This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The idea of the “informed consumer” may have always been a myth, but online shopping has made distinguishing between reality and manipulation even harder.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

America’s lowest standard Why Pope Francis isn’t with the West on Ukraine Every emergency needs to end, even COVID-19. AI is about to make social media (much) more toxic. An Illusion of Control

Booking a hotel room used to be fairly easy. But as my colleague Jacob Stern wrote earlier this week, the process has recently become a “uniquely excruciating experience.” You might see a few good deals on booking websites, only to click through and find that they’ve become unavailable. In the event that a room is genuinely up for grabs, it can turn out to be much more expensive than the price you were first shown, because of additional fees and taxes. The ordeal, Jacob writes, “will leave you questioning what is true and what is false. It will beat you down until, at a certain point, you won’t even care.”

One potential culprit for this hotel-booking fiasco is the airline industry, which pioneered the use of “dynamic pricing” in the 1980s, adjusting rates in response to supply-and-demand changes. By the late ’90s, hotels had adopted the practice as well. Jacob explains that the resulting price fluctuations cause problems for deal aggregators such as Expedia and Booking.com, which are able to scrape pricing information only periodically and therefore struggle to keep up with the latest figures.

In the end, the common theme of hotel booking is shoppers’ inability to tell what’s really on offer. As Jacob writes:

The best analogy for online hotel booking, I think, is a hall of mirrors: You can’t tell what’s real, and you can’t escape. In that sense, hotel booking, perhaps more than any other everyday commercial experience, fits perfectly into the landscape of 2023 America. This is online shopping for the “post-truth” era.

Post-truth describes the rest of our online-shopping ecosystem as well. In her February article “The Death of the Smart Shopper,” my colleague Amanda Mull notes that Amazon has become filled with junk results and apparent repeats of the same exact product—sometimes with the same exact image—but with different sellers, prices, and ratings. “In these conditions, understanding what it is you’re buying, where it came from, and what you can expect of it is a fool’s errand,” Amanda writes. This problem isn’t limited to Amazon, she explains. Although being an informed consumer has always been challenging, it’s basically impossible in 2023.

Brick-and-mortar retailers are no strangers to consumer manipulation. But shopping on the internet tricks would-be buyers into believing that if they can’t distinguish reality from sales tactics, it’s their own fault. Shoppers can now conduct their own mini research projects when deciding what to buy: They can read reviews, watch videos, consult the opinions of influencers and product-recommendation sites such as Wirecutter and The Strategist, compare products across multiple brands. But access to such information offers merely the illusion of control. Amanda writes:

Because you’re shopping online, you can’t go look at most of the products in a store, and you can’t tell how—or whether—one thing is different from the very similar thing two thumbnails down. You can’t tell if a particular product will spy on you or sell your data … You buy something cheap and hope it holds up—or at least tides you over—for a while. If it doesn’t, you probably can’t get someone on the phone to solve your problem, so you toss it or squirrel it away in the back of a storage closet.

Amanda acknowledges that misleading online-retail tactics might seem trivial to some. But she makes a good case for caring about the decline of what’s left of informed shopping: “If you can’t differentiate one product from a dozen listings for a seemingly identical thing,” she writes, “you can’t even begin to understand the conditions under which it was produced, or at what cost to workers and the environment.” Online shopping strips consumers of our ability to understand the world we’re living in. And yet, we’re living in it, scrolling through product after product, searching for something true.

Related:

Hotel booking is a post-truth nightmare. The death of the smart shopper Today’s News Rochelle Walensky announced that she will step down from her position as the CDC director on June 30. The killing of Jordan Neely, who was placed in a chokehold by another passenger on a subway train, was ruled a homicide by New York City’s medical examiner. Job growth in the U.S. accelerated in April despite interest-rate hikes by the Federal Reserve. Dispatches Books Briefing: Authors frequently manipulate language to unsettle their audiences, Elise Hannum writes. Small choices can have stark consequences.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Illustration by Oliver Munday / The Atlantic. Sources: Mark Newman / Getty; Laflor / Getty.

Call of the Wild

By James Parker

Overheard in the men’s bathroom of a movie theater in Boston, after a screening of Creed III:

“That movie basically just makes me want to get in shape.”

