When Camus wrote that “Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes,” he was referring to the totalitarian theorists of the 20th century, like Stalin: authorities who not only dominated you, but insisted that you listen patiently, bored to insanity but feigning attention, to the hypertrophied reasoning that justified it. And in that performance, you were utterly alone even as everyone else was obliged to do the same.

But he was also predicting easily the most depressing form of our time: the influencer —or, more starkly, the failed influencer— monologuing about the most pedestrian imaginable dimension of their lives —their “routines” for example— above a million, a billion solitudes, solitudes hoping to be something else, inflamed solitudes, resentful solitudes trapped in a truly solitude-enforcing little digital scene!

Lots of bored solitudes out there. Solitude: the new attitude. Solitudes for solid dudes. Etc. And the only alternative: to be a tyrant, of a sort!