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Part of the terror of the internet, for the olds, is that this technology exploits flaws in our thinking. Pre-internet, the prevailing belief was that we had real selves and fake selves, and we cast judgment on the fakes. We took for granted that we should at least try to present ourselves to the world as coherent people with unified personalities. An avatar could only mean trouble (and often did): an alter ego, an outlet, for the excised bits; a convenient, nearly irresistible portal for the parts of ourselves we had repressed.<\/p>\n
This foundational (maybe Puritan?) belief in the integrated self has been helpful, even necessary, in real life, because in real life we need to deal with one another in time and space. Thus it\u2019s nice if our fellow humans are predictable, and you have some idea of what you\u2019ll be dealing with when a person shows up. There are whole branches of psychology dedicated to trying to help us keep ourselves together. And, of course, rafts of diagnoses \u2014 bipolar, schizophrenia, multiple personality, borderline personality \u2014 for those of us who fail to do this well.<\/p>\n
And yet, at the same time, we know it\u2019s a ruse. We are, all of us, deeply, inalienably contradictory and chaotic. In the practical world, we pretend it\u2019s not true. But in art, if people capture this multidimensionality beautifully enough \u2014 \u201cDo I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself\u201d \u2014 we herald their genius and praise them for it.<\/p>\n
This chaos \u2014 this cubism, this unleashing of our multiple selves \u2014 is a feature, not a bug, of the online world. It\u2019s arguably its defining characteristic for those who grew up there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n