Among the oft-misquoted lines in western literature, Sartre's L'enfer, c'est les autres (Hell is other people) is probably the foremost. It has become something of a tagline for a branch of neo-existentialist discourse that echoes across the internet, mostly in the form of snarky and self-satisfied memes. Anchored in a mood that mistakes post-adolescent malaise—a discomfort with the underwhelming rewards of modern adult living—for the fruits of continental philosophy, this discourse rings pseudo-philosophic at best, and a lazy distortion of Sartre's writing at worst. According to the latter-day apostles of a lukewarm intellectualism, social bonds are as intolerable as they are inescapable, and social life is a hellish landscape to be navigated in a constant state of petulant disgust.

I take exception to this type of misreading, mostly because I think it flattens the complexity of an extraordinarily significant and ever-relevant set of ideas. Sartre's line, uttered at the climax of his 1944 play No Exit, was never intended as a nihilistic, misanthropic rejection of the other. If we restore context to the line, what is revealed is quite the contrary. Sartre, after all, was a humanist, and laid out the humanist principles of Existentialism (a descriptor that he first rejected, and then grudgingly assumed) in a manifesto that eloquently makes the case for our sustained, meaningful, and self-directed engagement with other people.

Far from an absurdist apology for social withdrawal, No Exit is a meditation on the negative consequences of a life lived in bad faith. Hell is other people, yes, but only from the perspective of three characters who are already in Hell. Trapped in a cycle of shame and regret, they have irreparably broken the trust of their friends and companions in life and are left to reflect on the decisions they made in an afterlife that is exposed to the constant, indefatigable surveillance of the other two. In Sartre's Hell, no one sleeps, no one blinks; they simply watch each other grapple with the inauthenticity of the lives that they authored—the patterns of mistakes that they were unwilling to correct, and the harm visited on others that they are unable to amend.

Cornered in a small sitting room whose three couches are positioned to face one other, the characters have been deliberately selected to sit out eternity in one another's company: Inez, a postal worker whose capacity for social cruelty has degenerated into relational aggression; Estelle, a beautiful and vain young social climber who has buried her murder of her own child under layers of saccharine denial, and; Joseph, a self-styled pacifist journalist who is unwilling to admit he has betrayed his own political cause. Of the three, Inez is the only character willing to confront the ugly truth of her own self-deception; Estelle and Joseph struggle to justify their actions while they avoid confrontation with the mirror that Inez keeps holding up to them.

To further complicate this dynamic, Inez has fallen in love with Estelle, who in turn has fallen in love with Joseph. The device of the other-as-mirror is concretized when Estelle laments that since there are no reflective surfaces, she cannot properly apply her lipstick in order to seduce Joseph. Inez offers to act as her mirror and reflects back a distorted version of Estelle's face—replete with crooked, smeared lipstick lines, blemishes, and acne. The entire meaning of Estelle's life has been constructed around her sexual appeal to men; her identity is unmoored when she is unable to affirm the truth of that appeal. Inez has effectively divined and exploited the central vulnerability at the heart of Estelle's personality. She profits from the sense of instability that she has sown to manipulate Estelle towards her own ends—seduction, allegiance, possession.

There are no instruments of torture in Sartre's hell, nor are there mirrors to reflect reality. The inmates must rely on one another to reflect back an image that is deliberately, instrumentally distorted.This is the central existential frustration at the heart of Sartre's play; when reality is filtered through the perspective of an interested other, vulnerabilities are exploited in order to exact a value—something that might stand to benefit the onlooker.

Throughout the course of his philosophical writings, Sartre names authenticity, free will, and autonomy as central to the existentialist project. In No Exit, he highlights the importance of solitude and self-reflection as key elements in the lifelong search for authenticity. It is not so much the presence of other people that constitutes the tortuousness of Hell so much as the absence of solitude. It is in privacy, in the innermost sanctuary of the self, where we are able to reflect on the chasm between the people we are and the people we want to be. It is for this reason that surveillance and the concomitant feeling of duress under the gaze of the other is inimical to the project of self-creation. 

