"I met a girl at a party in Manhattan right before the pandemic. She was dancing in a hollowed-out office building in Herald Square, the last tenant of which was apparently something called “VR WORLD,” if all the residual signage was to be believed. She makes YouTube vlogs, I later learned, and I will shamelessly divulge that I am her viewer. One night, lying awake in a starchy hotel bed, x years and y cities of residence later, I see that she has uploaded something new, roughly the length of a network television episode, called “QUITTING YOUTUBE.” I don’t click through to watch it, but hover for a second, and see the first few seconds playing out in the thumbnail, overlaid with auto-generated captions: “I just got back from a particularly radicalizing extinction rebellion protest…” Move my cursor from the thumbnail and it stops playing. Roll over it again and the captions restart, fitfully, breaking sentences at awkward intervals."