Member-only story
DOXING AND THE INTERNET
The Internet Wants You to Be Unhappy
Why Mary Kate Cornett? Why anybody?
I’m reading “The Answer Is No”, a short story by Fredrik Backman (“A Man Called Ove”), which opens (essentially) with the best, most concise, most accurate sentences in the history of sentences:
Lucas is happy. This is a very provoking thing to the world. Because people aren’t supposed to be happy, they’re only supposed to want to be happy, because how otherwise are you supposed to be able to sell things to them? More than anything people are supposed to pretend to be happy on the internet so that other people are reminded of how unhappy they themselves are by comparison.
Man, ain’t that the truth.
I’m not posting Mary Kate Cornett’s picture here because that just feeds the narrative and makes things worse. And more importantly, because I don’t have her permission.
Permission. What a quaint term that’s become.
When I first heard about the Mary Kate Cornett “scandal”, I assumed she was somebody famous, or at least tangentially famous, or somebody trying to be famous.
But I can’t tell that she’s any of these things. She’s just a girl. An average, objectively pretty college student from a presumably affluent…
