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“Mirror, mirror, on the wall—who’s the fairest of them all?”
We’ve all heard this quote from Snow White. It’s asked by the Evil Queen. There’s a winner take all impulse behind the question.
It’s not “who’s relatively the fairest, on a good day?”
Embedded in this scene is a kernel of the early February zeitgeist. A deep greed, almost vengeful, pursued with exactitude and totalizing in scope.
But something else is present, too, perhaps less “deep” and more…flamboyant. It’s quite a performance, this fairy tale vignette. There’s a lot of pomp and vanity.
Seems a bit much for an audience of one—or so it seems.
Within the Queen’s dialogue with herself, she’s actually communicating with the collective, with some mystical syndicate—some magic mirror—that will render a final judgment.
A judgment that says not only is she the fairest, but the rest aren’t even attractive by comparison—they are ugly.
No, not even ugly. That would grant them too much. They are simply not in the game, not main characters at all. They are extras used as props.
So, now that we have our narrative touchstone, where do we presently see this impulse at play?
Look around you. Notice the tribal, winner-take-all moves on social media, in politics, or perhaps at your own workplace. I’m sure in one of these areas you can point to a tyrannical figure holding discussions of what should be Beautiful and Right and recognized as Untouchable.
I use capital letters here because people will elevate the most specific but mundane features of daily life—an ingredient, a type of fabric or exercise—as the mirror through which they will be seen as the fairest.
“I eat this, I wear this, I lift this way…therefore, I am fit to rule them all.”
It’s a moral argument against the unwashed sinners.
In pop culture, we see this figure lately in…the Gym Thot. (I know some may take offense at this term but we need some levity while discussing such heavy topics.)
To the Gym Thot, public space is no longer public. It is one giant mirror through which she can experience a selfie supernova.
As her ego collapses in an almost sacrificial way—a lamblike offering to the magic mirror—it somehow also transcends and expands into something you can’t quite look away from.
Her image may reign across the land, but only because it is dead, much like how a supernova is merely the tardy messenger of a star’s demise.
The Gym Thot is no longer the TikTok handle her account is associated with, or even the physical person who created that account.
She is the crystallized image fixed in our collective magic mirror: “This Gym Thot is the fairest of them all! And this man, this creep, dared to think she was otherwise!”
Well, there’s a problem. People ARE daring to think otherwise…many of them. And that is shattering the magic mirror. Consensus isn’t happening. This isn’t the #MeToo era where the camps are cleanly divided between Mainstream Media defending the woman and bored retirees lamenting the loss of public decency.
Something crazier is happening. Splintering shards are flying through the air—people are sympathizing with what many women face today, and yet saying that these types of women in gyms are in fact predatory when they film unsuspecting people going about normal business.
It’s a highly fragmentary and nuanced landscape we’re in now. This is not one uniform Big Tent or smooth Magic Mirror where the liberals stand on one side of the debate and conservatives on the other.
You are seeing the beginning of a wild—and sure to be contentious discussion—of what it means to be human and have a soul in the 21st century.
Many will form their tribes around how they answer this question.
What else has been confronting us with the naked beauty of humanity?
Let’s talk AI.
Star of the Show
I know Artificial Intelligence can have many definitions. For the sake of conversation, we’ll use it how others have recently. Many have discussed the computer-generated images above as an example of AI.
You can spot a few flaws if you look close—the man’s fingers are grossly distorted—but that’s not what I want to dwell on.
Why do these images resonate with so many people? Why does this feel like a magic mirror that has taken a selfie of our collective soul?
A lot of it has to do with us reaching the completion of a 15-year cycle which began in 2008. We are now coming to grips with the long-term effects of social media in particular and “curated lifestyles” in general.
Once upon a time, the Instagram filter was just that—a novelty simulating the haze of yesteryear. After all, it was only 2010 or 2011 or so. Time still felt somewhat real to the collective.
But now, after years of repeated use—publicly documenting breakups, makeups, dinners, births, funerals, new jobs, graduations—we see life through a filter.
It’s no longer just Instagram eyes. We witness the present moment as if it is already dead.
Beautiful moments of life have been placed like a casket on some sacred altar—the altar is our profile.
The images above seem real because we’ve become a society in which people no longer experience the event firsthand. Experiences are automatically nostalgic. Auto-reflective. Life itself has become a martyr to the Age of Documentation. We are ghosts, documenting bits of time, looking for signs that tell us “You are having an experience!”
Thus, there seems to be a story in these fabricated pictures, even though we really only see People™—simulated creatures which we too in the flesh have become, during our 15-year quest to project our fairest lives to others.
It just seems so natural to us that these Beautiful People™ are true reflections of who we are now or who we might meet. Because isn’t that how we see ourselves and others on social media now, as we reach the summit of this cycle? “I discovered cold showers, it made me realize I am a person having an experience! He discovered grass fed beef, he’s a person having an experience!”
All with the fervor of a religious revival. Sweaty preachers pounding the pulpit. The crowd gathered under the shade of a Big Tent in tatters.
That’s what all the clout chasing has been after—the appearance of being a real person with a background of substance, value, worth and cred.
“I have a narrative and you don’t. I lift this much, know this esoteric trick, have this many followers, meet these kinds of girls. You don’t have a narrative. That’s why I am the Content Producer, the new priest.”
