Maheen Azmat

There is a specific, hollow exhaustion that all of us have experienced at some point in our lives (or rock bottom, as it’s usually called), sparked by a kind of loss or grief that sends your thumb recoiling into the interface of one of the apps, or worse, into an AI chatbot. This instinct seeks some form of desperate reassurance that the knot of anxiety in your chest isn’t uniquely terrible, a personal failing or worse, like stepping into a world anew where your pain is somehow the most unprecedented thing in the world. The algorithm, of course, has adapted to the fact of this vulnerability. It knows you want to feel less alone, even as it covertly and ironically creates newer versions of this alienation–from the self and from your larger community. And it has learned to feed this longing for connection back in the form of curated fragments—infinite scroll formats, regurgitated tweets and pastel-colored infographics.

Once you’re successfully hooked on these little fragments (thanks to doomscrolling), the algorithm also nudges you into being a bit of a content creator yourself, even if you’re not an “influencer” in the conventional sense of the word. Slowly but surely, you find yourself absurdly inserted into a scene from a digital funhouse that arranges your life’s experiences for you by making self performance a necessary condition of your “offline” life as well. You become a performer in a theater of mutual surveillance, playing to an audience that is invisible but omnipresent, with a frontstage that bleeds into your daily life. Alone or not, this means that your grief, pain and insecurities are no longer private and complex; they’re communal projects or props used in an ongoing audition for belonging, and validation, from people who have very little bearing on your day-to-day life. If everyone’s posting cute pictures of cafe decor, how are you distinguishing yourself? And why should anyone pay attention to you? Under the weight of these questions, the audience never leaves and eventually, the performance, the audience and the self, all end up collapsing into one another. As Jia Tolentino would contend, the show never really stops because there is no backstage to retreat into; just the idea that it exists somewhere, out there, far away from you.

This performance is continuous, and it has to be, more so now than ever before, because the stakes around “staying relevant” are invariably higher now. Gradually, performing has become a way to ensure that you’re not written out of the script entirely. The message is simply that for you, your life or your pain to matter, it must be laid bare and turned into a spectacle. Not posting is only a choice on paper, because it comes with the acknowledgement that you will be forgotten or deprioritized–a verdict that feels even more existential and damning in a social landscape marked by disconnection. This deprioritization is a risk that the algorithm also interweaves strategically through the use of discovery or engagement systems that immediately fade you into the background to punish your lack of platform presence and participation. On a personal level, this imposed sense of being nothing is also internalized as an exaggerated threat to your social and personal life. The algorithm, under this inverted logic, stands for the larger audience or public whose favor you must earn consistently in order to belong somewhere.

In the early years since its inception, the internet looked a little different, and even promised to be a place of endless possibility. Its more expansive claim was that it opened up worlds that had not existed before, offering a global experience that would enrich our personal and cultural horizons. This fact now coexists uncomfortably with the demands of the digital attention economy, which has quickly turned the experience of being a person who is online (in any capacity), into something much more dangerous. This relentless desire to see and be seen (since one can’t exist without the other) is something that has etched itself into the very architecture of our digital lives. In turn, this hypervisibility is tracked, categorized, and configured into a system of continuous surveillance where your information generates revenue. So, even as the intimacy of loss expands outward and we are folded into the internet’s promise of connection and universality, eventually, our deeply personal life experiences become data points in a vast web of networked captivity.

For a lot of women, however, the internet has offered new imaginaries and ways to inhabit spaces in a way that they can’t in their personal lives. It's provided a vocabulary for validating the mental and emotional toll that, across generations, was often dismissed as “hysteria.” For many, this has been a reckoning of sorts, a moment for experiencing a kind of shared relief that is inaccessible otherwise. However, the internet also knows this, and it has co-opted this in a variety of different forms, levying a hidden tax in exchange for this sense of liberation. This is also why you often end up encountering think-pieces and tweets that tell you that naming your struggles is indeed resistance, and that self-diagnosis is you finally taking ownership of a narrative that might otherwise not find space anywhere else. In this context, sharing is brave, private pain is public testimony, and all of this–the messiness of our emotional lives–is something that you can offer up at the altar of the internet in the hopes that someone else will make sense of it, and recognize themselves in it. Most of all, the hope is in mutual redemption.

