“Life is a dramatically enacted thing.” - Erving Goffman
One of the worst things about the internet becoming ‘real life’ is that it’s a place where you perform conversations instead of just having them.
Not long ago I found myself explaining this to my mom. We were sitting in the car after just arriving at the grocery store in suburban Texas; she waited patiently while I texted a friend who was launching a big project that day.
I congratulated him in iMessage—heartfelt wishes, inside jokes, the whole thing. But I felt the impulse to reopen the celebration in public. I opened Twitter, found his post, hit ‘quote tweet,’ and sat there thinking about how best to perform the praise—to get the tone right, to keep it about him but still reflect well on me.
I explained all of this to my mom. That the tweet would be redundant but just as important, if not more. That supporting friends doesn’t just mean supporting them in private now.
Private praise isn’t enough anymore—it has to be followed by performative praise. There’s an expectation to perform praise, loyalty, affiliation, intimacy in public. Wherever my people are online, it’s my duty to witness and champion them. Friendship as performance art. Social media as social theater.
II
There’s the anxiety of breaking news or a new “current thing” sprouting up and needing to have a “take.” Then there’s the quieter anxiety of wanting to support someone in their moment in the sun, to make them happy, to help them go viral. But it’s work—to like, reply, and quote tweet with something earnest and clever every time. It’s work to balance sincerity with signaling.
We’re all in the Spider-Man pointing meme, except instead of accusation, it’s adulation. You boost me, I boost you, we boost each other. It’s endless reciprocal performance. And you can tell who’s in a group chat together.
This is nothing new. We rail against doomscrolling feeds and curated Instagram lives, but we don’t talk enough about the burdens of doing even the “good” things online. Supporting your favorite people, strangers whose work you admire, or in our not so selfless moments, aspirational people you want to get to know, takes energy.
The need to detox from social media is as much about the endless performative rituals, even in service of others, as it is about brainrot.
III
It’s not just public congrats for big wins. It’s every online act: tweets, stories, blog posts, podcast episodes, pop-up stores, product drops, pre-orders, and personal milestones—shared on Twitter, Substack, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and beyond.
There’s an urgency to public praise too: chime in within the first hour and you’re a mensch, 3 hours and you’re still early, 12 hours and you’re safe, 24 hours and you’re really pushing it; any later and you may as well say nothing at all.
There’s a calculus to how you come across too:
Too effusive or not enough? Earnest or thirsty? Are you amplifying what you love or just what’s already popular? Are you buying it because you want it, because it signals a higher form of patronage than mere words, or simply because you need to buy it to post about having bought it?
Anyone who says these questions never cross their mind isn’t being honest. Self-awareness and social awareness run hand in hand with social theater. Reputation and performance are inseparable online. It’s hard to take anything at face value now; it’s easier to see what people want to project than what they actually think.
IV
I’ve been testing life on and off the few social media apps I frequent. I haven’t figured it all out yet, but I’ve started noticing the impulses that surface when I do.
This week I opened Twitter and saw the pre-drop announcement for Colossus magazine’s Josh Kushner profile. I knew it would be big. Sure enough my timeline filled with anticipation, and then came the flood of performative praise—quote tweets, screenshots, the many accounts of being six-degrees-of-separation from the subject, or less.
I wanted to applaud the mag, the writer, the subject. But I didn’t violate my hiatus. I impressed myself. Then again, here I am, arguably making up for it in longer form.
Sometimes I fantasize about a bot that would handle all of this—liking, sharing, commenting on everything my close friends, the founders I support, and my parasocial idols post. But of course, that would defeat the point—the attention is the currency. Or maybe I’m being idealistic. Maybe we’re heading toward a future where bots do all the praise for us and the “dead internet” is truly dead. Where being genuinely offline is the only sensible move and human presence is the only real way to pay.
The highest-status people already live there, away from forums for the masses. They rarely post, reply, or comment. And still, their silence may be worth more than all our performance.
V
The weight of this accumulates in ways that are hard to name. It’s the running to-do list and the quiet tally in the back of your mind.
Who launched something this week that you haven’t praised? Whose blog did you read but forget to comment on? If your praise wasn’t acknowledged, did it count? There’s a flip side, too. Who’s supporting you in public? When? How? Is there reciprocal energy, or is it one-sided? Are there people who show up in private but not in public? Maybe they’re curating different personas, or just “performing up”—saving their pledges of allegiance for people they see as higher status or more valuable to impress.
We tell ourselves we’re supporting work we love, but as our list of ‘mutuals’ grows, we drift from being originators and curators to being the system’s mimetic amplifiers. And the more we performatively praise, the less it means.
Perhaps the greatest cost: the more time you spend waiting in the wings to boost others, the less time you have to build something worth boosting. You’re trapped in an economy where you must give attention to receive it, but giving attention drains the focus you need to actually create things that deserve it. How valuable is your attention to yourself versus to others, and what silent exchange rate are you paying?
The more we play this game the way platforms engineer it—visible over invisible—the more the performance becomes the relationship. We think we’re supporting each other but we’re actually just building each other’s brands. Public friendships as vanity objects. Identity bag charms we display for status.
VI
What’s the way out of this trap of modernity?
The idealistic answer: Log off. Delete the apps. Abandon the platforms. Reclaim your time and attention for yourself. But you can’t fully participate in the network economy and escape its rules. Relevance wants you to stay. Going offline has costs.
The people who do manage to stay offline fall into predictable categories: they’re either post-economic (rich enough not to need the network), burnt out enough to accept the costs, or they never wanted what these platforms offer in the first place (a rare archetype now).
I’ve resolved to be more deliberate. About which attention economies I enter. Which platforms, communities, and performances matter. Recognizing that prioritizing timely reactions destroys my flow. That public gestures carry more labor than we think. I’m not necessarily trying to do less, just do it awake.
One remedy I’m contemplating: supporting fewer people with less obligation and more creativity. Thoughtful DMs, handwritten notes, genuine feedback, doing more in real life instead of online. Gestures not optimized for visibility. And even if they are, applying Dunbar’s number to performative praise too.
Performative praise is the soft power currency of the internet. We spend it to belong. We spend it to be seen. We spend it even when we’re tired and we’ve resolved to stay “offline.” It’s worth asking who we’re spending it on, and why.
I still want to support people I care about. And yes, I still want people to support me. Maybe I want assurance I won’t flop in public too. I’m not post-economic or above it all. I just want to see the game clearly—because even the ‘good’ acts on social media feed the machine more than meaning. Something’s got to give.
It’s worth examining. I certainly am, and if any of this hits you, you should too. But yes, I still want you to tell me how much you love me and love my work. Send me a text, an email, heck a postcard. Or say congratulations, publicly, too.
If you liked this essay, consider sharing with a friend or community that may enjoy it too. (If you share on socials, tag me. I’m mostly here and on Twitter.)
Cover art: Girl on Beach with Photograph, Ralph Gibson, 1972.
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"I’m not necessarily trying to do less, just do it awake."
That's essentially where I've landed too. I can play the game, as long as I'm not pretending I'm not.
I wonder if there's anything we can do that wouldn't be considered performative when we're doing it on a stage. You can be as "authentic" as you want, when you're doing it in front of an audience, it will still be seen as performance.
What an extraordinary and incisive post!!!