A New Luxury
Social media has made the intricacies of our inner lives accessible as a never ending feed for the entire world. It's hard to be a person without having an account on one of the big platforms, where your very existence is in doubt if you're not a part of the digital roulette of hearts and shares. This information is ready for the giga-billionaires to tap about the human condition, along with state actors, advertisers and organizations with more nefarious intents, hoping to sow discontent and doubts about the very core of the modern world.
In this age of voluntary surveillance, what can the real luxury be than being invisible and yet still mattering to the world around you? Isn't that itself the definition of luxury, a good or a service that the plebs cannot have or even aspire to have. Being a ghost without the need to flaunt and yet being social is a new kind of luxury and it's out there for all of us to see. Think of the big superbillionares that barely give any interviews or own huge parts of businesses that become the bedrock of modern economy, you never hear about what they're doing or where they are and yet they influence our lives way more than a big-ticket influencer can. Or the super-secretive artists who put out high quality work without a sliver of their public lives leaving out. In a world that's evre connected being secretive becomes a commodity of its own, one that only a few can afford to possess.
Social media is a myth making engine, where we can glamorize our lives with the paparazzi snapshots of our selfie cameras but the best stories told are the ones we're forced to imagine and so becomes extreme privacy a signifier of extreme luxury.