Exhibitionist Observer 〈2025〉

But we are no longer content to be just the eye in the sky. We want to be the sky itself, and also the bird flying through it, and also the person on the ground tweeting about the bird.

In literature, the archetype might be Dostoevsky’s Underground Man—a man who is painfully self-aware of his own wretchedness and who performs his misery for an imagined reader even as he suffers it. In film, it is the character who talks to the camera, breaking the fourth wall, reminding us that this tragedy is also a show. exhibitionist observer

There is a crack in the mirror of modern attention, and through it steps the figure I call the exhibitionist observer . At first glance, the term seems like a contradiction. An observer is a ghost—cloaked in anonymity, a quiet voyeur in the corner, sipping their coffee, watching the world with the serene detachment of a cat on a windowsill. An exhibitionist, by contrast, is the figure on the stage, naked under the hot light, demanding, “Look at me.” But we are no longer content to be just the eye in the sky

And the saddest part? While they are shouting, the canyon is silent, the sun has set, and the moment—the real, unobserved, un-shareable moment—has passed them by. In film, it is the character who talks