Why Is Every Relationship a Story?

Jason Yuan says every relationship is a story with shared authorship between two people. The self in isolation does not exist, even though internal identity does. Calling yourself a good friend only works if a bad friend can exist. As the only person on earth, there is nothing left to identify against. Dot can know a life because it was told about it, and that private record still cannot show that the toxic, emotionally unavailable man is you. Other people have to co-author the story. The world is a collection of stories people write together.

The detail that matters is narrative ambiguity. One account can call Soleio an amazing best friend while Soleio says Jason is okay and that he sees him once a year. The aim is coherence where the two accounts do not match, rather than one agreed label. Soleio adds that Facebook treated friendship as a mutually agreed, symmetric bond, while real relationships carry asymmetries that are more common in nature. Hivemind, as a theory, is a way to show what a social product should actually represent.