Great and horrifying article. Perry's story is particularly illustrative. The core idea here goes beyond that of creator and audience, though. We are shaped by

Great and horrifying article. Perry's story is particularly illustrative. The core idea here goes beyond that of creator and audience, though. We are shaped by who our community expects us to be. It then becomes hard to break out the norms we find ourselves in. We cannot escape our community's expectation. Be they parents, friends, or partners. We are locked into ourselves by those that root us. It's for this reason that solo travel seems the be the great reset of who we are as people. The vague and hokey-seeming idea of 'finding yourself' is really about escaping prior expectations and trying own new personas. In each new city, you can be a new person. The aspect explored in the article is important not just for creators but for your online persona via social media wherein the participant gets positive reinforcement for specific kinds of posts and that reinforcement shapes their lives in real ways. We become the people that are most rewarded by the platforms. This is both normalizing (as in instagram insincerity) and antagonizing (as with twitter/facebook engagement metrics promoting inflammatory opinions). I have trouble seeing any good that comes from our algorithmically created personalities.