And now we have Facebook and Twitter and Wordpress and Tumblr and all those other platforms that take our daily doings and transform them into media. Our newest communications technologies are also, by default, technologies of exposure. We are, tweet by tweet and post by post, becoming slightly less invisible to each other—and revealing ourselves, through the Internet’s alchemy, not just as individual collections of experiences and identities, but also as human systems. By sharing who we are, intimately and mundanely, we are making ourselves visible and readable to each other in ways we have never been before. We are participating in a voluntary anthropology of unprecedented scope and scale. We are opening our minds to each other, saying, directly and publicly: “This is what it’s like to be me.”

Which is, of course, awesome. It’s democratizing and liberating and transformative and insert whatever other sweeping nicety you prefer here. But it is also a matter of predictable anxiety. For one thing, this particular technological shift, like so many that have come before, threatens the people who used to hold positions of authority. (Those storied gatekeepers!) The bigger thing, though, is that this sudden exposure of otherness—all that literal mind-reading, happening on a mass scale—has led to a kind of cognitive chaos. All these experiences and perspectives and opinions and I thinks and yeah buts and how could yous, buzzing and humming and screaming and insisting. All these you can’t say thats and check your privileges. All this indignation. All this outrage.

The aggregate political value of this discourse, even when that value is diluted with the familiar trappings of the grievance economy, is so obvious that it’s barely worth mentioning. What could be more democratic than this messy jumble of opinions and perspectives? Who doesn’t benefit from the checking of privilege? What could be more salutary to a culture than its members' ability to understand each other not just as others, but as other people?

Taken together, though—as a kind of psychic weather system, spread across the Internet—this proliferation of perspectives is also, for the average human brain, dizzying. It’s constant. It’s mildly assaultive. A few years ago, the popular thing was to fret about “information overload,” the fear that the ancillary effect of the Internet’s promiscuous approach to facts would be, ultimately, to paralyze us. Those fears, for the most part, now seem quaint. But their anxieties are now taking a social form, leaving us to contend with questions that will be uncomfortable to pretty much any person who isn’t a sociopath: What happens, actually, when we are laid bare to each other as we’ve never been before? What happens when we are flooded with all this information about the intimate experiences of others? How are we, brain by brain, supposed to deal with this sudden exposure of subjectivities?