On the surface, this sounds like a viable alternative for navigating a world that is increasingly fractured by a lack of community. If we look deeper, though, we find examples like BetterHelp. This is a mental health app used by over 7 million people that was recently fined $7.8 million by the FTC for sharing users’ depression symptoms, anxiety levels and therapy intake questionnaires with Facebook and Snapchat for advertising purposes. The context of whatever you share online, therefore, is exactly what the algorithm is meant to dehumanize and strip away, until it assumes the form of measurable and quantifiable data units.

The asymmetry is built into the fact that this predatory and deliberately confusing design maintains the illusion of a healthy, two-way exchange between two people, situated in or across two different corners of the world. In that sense, your information, to you, is an earnest expression of your vulnerability, and you're encouraged to see it as an exercise in radical transparency also. Your “consent,” on the other hand, is often acquired through opaque methods, including endless unreadable terms of service that few take time to read, or cookies (tiny trackers that record your information). The algorithm relies on this inattention, drawing up a detailed map of your behavior and emotions, and trading your privacy for fleeting rewards that keep you engaged. Meanwhile, an insidious third–party corporation benefits from this by repurposing that same information for profit, and surveillance. This gathering of intel, in turn, can leave a digital footprint that can be weaponized at any given moment and misused, having long-term implications for privacy, security and trust in digital systems.

Essentially, then, you might gain some emotional value or catharsis by putting yourself “out there,” but for a lot of firms and social media apps, that translates into currency used to authorize a kind of spying where they can reduce the same experiences to marketable niches. This is a shadow contract, something that dissolves social context through a reliance on a hidden, computer-mediated process where free will imperceptibly disappears. And you’re deliberately made to believe the opposite of that.

The internet actively shapes this desire to be seen and in turn, this desire for legibility, specifically for women, morphs itself into a new, digital version of the medical gaze. As many feminist theorists of the medical gaze have argued, rendering the female body visible has historically been the precondition for regulating it as well. Within the four walls of the clinic, the body was isolated, examined, classified, and something that could essentially be “fixed.” Today, that same sense of passivity (forced on the receiver of that gaze) extends to the digital world as well. Here, as a woman specifically, you’re constantly “under observation,” and navigating a clinical space where you’re encouraged to label and pathologize yourself into coherence. The doctor’s invasive gaze is outsourced to the algorithm, which treats the female body and experience as a defamiliarized specimen, something to be probed and analyzed. Women, therefore, in the absence of accessible mental healthcare, are encouraged to self-diagnose and overshare themselves online into living more authentic, uninhibited lives. The only difference is that you are now convinced to participate in your own examination, making you both the patient and the pathologist.

The visual clutter of your day-to-day Instagram feed also disconnects you from the larger and serious implications of diagnosing yourself from the comfort of your bedroom. The mechanics of the feed introduces this idea that whatever is “wrong” with you, has a name or a label that you can ascribe to yourself. On an infinite scroll, for example, you’ll find someone’s byte-sized recipe for making pasta sitting comfortably alongside an infographic that declaratively says “5 Signs You Have High Functioning Anxiety.” Cognitively, you are encouraged to “pick” a complex psychological condition with the same frictionless logic with which you’d adopt a cooking hack, as if both of those things require the same amount of seriousness or attention. A reel will tell you that you’ve got “avoidant attachment,” and another reel will tell you that your inability to get out of bed and do anything is “executive dysfunction.”

