Les années moi-moi: the age of the self as measure
We live in a time saturated with exposure, where the self is a product. How we present ourselves, what we represent, how visible and opinable our identity is. If the 1920s were les années folles, the 2020s might well be called les années moi-moi: the me-me years. Let’s pretend we’re writing for the Oxford Dictionary:
Années moi-moi fig. phrase. From Fr. années (“years”) and moi-moi (emphatic repetition of moi, “me”; literally, “me-me years”), in reference to the années folles of the 20th century. A historical era, particular to the 21st century, defined by the centrality of the self as the axis of value, representation, judgment, belonging, and power. In the me-me years, identity exposure replaces connection, external validation displaces interiority, and politics, consumption, and subjectivity revolve around the visibility and performance of the ego.
This is an attempt to name an era in which the self becomes the organizing principle of what matters, what counts, what must be seen, said, judged, and shared. Of desire, affectivity—even politics. And what matters is not the act, the word, the work, or the listening. It’s the self who enunciates them.
At least six traits can be identified as emblematic of this epochal logic:
I. The performativity of the self as dominant logic
In the me-me years, what someone does or produces matters less than who they are, what they say, how they appear, what they stand for.
This logic can be read as an expression of a performative ontology of the subject, where identity becomes a series of acts that must be publicly enacted. Judith Butler proposed this regarding gender, but here the principle extends: the total self must be constantly performed. It takes center stage. It becomes a public interface designed to uphold a presumed moral, aesthetic, even theatrical coherence in the eyes of others. Everything becomes identity curation.
The aestheticization of this curated, optimized self aligns with the logic of contemporary capitalism, where identity becomes an exploitable resource. This connects directly with the figure of the homo instans: a subject forced to update, display, and position themselves now and always, without pause or interiority.
II. Cancellation as punitive ritual
Cancellation operates as a kind of collective validation rite, reaffirming the limits of acceptability by punishing deviation. There is no room for debate. The goal is simply the purge.
Instead of community, what emerges is something like a moralizing digital egregore,1 bound together by acts of cancellation. Punishing others affirms one’s own belonging.
The Other as latent threat, whose exclusion reaffirms the narrative that sustains the collective subject.
Psychoanalysis might also interpret this as a projection and splitting operation (what is intolerable in me is cast onto the “public enemy”). Politically, it functions as a way to shield consensus by sacrificing a visible other.
And rereading Foucault, cancellation also resembles a kind of digital spectacle of punishment. Not physical anymore, but still ritualized, visible, exemplary. A collective administration of shame.
Cancellation seeks alignment before justice. It expels what threatens the collective self-image, reinforcing its (supposedly) spotless appearance.
III. The mandate of constant visibility and opinion
Failing to speak up is already suspicious. Not having an opinion, not taking a stand, not showing up, not declaring something in real time amounts to betrayal. Visibility becomes a moral duty. Every subject (celebrity or anonymous; politician, athlete, or artist) must expose themselves, must mean something. Even absence must be interpretable.
This imperative can be read as a contemporary form of inverted panopticism (woke up feeling Foucaultian). Power no longer watches from a central point; we all watch each other, demanding transparency and visibility.
The technopolitics of the self amplifies this: each person becomes a constant emitter, an image manager, a curator of their values. Self-tracking, branding, and other forms of voluntary surveillance.
It also resonates with the logic of platform capitalism, where every interaction (every like, every share) is data. To not have an opinion is to not produce.
In contrast to the homo instans, we might propose a homo frater: a relational subject guided by awareness of interdependence, shared fragility, mutual responsibility, care, and a common fate. In this frame, silence becomes a form of dissent.
Its practice is not self-assertion but the patient construction of a we. In response to the mandate of performance, it offers attention; to judgment, mercy and compassion; to urgency, delay; to individualism, the building of shared horizons.
In the me-me years, there is no outside to the spectacle. Even silence is read as a meaningful act. To resist is to be silent in a way that does not translate into cynicism, but into intimacy.
IV. The disappearance of the work as site of mediation
The work no longer mediates anything. Focus shifts to the artist as public figure, and the work becomes mere testimony. Tomás Trapé, in this article, describes this well. Artists are subjected to constant moral exams, their works judged for what they represent identity-wise, all through a policing lens and a public trial reduced to a ceremony of punitive cohesion.
Walter Benjamin warned that technical reproducibility dissolved the aura of the work, its unique singularity.2 Today, that process deepens. It’s not just the aura that’s lost. The work, plain and simple, is used. It’s useful if it confirms, and discarded if it disrupts. We might speak of the collapse of aesthetic value in the face of immediate moral or identity value. A work is valuable insofar as it represents identity.
