The Biggest "Platform of Envy" of All

In Sonya Sarayia's ten year retrospective on David Fincher's The Social Network she recalled her own early experience of Facebook as increasingly one of a "toxic . . . platform of envy . . . that turned all of [her] anger and frustration inward, corroding my self-esteem and sending me into a sustained depression" by way of its subjection of her to her acquaintances' boasting.

Considering that my thought is that while this is certainly how many experience Facebook, it isn't just Facebook that functions as a "platform of envy." That term can be used to describe the whole mainstream media--a media which has always been staffed by courtiers of the rich and powerful whose services to them include endless flattery of them before the eyes of the world; which invented and exploited to the full the cult of "celebrity" in all its foolishness; and that in the digital age all this has got a whole lot worse because of its extreme pervasiveness (and, perhaps, more people "finding themselves desperate to escape an increasingly wretched workaday lot by becoming celebrities themselves").

In the face of all this idiocy anyone who does not have an army of claqueurs applauding them nonstop the way the billionaires and Fortune 500 CEOs and entertainment industry A-listers and politicians do is likely to feel pretty worthless if they let it reach them, all as, I imagine, few are truly immune to it--which seems to me a good reason to be very careful of where we venture online, curate what news we really think we need very carefully, and probably more often than we are doing, simply turn off the screen and look at something else, anything else, before we let the scum of the media-industrial complex drive us insane.