Real life scapegoats, sacrifices, are required to keep the fantastical online clout machine, which runs on blood, functional.
The fundamental choice of early modernity was—are you willing to reject your place in the machine if that requires being sacrifice to it? In metamodernity, the choice is similar: are you willing to be mimetically stoned, over and over again, driven outside the Internet, exiled, to save your own individuality?
Autofiction, like social media, is, for the most part, as I’ve written before, gossiping about the self—and, because it’s so consistently unrendered as anything else, boring. This is why the few who can still tap into the capabilities of fiction—who can play, in a pure sense, not only with language, but scope, pathos, character, structure—rightly maintain and retain their aura.1
Jaded, envious, anonymous, online behavior is less fashionable than it was a year or two ago. I wonder who the last rats off the ship will be.2