[The vain ego
The author reads from her book Saying Everything and Nothing (2023)]

“I will argue that digital modernity represents the greatest challenge to the human construction of the self that the world has ever seen. It involves immense and opposing forces, some acting to inflate the self, others wanting to make it disappear as a mere data supplier amid the unmanageable masses. […] At the same time, the triumph of social media has been accompanied by the rise of identity politics. Caricature-like, it is the perfect expression of what people have become under the influence of technology. Even many of the declared opponents of identity politics are now behaving like identity politicians by emphasizing their individual grievances, making their vain ego absolute, and running riot in the public arena.”