforms is to keep us scrolling. But TikTok’s emphasis on individually curated feeds and niche material has taken over today’s media landscape. And its dominance has forced other social media companies to adapt (to varying degrees of success), if they want to stay relevant, or at least keep their backers happy. The result—a smorgasbord of content that’s emerged across platforms—feels like a constantly changing, pluralistic pit of variety theater. And it’s ushering in a new era of popular entertainment. The closest equivalent to it that I can think of is vaudeville.

Hear me out.

The original vaudeville rose up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries amid a moment of profound change in American life, offering its own constantly changing acts in response to a country in flux.

At its height, the vaudeville machine was putting more than 25,000 on stage daily to perform their routines for millions. “It was the largest entertainment system the world had ever seen, held together by railroad and telegraph and ordered by form and filing cabinet,” historian Samuel E. Backer writes of the business of vaudeville. And before you could wrap your head around any of these “fast-paced succession of individual performances,” they were already being cycled out for something new.

A typical show ran for about as long as a blockbuster film’s duration today, but people could choose to watch the whole thing or just sit in on the “turns” on the program bill that most appealed to them.

Those performances ranged dramatically. Singing and dancing numbers were on almost every bill, but you never knew what other kinds of other acts would show up on the ticket. Take the silent comic Chaz Chase, who gained acclaim for eating everything from cigarettes and roses on stage (you could argue it was a precursor to the Korean-inspired food-eating mukbang genre, except here the effect was achieved by slight-of-hand trickery). Or Edgar “Painless” Parker, a dentist who was famous for extracting (very real) teeth on stage. They’re just two of the many, varied performers who found a voice on the vaudeville stage.

However unique the routines seemed, there was always a shared DNA to the performances, a lexicon of stock jokes, comedy routines, and other materials that the performers traveling on the vaudeville circuit were constantly in conversation around. What made certain ones shine were the extra flourishes added, “what cannot be transcribed in words, the physical comedy, or the ‘business’—the humor of inflections and body language at which so many vaudevillians excelled,” as the Library of Congress put it.

Vaudeville quickly gained a reputation for being a highly populist, highly optimistic form of entertainment. The vaudevillian impresario E. F. Albee sounds positively Pollyanna about the medium in one interview, claiming that in vaudeville “there is always something for everybody, just as in every state and city, in every county and town in our democratic country, there is opportunity for everybody, a chance for all.”

That’s a bit of a stretch—but there is something to Albee’s sentiment. Performers on stage often reflected the diversity of the people in the seats watching them. One of the most influential scholars on vaudeville, David Monod, created an online database of vaudeville acts that highlights this range of talent and scope, which reached people from different race, ethnicity, gender, and economic class (with the notable exception of the poorest Americans, Monod notes, who couldn’t afford the price of a ticket). But that didn’t mean vaudeville spoke for everyone—its comedy, especially, was often built on tired routines that stereotyped and dehumanized people based on their race and ethnicity. Especially for African American performers, racism was an omnipresent reality of the business, which is why some Black artists eventually broke away from the predominantly white vaudeville circuits to create their own shows.

If there’s a name to know behind the mélange of tastes that became the vaudeville voice, it’s Tony Pastor, a devout Catholic who’s remembered as the “Father of Vaudeville.” In 1881, he opened up the Tammany Hall theater on East 14th Street in New York, where he set out to make vaudeville family-friendly. Because of his influence, burlesque, a staple in early vaudeville “hot shows,” was increasingly pushed out in favor of “clean shows” that attracted less police presence. “Pastor’s shows became so clean that ‘a child could take his parents into his theatre,’” quipped one observer.

Bostonians B.F. Keith and Edward Albee expanded on Pastor’s vision, opening theaters that continued this “focus on respectability,” according to vaudeville scholar Mark Hauser. Hauser notes that Keith and Albee, who received funding from the Archdiocese of Boston, even had Sunday school teachers standing at the back of the theater to watch for vulgarities.

Because of this, while vaudeville is often said to have mirrored the public’s tastes, historian John DiMeglio cautioned that “it also exercised a considerable power in shaping its viewers’ feelings” including their moral attitudes and ideas—a theme that echoes today in TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance, which has played an invisible hand in determining what videos can gain traction on the platform.

Back in the early 20th century, the vaudeville form seemed unstoppable. And then, one day, a new emerging entertainment medium came along: film. Suddenly big- and small-time performers alike who had been incubated on the vaudeville circuit found their heyday had ended, and had no choice but to adapt to fresh performative conventions or fade out of relevancy.

