assuming the mistake

My favorite reaction videos — the subspecies that strikes me as the purest expression of the form — are the ones like that “Star Wars” clip: people reacting, in videos on screens, to other videos that they’re watching on screens. It seems, in its potentially infinite regression, to contain the fundamental experience of the Internet. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, the person in the reaction video will be wearing glasses, and you can see a tiny ghost image of the video they’re watching floating in the lenses, and then it will occur to you that everything you’re watching, reflection and all, is now being reflected in the lenses of your own glasses, and the little medicine cup of your consciousness will tip over and pour its contents out into the great everlasting ocean of American Image, and you’ll feel that ego-dissolving bliss of merging with the ultimate source of everything.