THE FUTURE OF FETISH, THIS COULD BE US: HOW FETISH AND FANTASY HAVE EVOLVED IN THE AGE OF IPHONES AND IMMEDIACY BY DEAN KISSICK. "The bulk of our online interactions with others have already been flattened down to a sort of fetish. We communicate with pictures of ourselves and our activity. Our bodies live in the cloud now, from which misty heights we broadcast them around the world as magical images to be worshipped or craved. While reporting on China’s selfie obsession for the New Yorker, Jiayang Fan meets a young Chinese influencer who shows her his workflow of photoediting apps and explains that “a regular camera can’t capture the whole of a person. It has no way of expressing the entirety of your beauty.” Your authentic self, he believes, resides in the portrait you craft." "Our descent into the virtual world has contributed to the making of a new aesthetic of lifelessness and void: that’s how Hollywood blockbusters look now. How pop sounds. How influencers look, and how we visualize ourselves. Might this very quality of artificiality be the thing we’ve come to fetishize the most? Could that be what we’re most attracted to?"