In a world governed by the logic of immediacy (instans), the work—requiring time, ambiguity, elaboration, rereading, risk, even failure—becomes inconvenient. It clashes with the direct, obvious, efficient, utilitarian, literal self.
The work only serves as a device to stage a self in search of validation.
In the me-me years, art loses its depth. It reflects identities. Its value is measured in moral clicks.
V. The logic of moral immediacy
Everything must be judged now. No waiting, no process, no nuance, no context (ambiguity is punished for being confusing, and complexity dismissed as inefficient). Moral judgment behaves like an algorithm: binary, fast, intolerant of doubt.
This logic condenses the figure of homo instans: a subject of absolute present, who cannot wait, cannot last, who reacts almost automatically to each stimulus. Trapped in a moral reflex, they cannot pause, or hesitate. They can only act, share, applaud, condemn, cancel.
This echoes a kind of technocratic efficiency invading the moral realm. We judge as we optimize: fast and with clear metrics.
In doing so, we lose the space of ethical ambivalence, of the time needed for discernment.
In the me-me years, justice is mass-produced, like any other piece of content. There is no space for grief or due process. Against this, delay may be an act of responsibility. Slowness, a fracture in the automatism.
VI. The disappearance of conflict as political engine
Instead of genuine confrontation of ideas, we get a circulation of opinions that only reinforce existing positions. Conflict loses its transformative power. It is no longer seen as constitutive of the common (the universal?), but as a threat to group cohesion (the particular?). Dissent is not dealt with. At most (and this is not the same), it is canceled, minimized, caricatured, or silenced. Everything uncomfortable becomes an identity problem.
Affinities are sealed with likes, retweets, and memes. A kind of community of feelings forms, grounded in drive-discharge. Difference and critique appear as threats. So they’re canceled or mocked. The other is not debated but rendered morally unacceptable. And in this exclusion lies the shared pleasure of believing oneself on the right side.
Rather than making space for difference, near-tribal alignment is demanded. And this isn't about arguing. It’s about proving belonging—visibly, constantly, emotionally. Politics becomes a moral curation of the we, leaving out any discussion of what that “we” might mean. Antagonism is replaced by performative loyalty that demands (and rewards) adherence, visibility, calling out, public shaming. Politics becomes more about belonging than (despite appearances) confrontation.
Disagreement becomes dysfunctional. Critique discomforts. Ambiguity irritates. Whatever does not confirm, offends. If something doesn’t reinforce, it’s expelled. Thus, conflict—once a motor of the common—is deactivated. The result is a more homogeneous, yet more fragile, community. More identical. More watchful. Persecutory. Folded in on itself, transformed into a moral cohesion device as strict as it is brittle; into a mechanism of harassment, nearly paranoid.
In the me-me years, conflict is no longer seen as the condition of the political, but as a glitch in the identity algorithm.
Coda
These six points illustrate how the self has become an epochal form. Today, omnipresent, it organizes desire, politics, judgment, and relationality. In that sense, Tomás describes symptoms, but more importantly, points to the imaginary architecture (the frameworks of the thinkable) of an era.
Les années moi-moi are more than a narcissistic period. They are a regime where the self becomes measure, filter, parameter, and criterion of belonging. Everything revolves around its exposure, performance, and alignment with others. But where everything aligns, nothing transforms.
If modernity enshrined the individual, and postmodernity relativized them, hypermodernity absolutizes them: it turns them into the measure. In that sense, the me-me years can be read as an aesthetic and moral phase of hypermodernity, where the visibility of the self replaces (or conditions) all other forms of relationality and meaning (I explored this tension further in this post).
Maybe it’s time to try something else.
From technopolitics, which contests tools, to a politics of time (or chronopolitics?), which contests rhythms. That reclaims space for pause. For detour, delay, interval, silence, ambiguity. For all that escapes calculation, utility, performance — reflection and reflex: the mirror and the twitch. I mean: we must interrupt both the narcissistic loop (everything confirms what we already are) and the logic of the instant (everything must be resolved now).
Perhaps what is truly political (and aesthetically irreducible) today is to produce again that which cannot be contained by the logic of the self. Words that seek no applause, or works that aim to confirm nothing.
Because if everything we see only confirms who we already are, why keep looking?
— E.
Egregore comes from Greek (egrēgoros, “awake” or “watchful”) and has been taken up in esoteric and philosophical traditions to describe a symbolic collective entity formed by shared emotions and beliefs. Here, I use it to describe something like a faceless group-subject coalescing around moral punishment.↩
In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (1936; Penguin, 2008).↩