“It makes me want to get in shape mentally.”

“Huh?”

“Bro, that movie was all about mental stuff. You didn’t get that?”

The mental stuff. That’s where it’s at. The mind, the mind—it can bear you sweetly along on pulses of transparent super-energy, or it can rear up and bite your face off. And if, like me, you’ve watched 432 episodes of survival TV, the beloved subgenre that pits bare, forked man against the unrelenting wilderness, you’ve seen it happen over and over again. It’s not Alaska that breaks you, or Mongolia, or northeastern Labrador—it’s the contents of your own head.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The ice-cream theory of Joe Biden’s success The Goopification of AI Bing is a trap.

Culture Break

Apple TV+

Read. A Minor Revolution, a new book about why our children should be more demanding, not less.

Watch. Apple TV+’s new adaptation of Frog and Toad adds a cast of woodland friends that highlight, rather than hide, the duo’s profound partnership.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I explored how our brains get tricked into buying certain products for an edition of the Wonder Reader newsletter last year. Digging through The Atlantic’s archives for stories about shopping, I came across a hilarious account of an annoying shopping experience from 1931. “I don’t like to shop, but I do like to buy,” an advertising executive named Frances Taylor wrote.

One moment in her essay makes me chuckle every time: Looking for an over-the-bed lamp, she’s told that the store only has “one … it is pink and it is broken.” “I too am pink and broken,” Taylor writes, “but I manage to reach another store.” As Amanda reminded us, a golden era of shopping never really existed.

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Overheard in the men’s bathroom of a movie theater in Boston, after a screening of Creed III:

“That movie basically just makes me want to get in shape.”

“It makes me want to get in shape mentally.”

“Huh?”

“Bro, that movie was all about mental stuff. You didn’t get that?”

The mental stuff. That’s where it’s at. The mind, the mind—it can bear you sweetly along on pulses of transparent super-energy, or it can rear up and bite your face off. And if, like me, you’ve watched 432 episodes of survival TV, the beloved subgenre that pits bare, forked man against the unrelenting wilderness, you’ve seen it happen over and over again. It’s not Alaska that breaks you, or Mongolia, or northeastern Labrador—it’s the contents of your own head.

Remember Jim Shields from Season 3 of Alone ? How passionately I relate to this guy. Deposited on the cold shore of a fuming-with-bleakness lake in the Andean foothills, with only a couple of GoPros for company (that’s the hook of Alone : no camera crews; the contestants film themselves), he spreads his arms, throws back his head, and, in an attempt at exultation, bellows, “PATAGONI-AAAAH!”— only to be almost visibly demolished, half a second later, by the ensuing unresponding immensity of silence and solitude. He exhales, as if the weight of it is about to collapse his rib cage. He looks momentarily holographic, like he might go fuzzy and vanish from the picture. And sure enough, on only his third day out there, his third day in the storm and vacancy of his own aloneness, Shields “taps out.” He can’t take it anymore: He radios the producers. His Alone time is over.

For comparison, Zach Fowler—the modest prodigy of durability who won that season of Alone—lasted 87 days (and lost more than 70 pounds in the process). Fowler, a boatbuilder, kept himself busy, did not wallow. This is the aspect of Alone, which has run for nine seasons, that made people love it with particular intensity during the pandemic. For those 87 days, Fowler was Kipling’s “man of infinite-​resource-​and-​sagacity”: fishing, chopping wood, a marvel to behold as he managed his plummeting calories and husbanded his plummeting moods. Shields, in contrast, Shields, my spirit-mirror. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have the skills,” he reflected to his GoPro. “It’s just a matter of one skill that I can’t control. My brain.”

On USA Network right now, you can find Race to Survive: Alaska, in which eight pairs of contestants huff and puff their way into some very hard-core Alaskan topography—six races over 100-plus miles, with no shelter provided. Interpersonal crack-ups are inevitable. Look at Jeff and Hunter Leininger, father-and-son partners, laden with gear, laden with father-son issues, toiling grimly through the Tongass Forest in the first episode. “OUGHH!” says young Hunter, bringing up the rear, as he gets thwapped by a recoiling limb. “Right in the face !” “Don’t be right behind me, Hunter,” his father responds testily. “You know that!” The wilderness glints; the producers rub their hands. This will get worse.