As I scroll through TikTok today and stop to watch a cat in a chef’s hat make a latte or catch up on the latest Gen Z drama acted out via plastic figurine, am I all that different from the audiences these theaters cultivated a century ago? I, too, am watching as new trends rise and fall, and seeing creators learn from one another to create, recycle, and reimagine their acts to meet and shape our moment. Only this time around, the talent pool is worldwide.

How long TikTok will have us in its grasp is impossible to say. But the reason it captivates us is no surprise. As Monod, the vaudeville scholar, writes, vaudeville was “a playful expression of early 20th century modernity” that appealed to people seeking “not just escape but stipulation.” This sentiment easily captures TikTok’s appeal a century later.

And just like audiences watching Chanticleer cyclists harmonize their way across stage in the early 1900s, when I open TikTok and see the latest video appear on my screen, I can’t look away.

The post Are We Entering a New Age of Vaudeville? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Leave it to Joan Didion. In her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” published in 1967, she identified a kind of slippage in our culture, the breakdown of collective narrative. “The center was not holding,” she famously begins, before moving on to details: “casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled.” It’s a set of images to which I find myself returning here in the summer of 2022, when the Supreme Court has voted to overturn Roe v. Wade; the findings of a House Select Committee, empaneled to investigate the attack on the Capitol, is regarded by a considerable percentage of the populace as “fake news”; and a series of mass shootings, culminating in the July 4 ambush of an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois, have turned our communities and schools, once more, into killing floors.

What we’re seeing is not a matter of disagreement or debate. Rather, it’s an expression of the collapse of society’s public narrative: the fragmentation of the commons, if such a term can still be said to apply. How do we come together in a landscape where fiction is now regarded as fact and fact dismissed as mere opinion?

At one time, we relied—or imagined that we did—on public narratives to uphold the center. The point of America, its measure (so to speak), has been to be progressive: to include more people, to extend more rights. I believed this as firmly as anything I ever believed about this tragic country.

I now believe that we are lost.

What Didion foresaw—“we could no longer overlook the vacuum,” she writes, “no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed”—has become the way we live, manipulated by news that is not news and feeds that amplify ignorance. It’s taken barely 60 years to move from “We shall overcome” to “You will not replace us.” This is how our narrative has unraveled. This is how we have lost our way.

I’m pointing the finger here, yes, I am, at the anti-vaxxers, at the homophobes and anti-trans haters, the election deniers, the traitors who stormed the Capitol. Very fine people on both sides; all lives matter—I, for one, can’t imagine finding common ground with replacement theory supremacists, or, for that matter, advocates of the Big Lie, that the 2020 election was stolen, spread by the former president and his followers. But I’m also wondering about the future of the country, whether there even is one, whether this is a goal we continue to share?

There’s a meme I keep encountering, citing Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, this does not appear to be anything Goebbels ever said. Still, let’s stay with it for a moment because it’s also instructive. Certainly, Goebbels could have made such a statement; it aligns with pretty much all he thought. This meme, I should say, is intended as a corrective, a critique of those who have been taken in. At the same time, it also highlights a larger danger: the fact that all of us, given the right circumstances, can be duped.

The same was true in Didion’s era also, when many of the prevailing public narratives were authoritarian and divisive. I think of the quotas faced by Jewish students, among others, at American universities, which extended into the 1960s; the redlining and housing covenants that prevailed across the country; the restriction or outright non-existence of women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights.

Yet in the era of social media—which now comes framed as discourse in its own right—the progress of the last decades feels illusory, if not outright moot. “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy,” Elon Musk tweeted on March 26, shortly before making a $41.4 billion offer to buy the company. (He’s now headed to court to get out of the deal.) Musk is overstating, of course; less than a quarter of U.S. adults use the platform—or about the number who voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

On my feeds, I can see the algorithm working: Trends are tailored to my searches and my predilections, intended to magnify, and encourage, my opinions and beliefs. The public narrative, in other words, has now become a private narrative, self-selected. Nothing is considered or thought through. Rather, it’s a self-fulfilling set of echoes, less conversation than monologue in overlapping snippets of text or images, sound and fury signifying nothing.

In the face of this, I find myself turning away from public narrative. I look for solidarity or consolation in the private narratives of others—literature mostly. Why? Because in books and essays, I find a more fundamental humanity (which is not the same thing as a sense of peace). So many writers have lived through what we’re facing, and worse. Some survived and some did not. But in staring down their circumstances directly, with grace and clarity, they offer a model of how I want to think and to behave.