Writing in 1944, Sartre could not have foreseen the ways in which the technological advances of the coming century would plant a camera in each of our hands and a screen before each of our faces. And yet his Hell strikes me as a remarkably prescient prototype for the ways in which the ubiquity of the camera—and other mirrored lenses that reflect our images back to us—have come to shape our realities in the twenty-first century. The rise of social networks, and of a consumer society that is driven by the exchange of behavioral data for cornered advertising, compel each of us to construct our lives under the constant gaze of the Other.

The most immediate incarnation of the "Other" is a figure as elemental as the network of friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers who subscribe to the image that we have deliberately resolved to turn to the outside world. In the gaze of this amorphous Other, we struggle to formulate an identity upon a backdrop of comment, shares, upvotes, and likes. Meanwhile, the multiplicity of gazes surveilling our actions impedes our ability to think and act authentically. Shoshanna Zuboff observes the adverse effects of this phenomenon: "Instead of a stable identity, there is only a chameleon that reinvents itself depending upon the social mirror into which it is drawn" (453). Zuboff adds that this impacts the development of adolescents—the most socially vulnerable among us—in ways that we cannot yet begin to quantify.

More significantly perhaps, "the Other" has come to embody a second figure lurking in the wake of the sea of data we shed: a non-human shadow figure, or the algorithm designed to corner our own individual vanities and mercilessly exploit them. This algorithm is a carefully-honed device intended to mine the mundanities of our behavior, pin-pointing our weaknesses and selling us back a fleeting sense of stability in the products and services that purport to improve our lives. Like Sartre's trio, we are cornered by operations that relentlessly surveil and track our behavior in order to mine it for weaknesses and susceptibilities that might pay. Dependent on these networks for a sense of psychological integrity, we are trapped in our corner of the internet where an array of products parade before us temptingly until we buy them.

The result is the worst aspects of Sartre's Hell. We are left with no space, no solitude to construct the course of our lives. Our sanctuary has been invaded by the mechanical eye of the surveillance capitalist intent on divining our weaknesses and selling us a chimeric sense of a stability to fill the void of self-observation that we feel but cannot name. We are each Estelle, unmoored from a fixed identity as we desperately try to construct a new self in the image of what we believe the Other might want to see.

Unlike Sartre's characters, we are not in Hell. We still have the ability—the imperative, even—to wrest agency from the forces of surveillance and reclaim the mental space needed to think and act authentically. If we read Sartre carefully, we find that this imperative is the only action we can take in good faith, lest we succumb to the inauthenticity of a life lived in passivity, in the petulant disgust that worst readers of philosophy would have us mistake for truth.

Sartre's No Exit resonates as a profound reflection on the fragility of human social bonds. Our relationships are structured on trust; they become irreparably fractured when we fail to maintain them in good faith. His characters exist in a morass of instability sown by the corrosion of social trust and broken bonds of reciprocity. And yet Sartre intimates that it is human to err, to make mistakes that harm other people, unintentionally or otherwise. It is vital to the project of self-creation to withdraw, to reassess our choices within the sanctuary of the self—a sacred space that has been gradually, inexorably wrenched from us.

The frustrating reality is that we have consented to this arrangement. Technologies allow us to replace trust with certainty, to supplant the unknowns of human relationships as we deliver ourselves into the unerring hands of automation. Machine learning sells us on the promise of certainty—instantaneous, synchronous, and anomaly-free—but at what price? The cost itself is buried in the labyrinthine clauses of the terms of service that none of us have read. Were we to bother reading these terms, we would discover a pact that is more Faustian than commercial; in the guise of enhanced connection, we have abdicated our fundamental rights to privacy, the search for authenticity, and the imperative to cultivate sustained, meaningful, and self-directed engagement with other people.