The Tufts Daily

Celebrity culture, or “standom” as people call it these days, has always fascinated me. In this new world, artists aren’t mere mortals; they’re gods that people idealize and pay tribute to. Stars like Charli are within closer reach than they’ve ever been thanks to online platforms like Twitter and, in this case, Zoom.

Although I’ve been wary of social media for a while, the decision to actively regulate my usage was precipitated by “The Social Dilemma” (2020), a Netflix documentary centered around Tristan Harris, a former Google employee and cofounder of the Center for Humane Technology. He uses the ominous phrase “human downgrading” to describe the effect social media has on our minds, and has spent much of his career pushing tech companies like Facebook and Apple to adopt more ethical guidelines to govern their interfaces.

While most people have turned to gardening, baking or biking, my isolation projects have been more abstract. One of them is, in essence, an investigation that revolves around a single question: is there such thing as the perfect queer film?