Most profoundly, VK illuminates Sartre’s concept of “the Look.” For Sartre, shame and self-consciousness arise when we realize we are being seen as an object by another subject. On VK, the Look is ubiquitous and anonymous. When you post, you are not writing for a friend but for a faceless potential audience of hundreds. You become the object of an unknown Other’s gaze. This generates a specific digital nausea: the feeling that your carefully crafted identity is always at risk of being misinterpreted, mocked, or ignored. Your being-for-others—the version of you that exists in the consciousness of other VK users—is a permanent, unstable construction. You cannot control it, yet you obsessively try to manage it through likes, reposts, and privacy settings. This is the hell of digital intersubjectivity, which Sartre famously summarized as “Hell is other people”—not because others are malicious, but because they freeze your fluid freedom into a fixed object of their perception.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s magnum opus, Being and Nothingness (1943), constructs a phenomenological ontology centered on the tension between two modes of being: the en-soi (the in-itself, the dense, unthinking reality of objects) and the pour-soi (the for-itself, the fluid, negating consciousness of human existence). For Sartre, human reality is defined by a fundamental lack, a “nothingness” that coils at the heart of being. In the twenty-first century, the Russian social network VK (Vkontakte) offers a startlingly precise digital theater for this existential drama. Far from a mere platform for communication, VK functions as a laboratory of bad faith, where users attempt to freeze their fluid consciousness into the fixed, object-like identity of a profile—a futile pursuit that illuminates Sartre’s core thesis: that we are condemned to be free, even when clicking “like.” being and nothingness vk
At its core, Being and Nothingness argues that human existence is not a solid thing but a perpetual vanishing. The pour-soi is “nothingness” because it is always other than what it is (projecting into the future) and what it was (haunted by a past it cannot fully reclaim). Sartre famously declares, “Man is not what he is, and is what he is not.” The VK profile, by contrast, is a monument to the en-soi . It is a curated collection of fixed attributes: a name, a profile picture, a list of friends, a timeline of posts, musical tastes, and geotags. Each element is a solidified past, a “facticity” presented as the whole truth of the person. When a user meticulously selects an avatar that radiates confidence, updates their status to a witty aphorism, or lists favorite bands from five years ago, they are attempting to perform a sleight of hand: to transform the fluid, anxious pour-soi into a static, serene en-soi . This, for Sartre, is the essence of —lying to oneself about the nature of one’s own freedom. Most profoundly, VK illuminates Sartre’s concept of “the