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> ... as psychologically debilitating as literal homelessness — online homelessness. Even a quick glance at any notoriously sad place online, such as the YouTube comments section, will reveal the existence of an entire invisible online world that is comparable to homelessness.

> A new platform or medium comes along. You make a first-pass judgment about whether to even join it, based largely on whether you think you can cohere an inhabitable persona on it, and whether you have the time to participate on it.

> If you decide to give it a shot, you go on, you try a few experimental personas on for size, and as one starts to gel, you become present on the platform. There is now something it is like to be you on Platform X.

> They are Very Online, liking, retweeting, beefing, trolling, and reply-guying. But their profiles are incoherent. Their tweet streams reveal a sort of frustrated search for an “at home” presence that seems to forever elude them.

> Their reply conversations have a quality of tentative, inept, entryist behavior being managed from a wrong sort of adjacent identity to the one they are trying to cohere. There are clear patterns of avoidance around them. Often, they appear to be talking to themselves.

> Yet they persist, trying to come alive. Some are so borderline not-human, at-home people have to do a double take or even run tests to check whether they are talking to Russian bot accounts or real people.