And so, I look to George Orwell, who admonishes in his essay “Inside the Whale” that for people raised like us, in a country built on rule of law, “such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial, etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism.” It’s a reminder of the dangers we are facing, a reminder that we need to stay aware. Or I consider Anne Frank, writing from the Achterhuis: “I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

When my children were little, I liked to imagine—as the artist Wallace Berman did before me—that one might make revolution a single household at a time. Although I still believe that change begins at home, this, too, cuts both ways. The ecstatic social revolution Didion was critiquing, what did it teach us? That utopia and dystopia are intertwined.

Many days now, I don’t know what to do with this. Many days, it makes me want to retreat. Retreat, however, is just another word for surrender, and surrender comes at far too high a cost. “[W]hat was the point,” James Baldwin asks in The Fire Next Time, “the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved to me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet answered. But what I did was my responsibility, and I would have to answer, too.”

I don’t believe in the judgment trumpet. It’s not an emblem of my faith. But what I do believe in is the question Baldwin raises: How to live responsibly, not only for one’s own future but also that of everybody else. I am not an altruist, and I am filled with anger, but what else can I do?

We do not get to choose the times we live in, only how we respond.

The post When the Public Narrative Fails appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This is a new kind of war, waged by a new kind of citizen.

The failure of the Russian forces to subdue Ukraine quickly has astonished experts, officials, and journalists worldwide. It shouldn’t. The Ukrainian resistance is just the latest example of the new attitudes and abilities of 21st century citizens.

While social media has been getting a lot of attention in this “TikTok War,” the real story is the growing determination and capacity of ordinary people. Around the world, ordinary people are fundamentally different from people of generations past. They have dramatically higher levels of education, far less deference to authority figures, and much greater facility with technology.

These trends have changed citizenship itself. We need to understand this shift so that societies, especially democratic ones, can figure out how to adapt, both in war and peace.

The war in Ukraine is instructive, in at least four ways.

First, citizens now have the ability to make their own media; Ukrainians, under attack, are mass-producing reality TV. Thanks to footage produced by thousands of people and viewed by millions, the war has a constantly unfolding cast of characters. Ukrainian farmers towing Russian vehicles, a soldier moonwalking in a field, people joyriding on a captured Russian tank, and a little girl singing “Let It Go” in a Kiev bomb shelter have become relatable, inspiring figures in the conflict. Seemingly every time Ukrainians have success on the battlefield, they upload videos of burned tanks and downed planes.

Perhaps most poignant are the videos of Russian POWs—young, hungry, and confused—being fed by their captors and allowed to call their mothers. These conversations, in which they tell their parents they are OK and aren’t sure why they ended up in a war, may be the best hope for affecting Russian public opinion. The Ukrainian hotline set up for Russians trying to get information on their loved ones on the front lines has also produced heartrending recordings. These videos expose the one thing Putin can’t easily hide: Russian deaths on the battlefield.

All that citizen-made media has been fuel for a second major trend of 21st century citizenship: crowdsourced community organizing.

Nonviolent protests have sprung up around the world, both on the internet and on the streets, including in Russia and in occupied Ukrainian cities. The capacity of citizens to make this civil disobedience visible has rallied millions of others to their cause. People are filming the crowds that slow Russian convoys, and mapping protests around the world in precise geo-located detail, so that others can join in.

This organizing happens rapidly and shows advanced collective thinking. People aren’t simply protesting the war, they are focusing on specific priorities and pressuring Western governments to move on them: singling out Russian oligarchs, denying SWIFT access to Russian banks, banning Russian oil, and shaming international corporations into halting their Russian operations. Community organizers call this “finding winnable issues.” Many of these economic sanctions are unprecedented, and it seems unlikely that Western governments and businesses would have taken all of these drastic steps if not for large-scale public pressure.

In addition to pressuring governments, many citizens are also sidestepping civil society institutions. They are supporting Ukrainians not just through traditional means like donating money to the Red Cross, but by using networks like AirBnB to send money directly to Ukrainian families. This is international aid without institutional intermediaries.

It isn’t just the aid that is do-it-yourself. The warfare is DIY, too.

The contributions of Ukrainian citizens to the war effort includes all generations: grandmothers making Molotov cocktails, mothers brandishing assault rifles, young couples getting married at the front, schoolchildren sewing camouflage nets.

