When “The West Village Girl” essay made its rounds, calling out the monotony of white twenty-something women climbing the influencer-adjacent ladder, it laughed at these women who sought friends in a specific circle in a specific subset of the city:

After they snapped a selfie, I observed one of them, in the course of a minute, check a group chat, swipe through a dozen Instagram Stories, clock in to her Hinge account (no new messages), then throw a few heart reacts into yet another group chat. W...