So, coming back to the AI pictures. Take that chap with the pompadour up above. Perhaps he has some Jack Johnson covers on his YouTube channel with 11.2k subscribers—most of them arriving after he wrote a song one day in support of #BlackLivesMatter.
And speaking of causes, those are his diverse friends in the next frame—they’re healing generations of familial trauma with an internship at the Kellog Foundation.
Or flip it around. Maybe she is the next Candace Owens, caught as she just “owned a lib” in front of dozens at a UC Berkeley protest. You get the idea. These pictures seem real to us because as a society we have entrained ourselves to look in every crevice for evidence of profiled humanity. People just can’t be people when we look at them. Maybe they’re a famous model on Instagram. Maybe they had a spicy take that rattled a senator.
This causes everyone to walk around as if they are celebrities who may just happen upon another fellow celebrity. Everyone a star of in the big show of simulated reality.
This is why “physiognomy analysis” is so popular on Twitter. It’s not because such analysis is actually valid. It’s that we have become over-socialized to the point that everything is imagistic. We’ve documented every moment—mundane and epic—then spread it around the magic mirror of social media until our preferred judgment bubbles up.
We live in the realm of POV as the TikTok meme goes. It’s all “point of view” now.
“She was being virtuous owning the libs!”
“No, she was way out of line!”
This is now beginning to destabilize our relations as a schizophrenic process plays out. Instead of speaking to people directly, we wonder how closely they can fit our POV. Maybe we demonize them in a TikTok we record at the gym.
Or maybe we even make porn of them. Consider the Twitch streamer this week who made headlines for being the star of the show…and not in a way she wanted. Someone had made AI-generated porn, superimposing her face on someone else’s body. The imagistic realm supplanted the real.
And of course, the audience played a role, too, as many cheered this development. Yes, cheered.
We’re seeing Hertz Law in effect: “The consequences of the images will be the images of the consequences.”
In other words, when modernity pedestalizes images of what it would like to see more of, the result is NOT the manifestation of that thing itself.
Instead, the modern world ends up dwelling inside the images REPRESENTING that thing.
Call it the curse of wish fulfillment. You can’t be Scarlett Johannson but you can LARP as her on TikTok and thereby become fairer and more famous than your idol.
The way to break out of this is to take vulnerable action toward a goal, which can risk failure. You may not be the fairest in the land on the first try. There’s no edit button on a first draft, there is only flow.
But you at least you will not be a selfie supernova—someone who believes they are shining a light into the future when really they are imploding.
Write that novel. Take those analog pictures. Do something that makes your heart sing. Eat a burger with a drop of seed oil ketchup. Go against the grain when others say “that’ll never look beautiful.” That’s how you build a legacy for yourself. Life is more than a profiled identity viewed in a magic mirror.
Truth and Consequences
As we move through February, we will be dazzled by this new social landscape which we can no longer ignore.
It’s funny because Hertz Law speaks to something gaining apparent domination just at the point that it shatters into mere images of its former glory.
So just as social media seems to become a hellscape that represents all the worst parts of the past hyper-competitive 15 years, we are witnessing its end.
There will be many good things to come from this. Many people will realize their inherent beauty and their ability to create something outside the plastic falsity of the publicly documented moment. Some more creative version of social media will probably evolve out of the rubble, too.
But be sure, when people realize they have the power to paint their own destiny, they will be vilified or exiled or at the very least looked upon as different for embracing their heart versus embracing the (soon dead) status quo.
Fragmentation is only just beginning. If you think it’s wild that people can applaud deepfake porno, prepare to be shocked by what they’ll champion next. Surrealism and absurdity will run rampant.
You’ll also just see more overt displays of social media being a bot party. And I’m not talking about the airbrushed kind from above. This poor guy below was trying to make a sincere point, typo and all…and a bot came in and basically quote tweeted him with: “Nah, this is MY time to shine…I’ll be the star of the show.”
The point is to be ready to stand your ground. There will be no shortage in the army of People™—whether it’s Gym Thots, Woke Police, Conservative Hacks, Neo-Esoteric Gurus or straight up bots.
To each and every one of these tribes you are a threat because you’ve honored the divine spark within.
No doubt we’ll see more mobbing as we go through the month.
News could be highly shocking, “out of nowhere”—reflective of the breakthroughs budding at the fringes of our personal awareness, which is telling us there is more to life than what has dominated for 15 years.
Some may need to rest and retreat as this continues. That’s ok, go for it. Others may find that they really shine in the chaos—for good, not for ill.
Whether in your own private sanctuary, or on some bigger stage, make sure you color outside the lines and create lasting change.
Each stroke beyond the status quo helps you take joy in your difference. You remind yourself that you are irreplaceable in your singular identity. That’s real beauty—no magic mirror needed. Revel in it.
I am currently quite full with reading requests right now, but if you have an authenticated birth time and wish to be waitlisted, contact me HERE.
I'm kinda annoyed that I don't have enough time to properly comment on your article, that being said... I resonated deeply with the theme of AI, how the age of documentation has taken a toll in the way we experience life.
I believe we're all our own universes, and our phones an extension of that inner cosmos.
By learning to observe the filter, to remember it's only a filter... Maybe then I might be able to use this in my favor.
For now, we all might be just a bunch of ghosts in the machine.
I'll come back to finish it tomorrow, just wanted to let you know how much I enjoy your writing.
These always show up at what feels like the ‘right’ time.