Screen People summary

In 2006, Time magazine named an unusual person of the year: “You.” The cover featured a mirrored computer screen, where readers saw their own reflection where a celebrity’s photo usually went. The message was clear: ordinary people were becoming the protagonists of the new information age, thanks to brand-new platforms like YouTube and Facebook, just as screens themselves were shrinking down to fit in a pocket.

The magazine was largely right. Today, nearly anyone can access an audience – and with that, a sliver of celebrity, and the performance and visibility that come bundled with it. But fame is a double-edged sword. Historian Daniel Boorstin argued in his 1962 book The Image that celebrities’ real function isn’t the singing or acting that supposedly defines them – it’s serving as raw material for gossip, conversation, and imagery. The tabloid and gossip industry that’s boomed since only proves his point. 

In 2022, a strange trend went viral on TikTok: homeowners asking their delivery drivers to dance for the doorbell camera before they leave. It looks like harmless fun on the surface, but look closer and there’s a real power imbalance humming underneath it. A delivery worker facing the threat of a bad review can’t easily say no to a customer’s request, however odd. They become a bit player in someone else’s show, performing on command – and the homeowner becomes the producer, calling the shots from behind the lens.

It’s the same dynamic that’s always powered reality television. We watch contestants in moments of genuine vulnerability and tell ourselves we’re seeing something authentic. But it’s the producers who actually control the story, choosing which scenarios to engineer and shaping the footage later in the edit. Sometimes that control tips into something darker. Former contestants have described food deprivation and sleep deprivation on set, and one America’s Next Top Model alum called the environment outright “psychological warfare.” And we, the viewers accept all of it, because we know we’re watching “reality” in air quotes, not reality itself – a genre where almost any treatment is justified by the dangling promise of a shot at fame.

You know the old parable. A boy cries wolf for a laugh, one time, two times. By the time the wolf actually shows up, no one believes him anymore, and we know exactly how the story ends for him. But the part worth revisiting is what happens to the village itself. The villagers start the story as a community, ready to drop everything to help one of their own. By the end, they’ve become suspicious, isolated individuals who leave him to face the wolf alone.

In many ways we’re living through the villagers’ arc right now. These days, the cries of wolf arrive from every direction all at once. It’s genuinely hard to tell a real cry from a fake one, or to judge how loud any of them truly deserves to be. “Fake news” has quietly stopped meaning factually false; more often now it just means unwelcome. Politicians have understood the power of this maneuver for decades. In 1990, the political group GOPAC mailed a pamphlet to Republican candidates urging them to describe their Democratic opponents using words like “betray,” “shame,” “traitors,” and “selfish” – vocabulary built to dehumanize an opponent rather than simply disagree with them.

When automobiles first appeared on the scene, the world had no infrastructure ready to receive them. Roads were built for horses and carriages, not engines, and there were no traffic lights yet, no seatbelts, no real safety standards at all. A genuine period of lawlessness followed, while society scrambled to catch up and build the rules the new technology demanded.

We’re living through that same lawless gap right now, except the new machines are AI systems sophisticated enough to convincingly pass as human. We increasingly can’t tell whether we’re talking to a person or a bot on the other end of a chat. French sociologist Émile Durkheim once observed that “we are moral beings to the extent that we are social beings.” But how can we be either when we can’t even be sure that there’s another human on the other side? Even the companies building these AI models often lean into the uncertainty as a marketing strategy, openly bragging that they can’t fully predict what their own creations might do next.