One irony of the power of modern tech companies, and of their insidious mission creep, is that we have come to view privacy as the ultimate status symbol, because the logistical nightmare of going off grid, of evading the surveillance state, is so stressful that, sooner or later, the slot machine seduction of social media finds its way back into our orbits. “I had my reasons,” she told me via email, “including the corrosive effects of self-branding, the reduction of dialogue to ‘likes,’ the dystopian hypocrisy of private companies masquerading as public space, and the basic ridiculousness of me spending hours of my time crafting a Twitter feed, working for free as a curator of information for a company in which I did not even own stock. After years of maintaining a pristinely positive social media presence, Sofia Samatar, the American-Somali novelist, poet, and academic, pulled the plug.
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