Mass delusions—this sense that you can speak your reality into existence—are everywhere in our digital-first world. To quote the writer Matias Viegener, we exist only in words, “less in the spirit of total revelation than total text.” We are transforming from embodied, biological beings into digital entities composed of zeros and ones, data sets and social media posts. The strange thing about a world subsumed by the digital is that we’re simultaneously aware of being under constant surveillance and yet convinced that we have complete agency over our self-definitions.
