Join social media provocateur, feminist cultural critic and OnlyFans model Farha Khalidi as she sits down with the IAI for an exclusive interview about what performing for an audience gives us and what it might take away. With our lives lived increasingly online, and social media making fame more accessible than ever, the line between the private self and the public performer has never been thinner. Does putting ourselves on show online expand who we are, or does the self need privacy, away from the audience’s gaze, to grow?

Should platforms be forced to make themselves safer, even if this makes it harder for users to build vast audiences? Should governments intervene, or even nationalize social media? Or would this silence ordinary voices and hand power back to a narrow elite?

Is the idea of privacy, indeed the idea of the authentic private self, just a dogma of Western individualism? Join Hans-Georg Moeller, expert on Chinese philosophy and host of the Carefree Wandering YouTube channel, as he addresses our theme through the critical lens of Daoist thought. Social media has, he argues, changed the meanings of authenticity, privacy and the self—and this may not be such a bad thing.