Some of the combatants aren’t even in Ukraine: a small army of hackers is helping to disrupt Russian technologies, interfere with defense communications, and broadcast news about the war to Russian citizens. In an interview with Politico, Ukraine’s deputy digital minister Alex Bornyakov reported that there are 300,000 people worldwide contributing to these efforts.

“We don’t have a chain of command or any structure at all,” Bornyakov said. “So, [Russia] can’t fight it. It’s impossible to disrupt it or break it down. You can’t bomb it or cut off connections or take down a top person—because there is no top person.”

Of course, such warfare isn’t entirely new. For thousands of years ordinary people have taken up scythes and muskets against invading armies; for hundreds of years there have been propaganda campaigns; for decades people have been able to see in real time events happening on the other side of the world.

But the war in Ukraine is revealing how much things have advanced in the last 20 years: the full flowering of a gigantic global network of person-to-person connections; the blurring of the lines between professionals and amateurs; the ability of almost everyone to make their experiences visible and immediate to millions of other people.

Five years ago, the American writer and democracy advocate Eric Liu wrote that “We are in the midst of a profound global Great Push Back against concentrated, monopolized, hoarded power.” Today in Ukraine, we are witnessing not just the decentralization of power—along with knowledge, skill, and authority—but the ability of the “crowd” to wield those decentralized resources in coordinated ways.

The changes in citizen attitudes and capacities are not all positive. Just like previous generations, 21st century citizens can be selfish and unwilling to compromise, saddled with bias and racist assumptions, and fundamentally misinformed. There is no guarantee that the crowd will wield power in ways that are wise, equitable, or just.

But these dangers are unavoidable when people are empowered. And the best way to reckon with them is to seize the related opportunities that this change in citizenship creates for democracy.

We are already seeing what is possible when democratic governments support, inform, and collaborate with 21st century citizens. Countries like Colombia, Iceland, Taiwan, and Brazil have been leaders in democracy innovation: reforms and practices that strengthen relationships between people, give them a meaningful say in decisions, and support their volunteer efforts. Many of these ideas, like participatory budgeting and citizen’s assemblies, create situations where people can learn about an issue, talk with people who have different views, and make decisions together. (Some Ukrainian cities have also been hotbeds of this kind of democratic experimentation.) Others, like crowd-resourcing, inspire and coordinate volunteer efforts to solve public problems.

The desire of citizens to connect, be heard, and get things done seems universal. Even in Russia, the “demand for democratic input” in governance has been on the rise.

Governments should adapt to the shift in citizenship by explaining these potential democracy innovations to their citizens, offering different democracy options and working with citizens to implement them, and measuring their impacts.

Putin’s regime seems more like a criminal institution than a political or military one. And it still may be effective enough to win the war, because of the overwhelming Russian advantage in traditional military resources. But even if the Russian military is victorious on the battlefield, it seems unlikely that the Russians can occupy, let alone govern, Ukraine for long.

Whenever peace comes to Ukraine, and the rest of the world, we need to appreciate the new realities of what citizens want and can do. The greatest hope for democracy, justice, and peace is for leaders and institutions to interact more productively with the people they serve.

The post Ukraine Shows Us the Power of the 21st-Century Citizen appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The saga, which involved effusive wooing, a curated Spotify playlist, and of course, the cold exit (not to mention at least one allegation of an unsolicited explicit pic), proved to be just the kind of catnip that can scorch-earth its way through social media.

By the time #WestElmCaleb—so named for the place of work listed on his dating profile— played out on TikTok, no one came out unscathed. The original West Elm Caleb’s identity was repeatedly doxxed. Localized efforts to name and shame the West Elm Calebs of other zip codes took off. And brands, from Ruggable to Matel, jumped into the fray like vultures to a carcass to pick at what was left.

Dubbed “2022’s most embarrassing witch hunt,” the level of engagement around West Elm Caleb was perhaps its most puzzling dimension. Did everyone just hear about dating in the year 2022?

But from Caleb’s original sin, love bombing—one person showering another with grand romantic gestures just out of the gate in order to manipulate them—to the TikTok mob that emerged, narcissism offers a through line. As a well-timed New York Times explainer noted, the phenomenon of love bombing is a red flag that you’re dating a narcissist. (And if you’re gleefully filming front-facing videos in full makeup as part of a vicious pile on, that’s maybe also an indicator.)

Studies have shown that less than 5.3 percent of the general population actually has narcissistic personality disorder—which itself continues to be a controversial diagnosis. At one point, the American Psychiatric Association considered dropping it from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders entirely. Yet the term “narcissism” continues to be a buzzword of our times.

