
“Anna and Tom had grown up with the notion that individuality manifested itself as a set of visual differences, immediately decodable and in constant need of updating” (19).
“It was the admission stamp into a community bound by a shared reality, or quasi-reality” (21).
“They lived a double life. There was the tangible reality around them, and there were the images, also all around them” (50).
“They could still remember a time when they only used Facebook to find out what had happened to their school crushes, and when Instagram was little more than an archive of people’s holiday snaps. Since then, they had followed the many evolutions of those websites from their dual perspective as both interface designers and users. They could name every single update—the introduction of likes and notifications, video sharing, picture posting, tagging. But any attempt to draw a connection between
those minutiae and the way in which social media had spread through every aspect of their lives was so reductive as to miss the point entirely, like wondering whether it is at the first twig or the third tree that a forest can be said to be on fire” (52).
“It was like walking through the world’s most hectic street market on cocaine. It was like channel-hopping an entire wall of TV sets. It was like telepathically tuning into the thoughts of a stadium packed with people. But really it wasn’t like anything else, because it was new” (54).
“an inner landscape reconfigured by twenty years of the internet” (54).
“Their screens had unlocked a whole world of differences they hadn’t even known existed” (58).
“The reason they had tolerated, even loved the work, they will tell themselves, is because the repetitiveness provided a counterbalance to the limitless growth and broad horizons of the rest of their days. Now, they will realize, nothing remains but the work” (118).
Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection (2025)

Leave a comment