Novelist Zadie Smith delivers an insightful and beautifully written essay into the role of self-hood in fiction - if we could ever accurately tell the stories of others and ultimately, ourselves. "And the dark joke at the end of it all is that these unique selves to which we feel so attached, that we believe to be nontransferable, and with which some of us hope to write fiction—these spectacularly individualized selves who hold this opinion rather than that, who claim one identity as superior to another—are entirely irrelevant to the second, shadow text that lies behind it all. To the technological monopolies that buy and sell your data—and for whom your daily input of personal information is only raw product, to be traded like orange juice futures or corn yields—you reveal yourself not so much in your views or hot takes as by the frequency of your posts or tweets, their length or syntax, the pattern of their links and follows. They do not care that you are woke or unwoke, patriot or activist. To that shadow text, all you are is data. You are the person who tweets fourteen times in twenty minutes and therefore is needy in some way and vulnerable to a particular kind of political advertising, or else you are the person who moves through a series of lifestyle and news sites, which route will predict, with extraordinary specificity, the likelihood of your booking a vacation in early February or voting in November."