Coronated into popular culture in the 1970s by social critics like Christopher Lasch, who latched onto it as a sign of national decay, narcissism has captured the American imagination like no other over the last half century. The word has continued to be melted down and repurposed into a catch-all insult about self-absorption and vanity. In our social media age, that often takes the form of a hand-wavey article every few months or so proclaiming that this latest generation is the most narcissistic yet (not true), or that the internet has made narcissists of us all (well, maybe).

Narcissism, of course, dates back all the way to its foundational myth, famously immortalized by the Roman poet Ovid. Ovid spun the tale of a handsome young hunter, Narcissus, who is prophesized to live a long life, so long as he never recognizes himself. When Narcissus spurns the affections of a nymph named Echo, she becomes overcome by grief, fading away until just her voice is left. Watching this, Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, decides to punish Narcissus and lures him to a pool where he fatefully peers upon his reflection for the first time. Transfixed by his beauty, Narcissus falls in love with his own self-image. Ovid’s version, published in Metamorphoses in 8 CE, ends in heartbreak: Narcissus realizes he can never be with his own reflection and like Echo, he too withers away, ultimately transforming into the Narcissus flower.

But that narrative isn’t the earliest known telling of the myth. Only a few years ago, that version—a darker story that ends in suicide—was found in the Oxyrhynchus papyri trove, the largest collection of ancient writings in the world, so named for the location in Egypt where they were discovered a little over 100 years ago.

Oxford classicist Benjamin Henry, who transcribed and translated the fragment, believes it was written down in the mid-1st century BCE by Parthenius of Nicaea, who was known for recording obscure stories of love. Parthenius’s Narcissus doesn’t involve Echo, but rather male suitors, whose affections Narcissus also spurns in favor of his own reflection.

The myth wasn’t intended as a cautionary tale around vanity. Rather the narrative, which likely originated in the Hellenistic age, as early as the 3rd century BCE, was probably used to explain why a particular god was worshiped in a particular place—in this case to encourage the local population to honor Vera, the god of love, more reverently. “Whether it was supposed to shed any light on psychology or any such thing is rather unclear,” Henry told me.

Had Ovid not revamped the tale, Narcissus may have ended up just an obscure local story. “It’s really Ovid’s retelling and ingenious rhetorical speeches that he gives to Narcissus and Echo that made the myth popular,” Henry explained.

It’s worth remembering that there are actually several early versions of the Narcissus story out there. Another version, by an unknown author, even creates a backstory where Narcissus is in love with a sister, who dies at a young age. In this telling, Narcissus consoles himself with his watery visage, which resembles hers—casting his self-absorption in a more sympathetic light.

This more nuanced interpretation of Narcissus is more in keeping with the way the psychological condition was first characterized by Freud in his influential 1914 paper “On Narcissism.” Freud borrowed the term from Havelock Ellis, the founder of modern sexology (and a eugenicist) and German psychiatrist Paul Näcke. Ellis first linked the idea of excessive self-love to the Greek myth by using the phrase “Narcissus-like” in 1898, and Näcke added on an -ism to it the following year, to characterize self-absorption around sexual emotion. Freud took this and established the concept of narcissism as we understand it today.

Notably, Freud’s paper breaks narcissism into two parts. Primary narcissism, he argued, is a part of everyone’s psychological makeup. “Loving oneself,” he wrote, is the “libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation.” He linked secondary narcissism, by contrast, to megalomania, a form of delusional grandiosity.

Today, there’s been something of a renaissance of scholarship around narcissism that adds even more dimension to the concept. “Two Faces of Narcissism,” a classic paper published over three decades ago, breaks narcissism into two subcategories—grandiose and vulnerable—the former characterized by “extraversion, aggressiveness, self-assuredness, and the need to be admired by others,” and the latter by “introversion, hypersensitivity, defensiveness, anxiety, and vulnerability.” Today it’s well established that narcissism lies across a spectrum—and that healthy narcissism can be a natural state for everyone.

One of the clinical psychologists leading this charge is Craig Malkin, whose 2015 book Rethinking Narcissism begins with an anecdote about his own mother, crediting her “warmth, optimism, and activism” to the conviction that she was special, and therefore could affect change in the world. Narcissistic behavior, Malkin posits, isn’t just for “arrogant jerks or sociopaths.”

So this Valentine’s Day, perhaps we should get comfortable with the idea that there’s a narcissist in us all. That said, should anyone send you a customized Spotify playlist featuring LCD Soundsystem and Angel Olsen, you have my permission to unmatch.

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