“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. Often there’s both.
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.
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 little performative rituals 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 when you have an unbounded audience. 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
As much as I’m enumerating all this in great detail, it doesn’t amount to a vast amount of time being tangibly spent. Rather the weight accumulates in ways that are hard to name. It’s the running to-do list and the quiet tallies.
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 just 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.
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.
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.
V
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 that would defeat the point—the attention is the currency.
Or maybe I’m being idealistic. We’re heading toward a future where bots do all the praise for us and the “dead internet” is truly dead. Where being largely offline is the only sensible move and human presence is the only real way to pay.
The people who do manage to go 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).
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 participate in the economy if you do.
The network is both the value and the complication. You’re immersed in whole communities and industries that have real professional and personal value. Make friends, accelerate careers, learn about the world.
I’m not shy about saying there’s an intellectual and cultural richness to be found online. There are great works of art that emerge from these places too. That’s precisely why it’s hard to extract yourself.
We zoom out to social media and blame the devices—the phones—a lot. And rightly so. It’s encouraging to see all the new consumer hardware experiments sprouting up. The novel lightweight devices that aspire to re-center life around real life, with just a touch of digital. But replacing our phones, or even taking a bit of time away from them, is an uphill battle.
I still want to support people I care about. I just want to see the game clearly—because even the “good” acts on social media feed the machine.
One remedy: support fewer people with less obligation and more creativity. Thoughtful DMs, handwritten notes, genuine feedback. More in real life, less online. Gestures not optimized for visibility. And even if they are, apply Dunbar’s number to performative praise too. (To be clear, that which is performative isn’t necessarily inauthentic, it’s just concerned with it’s appearance simultaneously).
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 sworn to stay “offline.” It’s worth asking who we’re spending it on, and why.
I cope fine, I just can’t unsee it. I’m not trying to escape, just be awake. Still, I won’t complain if you 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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Public congratulations is an expectation only of the extremely online, generally of people who are less established in their careers. Maybe it's because social media wasn't popular until I was out of college, but I've never done this outside of the occasional LinkedIn posts, and I've never expected my friends to publicly celebrate my wins. I don't join into social media requests for post promotion unless it's really related to my core expertise, and the Xennial in me thinks it's a tacky pyramid scheme.
Personally, I use the apps as designed: I look at what the algo surfaces, and if I like the content, I press the like button. that's it. there is no deeper meaning.
Yet I have a successful career doing the internet. Most of the people I know who have successful careers in doing the internet don't spend their days congratulating each other.
The public cycle of congratulations was invented by people (mostly social media managers, god love them) who claim to understand "the algorithms" but it's really only the same, very small percentage of people who believe internet popularity has any correlation to success in real life, feeling like their friendships are transactional, having way too many thoughts about something they could just opt out of and no one would care very much.
Liking, commenting, and restacking for entirely selfless—laudable, some would say—reasons