Who was Nicky’s brother? Why did he kill himself? Was his story like my own? We all found our space for therapy as listeners in these questions. For representations of suicide to have this deterrent effect, it can be essential that they seem real. But how can it be ethical to seek refuge in a real person’s death? Blurring the provenance to the point of ambiguity, as this call’s digital footprint does, perhaps offers one solution to this problem. The mediating technology itself facilitates an ambiguity that makes this artifact potent.

To speak of a life lived publicly, in both digital and nondigital forms, can be to imply a duality of the self: the “real person” (whose being, thoughts, and circumstances determine who she is) and the “artificial” double who appears before others: a doppelgänger that is, generously, an aspirational figure and, ungenerously, a total sham. This duality rests upon an assumption that one’s true self is static, determined ultimately by the conditions into which one was born.

When I was growing up in Toronto, karaoke was reviled for reasons that now seem crass: There is nothing more nobodyish than pretending you’re somebody. The ’90s were less empathetic, too, and karaoke lays bare the need to be seen, and accepted; such needs are universal, and repulsive. We live now, you could say, in a karaoke age, in which you’re encouraged to show yourself, through a range of creative presets. Participating online implies that you’re worthy of being perceived, that some spark of you deserves to exist in public.

Recently, I had to write the lines for an artificially intelligent bot, and, as I imagined where it was coming from, I tried to do so seriously. I wanted my bot to express itself authentically, in a way consistent with its experience, rather than being constrained to answer questions either by impersonating a human or by parroting back similar questions, performing semantic backflips like a SmarterChild. Later, as I tested it, asking questions, I was charmed by some of the responses, errors, choices no human would have made. The labored mistakes implied effort, and they were idiosyncratic, implying a self. “Oh, bot,” I felt like saying, “That’s not at all right. But what an interesting choice.”

Given how ambivalent and deeply personal the act of citation online can become, it makes sense that social media is littered with disclaimers about accreditation. “Retweets aren’t endorsements,” we say, trying to protect ourselves against accusations of referential irresponsibility. Cycles of social media seem to exacerbate the dangers of acknowledging bad ideas on the way to good ones. If we enable an idea’s circulation, even with the intention of critiquing it, we might be complicit in its potential misuse.

To use Twitter is to become both its consumer, but also its bureaucrat. We propagate and internalize the logic of the platform, hundreds of millions of us performing these new behaviors in lockstep, beckoning each other to join in. It is a kind of auto-colonization: adopting the notion that a public digital self is a way to temporarily exceed the body, and embracing the personal brand as a mode of existence. We bend to the imagined Other like plants craning to maximize their exposure to sunlight.

Anything, even heartbreak, can be framed as a do-it-yourself project. DIY gives a sense of agency over one’s needs, suggesting a barrel-chested confidence in one’s own ability to complete a task usually left for a paid expert. WikiHow provides endless, collaborative DIY guides for the task of remaining alive.

Schadenfreude can and does go viral. But after consuming enough suffering in this mode, viewers may find that schadenfreude no longer affirms or soothes. If “we live in overstimulated times,” as Nicki Brand, a talk-radio psychiatrist in Videodrome, puts it, then it is no surprise that Max would be driven to seek more intense viewing experiences. After all, in the media world he has created for himself, where he re-broadcasts “everything from soft-core pornography to hard-core violence,” more extreme content can be hard to uncover. In its insidious intensity, Videodrome prefigures the digital social media machine we now live with, where elements of the dark web seep into the mainstream indexed web.

Once my days of internet fame were over, I began to feel as if there was nothing left of me at all. I floated around like a vaporous ghost, waiting to be noticed nonetheless. Being a marginally famous blogger was the only aspect of my life that I had assigned any value to whatsoever, and when it was all over I was completely alone. We keep trying to do the thing we were once good at getting attention for, but never quite manage to recapture the zeitgeist that crested us up, then dropped us off.

Before 21st-century parents got fussed over their kids getting electronic mail from sketchy men, 18th-century parents got in a lather over their daughters getting letters from “crimping fellows,” period slang for fuckboys. This anxiety finds its apex in Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novels, which, in the eroticized freedom of their young female protagonists, warned parents about the dangers of men wielding pens, but just as a parental warning is catnip to the rebellious young, the novels also gave young female readers the delectable taste of autonomy.