We all imagine a million cameras facing us and recording everything. There's this acute self-consciousness that constitutes a tremendous psychological burden, because you can never really feel like you're alone with yourself. You can never really feel like someone's not overhearing what you're thinking. . . . Even in the deepest privacy of your own mind, you'll often find a team of them from some advertising agency. That's the most criminal aspect of this whole system--it seems to have colonized, or tries to colonize the very consciousness of its young subjects...

...To be the center of attention is a tremendous pleasure, and we've always known this. It's fun to be famous. It's fun to have people paying attention to you. Well, since we live in a completely visual, completely spectacular culture now because of the pervasiveness of TV and the cult of celebrity, we now conceive of that kind of pleasure as the greatest good. The highest, finest thing that life has to offer is to be on TV, is to have a whole huge audience clapping for you, is to be a performer, is to win gold at the Olympics. That's it. That's the great pleasure, okay?

But the interesting thing is that there are a lot of pleasures that you actually cannot have when the whole world seems to be gawking at you. We close our eyes when we kiss someone for a reason, because that kind of pleasure involves a certain sort of surrender. Enjoying anything involves losing one's self in it. And that even includes the pleasure of using your mind, thinking your own thoughts, that you just aren't bothered by that din, that constant attention or the illusion of attention. I think that that there's something strangely destructive about this all-pervasive sense, especially among kids, that the whole world is watching.

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