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To read more of The Yale Review’s folio “Is This Real?,” click here.

Reality is a medium in several senses. Most literally, the real world we inhabit is an artifact of our relationship to media and technology. Hammer and language, coins and numeracy, steam engine and telegraph, mobile phone and artificial intelligence—humans have always developed tools and symbols that extend what our bodies and minds can do on their own. Each, in its way, has pushed the boundaries of what is possible, of what can be considered real. On the phone, to pick an obvious example, I can have a meaningful conversation with someone thousands of miles away. The hivelike activity that occurs on social media platforms is another such progression.

At the same time, the idea of reality—our shared understanding of it, its presumed integrity—is itself a made thing, a notion through which we mediate our relationships with ourselves, our communities, and our societies. Its boundaries are fluid. The concepts and platforms through which we funnel our attention, and the determinations we make about what exists, produce our taken-for-granted sense of the real. When a creator makes a Reel, and when I watch it, we are both tinkering with this medium, contributing in our small ways to reality’s unfolding history and emergent shapes.

To say that digital platforms shape reality is not to say that they have shaped it for the better. Biologist E. O. Wilson famously claimed that “the real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” And that was in 2009, just as Google was rolling out Personalized Search. If the nature of reality has always been interactive and evolving, digital technologies make that truth conspicuous, vertiginous, global. What’s notable now is the speed and scale at which iteration occurs—the ongoing interplay of information and interaction spiraling ever faster.

In his 1979 book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, cognitive and computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter introduced a phenomenon he calls the “strange loop.” A strange loop occurs when a complex system creates the illusion of progress but always returns to its starting point. Hofstadter argues that our conscious sense of “self” emerges because we’re constantly referring back to our own perceptions; the part of us that perceives is also the part being perceived. The strange loop does not describe the content of the self—that is, as we mature, have new experiences, develop new habits, or adopt new beliefs, the elements in the loop shift, but the looping architecture persists. If the strange loop is the proverbial algorithm, lived experience is the training data that informs it.

What, exactly, is happening to me, my self, and my reality when I scroll on Instagram? Vertical video is a data-rich communication medium, combining imagery, sound, and text. Every action I take—not just those thwips but how long I linger on a video, whether I read the comments, whether I leave comments of my own—produces ever more information that is used to better understand my tastes. Instagram simulates a self for me: a hyperlink with my name on it. It reflects my interests and automatic responses to sensory information, but these are filtered through the warped lens of an algorithm that mediates what I see on an app that constrains how I can participate. And this information is correlated with that of billions of other people, a genuinely incomprehensible degree of entangled complexity.

The algorithm is not neutral, and not geared toward my well-being. Instagram is designed to deliver profit, whether directly or indirectly, and it’s only one platform among many. How do our inclinations toward status or cultural appropriation get caught in these loops and amplified back to us? Which facets of “the real” do we lose or distort when the loop intensifies, shortens, and focuses on microbursts of attention? And what happens when, as with the grotesque running video, content we “should” turn away from gains a hypnotic pull thanks to the loop?

The detritus of these loops lives in my body in ways large and small. A few days ago, I finally got around to watching Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film Oppenheimer. When the Oscar-winning score kicked in, I realized I had already heard it. One particular snippet became trending audio on Instagram last year, dubbed over a bloom of videos. Some used the snippet for its emotional bombast as they presented unfathomable facts about the universe; others subverted that bombast through routine events like doing the dishes. By the time I started the movie, I was utterly suffused with preexisting context. The score triggered not the euphoric crescendo that Nolan intended but, rather, the meme’s swirl of tones, accrued through the actions of strangers, only some of which I remember. I can’t disentangle these experiences. This, of course, is a relatively benign example.

We are not even two decades into a vast, largely unregulated experiment in human psychology. This blur of experience, a composite of varied partial glimpses, is not something I or any of us evolved to digest. All these people, all these loops. I think of my baby nephew. Even in our one-to-one conversations on FaceTime, we inevitably shape his expectations of the real, setting a baseline for his neuroplastic brain that’s so tremendously different than mine. In the digital, reality, like scroll, becomes more verb than noun. Reality doesn’t merely exist; reality reels. My nephew will never know otherwise.

I’m haunted by that video of the runner. I thumb back up to find it, pop over to his profile. I see that in his more recent videos, he has begun challenging friends and strangers to eat-offs: a new shape for the performance. I’m grossed out and keep watching. I should know better, but I can’t help myself.