[Read: Reality shows don’t have to be cruel]

Alaska seems to be a perfect place for all of this to go down—the flapping, still-open, still-wild, burning-and-freezing American frontier where you’re either alone, alone, all, all alone, or tearing each other to pieces. Outlast, which you can find on Netflix, is the next twist. Here 16 aloners/survivalists/bushcrafters/berry-munching nutcases are dumped in the Alaskan outback for as long as they can stand it. No rules, no end date: You either tap out or get medevaced. As usual, everybody’s plodding around in the cold, whittling and splicing and setting snares and muttering about protein, but with a crucial refinement, the contest’s single law: They must form teams. Nobody wins this game in isolation. No prizes, this time, for going it alone. It’s the last team standing, the last unit of cooperation, that shares the booty: a million bucks. You see the tension, right? The drama-generating torque? These are lone wolves, alpha personalities, rugged individualists, huge pains in the American ass, and they must work together, be together, in a classic Sartrean hell-cell of a reality-TV situation.

It’s different now, watching reality TV. Years ago, pre-everything, on a flight out of Salt Lake City, I sat next to a man who had been on one of those construction reality shows—about tiny houses, I think. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said to me as we popped open our second beer. “It’s all made-up. Everything that happens in the show. It’s complete bullshit.” At the time, I didn’t really believe him. I didn’t want to, so happily and beerily invested was I in the narrative tropes of reality TV: the villain, the meltdown, the redemption. But now, post-everything, we distrust narrative. So when plot enters a reality show, when story starts to happen, we think, Yeah, right.

[Read: Survivor, 20 years later, keeps teaching us to trust no one]

In the case of Outlast, however, I buy it. When one of the ad hoc teams abruptly goes feral and starts wrecking the campsites of its rivals, stealing sleeping bags, and so on, that feels real to me. I do not sense the hand of the producer. Or rather, I sense the producer’s glee at how fucked-up everything is getting, at how readily it’s all reverting to a state of nature. Isn’t this the secret agenda of all reality shows: to become the Stanford Prison Experiment? And Outlast has the characters. Team Alpha, the rogue team in question, is three people: Jill, who has all the evil ideas; Justin, slashing tarps and twiddling the ends of his Mephistophelian mustache; and Amber, with her eyes of wolfish clarity, who aids and abets. They really run riot, this lot. They accelerate into a space of no compassion at all: “This isn’t about survival!” protests one of their appalled and out-gamed victims. “It’s about who’s the fucking meanest.” Now, doesn’t that have the ring of truth, the authentic clang of 2023? In lockdown, we watched Alone ; now we’re dealing with one another again, and we’re watching Outlast.

The greatest, boldest, craziest aloner of them all was Timothy Treadwell, cracked wilderness king and director of his own bootleg reality show. You’ve seen Grizzly Man, I hope—one of the director Werner Herzog’s masterpieces, and a prime text of the Alaskan sublime. Treadwell is the protagonist: the hero, why not? He filmed himself, like the contestants on Alone ; he asserted himself in hard company, like the contestants on Outlast. Only the company was bears, not people: the roaming grizzlies of Alaska’s Katmai National Park, among whom Treadwell camped for 13 summers. Bear-loving, bear-obsessed, eventually eaten by a bear, Treadwell never muttered about protein—at least not in the footage I’ve seen. He was too busy watching the bears play their own game of survival. And he entered the game. He was with them; cherishing them; backing them down; giving them names; talking to them in eerie, rapturous singsong, half shaman, half preschool teacher. Don’t you do that … don’t you do that … It’s okay, I love you, I love you. Next to this strange ecstasy, Herzog’s German-accented voice-overs are cosmic deadpan. “In all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.”

[Read: The movie review: Grizzly Man]

How nature feels about us, that’s the great imponderable. That’s somewhere under all these shows. The wilderness gapes. The wilderness crackles. Trekking across it, trying to make a home in it, aloneing, outlasting, or diving profanely into its mysteries, we never quite get the answer to our question: Are we strangers in this world, or not?

This article appears in the June 2023 print edition with the headline “Call of the Wild.”