In the past, I’ve only seen coverage of Edits focus on four things:How this is a popular form of content that is only being created more and moreHow those who create Edits have the ability to make clips take on an entirely new meaning and provoke strong emotions in viewers How they’re geared towards TV, film, and music – as that’s the realm of culture this form of media originated And lastly, the debate around Edits in terms of copyright and/or other infringementsBut today, we’re covering how the power of TikTok Edits is far greater than just those observations. Because as this person stated, “You can convince people of anything if you put it in a TikTok with a catchy sound.”

Edits now play an integral role in how people get introduced to topics and how they continue to keep up with them. While Edits have had various evolutions, in their current form, they can be defined as “compilation videos, typically set to music, that convey a narrative about a person, place, thing, or cultural topic.”

Whereas if you grew up online, the negative attributes of individual humans are immediately disqualifying. The very phrase ad hominem has been rendered obsolete, almost incomprehensible. An argument that is directed against a person, rather than the position they are maintaining? Online a person is the position they’re maintaining and vice versa. Opinions are identities and identities are opinions. Unfollow!

I’m the one severely triggered by statements like “Chaucer is misogynistic” or “Virginia Woolf was a racist.” Not because I can’t see that both statements are partially true, but because I am of that generation whose only real shibboleth was: “Is it interesting?” Into which broad category both evils and flaws could easily be fit, not because you agreed with them personally but because they had the potential to be analyzed, just like anything else

We are by now used to apocalyptic bad guys with the end of the world in mind, but it’s a long time since I went to the movies and saw an accurate representation of an ordinary sinner.

Spotting a hot young cellist, Olga, in the bathroom of her workplace, Tár later recognizes this same young woman’s shoes, peeking out from beneath those screens orchestra directors use to preserve the anonymity of “blind auditions.” Next thing we know Tár has given Olga a seat in her orchestra. Then decides to add Elgar’s Cello Concerto to the program, and to give that prestigious solo to the new girl instead of the first cello. And this move, in turn, allows her to organize a series of one-on-one rehearsals with Olga at that apartment she maintains in the city…There’s a word for this behavior: instrumentalism. Using people as tools. As means rather than ends in themselves. To satisfy your own desire, or your sense of your own power, or simply because you can

Every generation makes new rules. Every generation comes up against the persistent ethical failures of the human animal. But though there may be no permanent transformations in our emotional lives, there can be genuine reframings and new language and laws created to name and/or penalize the ways we tend to hurt each other, and this is a service each generation can perform for the one before.

While it may ostensibly appear to be a simple case of influencers making a business decision to create more of the content they believe audiences want, and then being incentivized by engagement numbers to remain in this niche forever, it's actually deeper than that. It involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person's identity with one custom-made for the audience.

Put simply, in order to be someone, we need someone to be someone for.

When influencers are analyzing audience feedback, they often find that their more outlandish behavior receives the most attention and approval, which leads them to recalibrate their personalities according to far more extreme social cues than those they'd receive in real life. In doing this they exaggerate the more idiosyncratic facets of their personalities, becoming crude caricatures of themselves.

As the caricature becomes more familiar than the person, both to the audience and to the influencer, it comes to be regarded by both as the only honest expression of the influencer, so that any deviation from it soon looks and feels inauthentic. At that point the persona has eclipsed the person, and the audience has captured the influencer.

he implied his firing was part of the conspiracy to silence the truth, and urged his loyal followers to subscribe to his Substack, as this was now his family’s only source of income. His new audience proved to be generous with both money and attention, and his need to meet their expectations seems to have spurred him, consciously or unconsciously, to double down on his more extreme views. Now almost everything he writes about, from Covid to Ukraine, he somehow ties to the shadowy New World Order.

I wanted an audience, but I also knew that having the wrong audience would be worse than having no audience, because they'd constrain me with their expectations, forcing me to focus on one tiny niche of my worldview at the expense of everything else, until I became a parody of myself.

I ensured that my brand image—the person that my audience expects me to be—was in alignment with my ideal image—the person I want to be. So even though audience capture likely does affect me in some way, it only makes me more like the person I want to be.

This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one's own persona. The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be. And with personal development so arduous and lonely, there is ease and comfort in crowdsourcing your identity.

in Instagram apologies, even when someone ostensibly confronts their ugliness, it’s hard to read the gesture as anything but an effort to publicly reclaim their image. But at least the Notes App Apology permitted us a semblance of sincerity, and suggested there might be a human being who typed the message—even if that human was an intern or assistant. There’s nothing sincere about a trickle-down excuse crafted to look pretty for Instagram grids, and the processed nature of Photoshopped Apologies implies the absence of the one thing all genuine apologies must possess: accountability straight from the person who committed the transgression.