As you move through similar reels, you generate data that turns normal moments of private confusion or pain into something extraordinary, and consequently, market research. This follows you across the internet, shaping what ads you see, what opportunities you're offered, or the kind of content you generally consume. You are now more susceptible to an impulse purchase or an ad that offers to alleviate that sense of insecurity or loneliness, with a particular focus on products like focus supplements, organizational planners, and online courses. Your emotions, in this scenario, are prime real-estate, and for companies, an inventory to be filled with curated consumption. You could be a person in pain, with limited avenues for expressing that pain, but to the algorithm, you are a consumer who is statistically more likely to buy.

In effect, you’re encouraged to shop for different identities, to look for terms that allow you to flatten complex psychological histories and the micro-logics of your day-to-day social interactions, into a neat category. These labels are essentially dead-end explanations that tell you why you are the way that you are, and they also externalize any responsibility for how you show up, in your own life and in other people’s lives.

Once you’ve claimed a label or an identity, you’re also offered a kind of vibes-based “coaching” on universal truths that are cherry-picked based on what the algorithm rewards. The “advice” that follows from it is invariably also based entirely on aesthetic and mood, rather than actionable evidence-based psychological tools. Unsurprisingly, this is because for a lot of these “truth tellers,” healing is simply a moodboard that sells. You can speak in therapy, but online, you will call yourself a “coach” to sidestep the ethics of professional practice, while lazily doling out analyses around complex, nuanced emotional experiences. Within this framework, your subjective experiences are data points rewarded for their simplicity while a single action (a friend not liking your story, a late text) is treated as evidence of a fixed character flaw (your friend is secretly jealous of you or if your partner “wanted to, he would”).

The algorithm encourages this for a number of reasons. For one, when you’re seeking out advice on relationships, for example, you’re signaling to the algorithm that you are a user in a state of relational instability. You’ve introduced your crisis, and now the system must respond to it by churning up a new opportunity for consumption. Secondly, a reel on attachment theory or infamously “5 ways to make him think about you,” functions very much like a digital casting call that recruits women into an endless search for “decoding” and assigning some sense of predictability to male behavior, especially in the context of romantic relationships. The male gaze never disappears, but instead, is mutated and absorbed into the digital infrastructure of the platform. Self-surveillance becomes a romantic strategy, and “hacking” the male gaze, a puzzle worth solving. On the surface, this appears as a neutral interface; one that conveniently always ends up with women locating the source of dysfunction in their own selves.

The algorithm learns, through the many ways in which we interact with it, which performances of femininity generate the most friction-less engagement. It prioritizes them, teaching women very implicitly that to be seen is to be ranked, and that to “qualify” for this ranking, you must view your life through a lens of marketable desirability. The proliferation of content by spiritual grifters and pseudo experts only makes this worse. This also takes the form of Ted-Talk sized reels that “teach” women how to be “high value,” “low maintenance” or the “phantom ex,” inciting them to believe that if they can discipline their emotions and curate their “mystique” correctly, they can “make” their ex regret them by turning themselves into a “spectacle” of detachment. Self surveillance, as a data-generating mechanism, is reframed as empowerment, and as a woman, you’re made to believe that managing the perception of a man who is no longer in your life, is a way to take “back” power. Ultimately, your vulnerability as a woman (your insecurity about relationships, your body, your worth) becomes a marketable demographic that ad-tech ecosystems bid on.

Systemic harm, in this manner, is individualized, and our pain is, at the end of the day, still uniquely ours to carry and “solve.” By encouraging us to shop ourselves out of personal crises, platforms effectively erase the possibility of engaging in any kind of collective refusal. Your pain, through this insistence on self-optimization and purchasing, turns systemic harm into private defects that can be corrected by looking inward. It is no longer a shared political condition, but a platform-driven catalogue of personal, and hence, marketable “failures.” The question, then, is in trying to locate or understand what accountability looks like when the very fabric of our social lives is built on extraction. What we've accepted as inevitable online is, at its core, a poverty of imagination. Against this logic, it is important to ask: what would feminist digital alternatives look like in the absence of digital monetization? And how would they bypass the idea that healing can be engineered, moving us instead towards spaces where it is carefully cultivated through love and care?