"Through the emergence of blogging, personal lives were becoming public domain, and social incentives—to be liked, to be seen—were becoming economic ones." 

Tolentino describes the early days of the internet, presenting blogging as a key step in arriving at the present-day version of the internet. Here, she explains how presenting the self online became profitable. The creation of this model then led to the rise of platforms like Facebook, which began to both reflect and control users' behavior.

"Even as we became increasingly sad and ugly on the internet, the mirage of the better online self continued to glimmer." 

Related to the "trick mirror" of the collection's title, these lines show the distorted relationship between image and reality, created here by the internet. Tolentino uses this observation not only to illustrate the internet's appeal, but also to show how websites were able to monetize users' online behavior through this appeal.

"These deranged takes, and their unnerving proximity to online monetization, are case studies in the way that our world—digitally mediated, utterly consumed by capitalism—makes communication about morality very easy but makes actual moral living very hard." 

As Tolentino writes about the distance between images and reality, one key point she returns to is the dangers this distance creates. This is particularly true in the case of performative speech replacing concrete political action, as she references here. In other words, Tolentino worries that seeming to be ethical is now equated with actually being ethical, when the two are very different.