Being an individual has perhaps never been as panoptic and central a question as it is today. Social media platforms prioritize the careful maintenance and monitoring of online personas, creating spaces in which identity construction plays a central role in the user experience. But how do you present yourself authentically online? Unlike offline reality, where spontaneous and unprepared human self-expression is not only possible but inevitable, online life always reminds us of its own artificiality. To post is to calculate, to deliberate, to manipulate—efficiency is built into the experience, whether the poster is aware of these dynamics or not. This explains why unflinchingly serious content rarely appears on social media; doesn't the poster see that by simply posting they are showing themselves to be image conscious and vain? The main reason that “virtue signaling” became so hotly contested in the mid-twenties was not only that it was bad form to express passive, entirely gestural solidarity with a political issue, but also that the broader mores of social media use were beginning to change dramatically. It was no longer the norm to post a photo of your breakfast or write an Instagram caption about how much you love your mom on International Women's Day. Suddenly, any type of non-ironic personified material entered the hall of mirrors of performative criticism. These days, users can escape the performance label by imbuing content with the metatextual awareness that they are somehow aware of the performance. But it remains impossible to completely ignore the specter of performativity on social media, despite the apps' claims that they are an organic breeding ground for authentic human expression. (Instagram's mission statement states that its goal is to bring “you closer to the people and things you love”; TikTok says its platform allows users to “unleash their creativity and share authentic stories.”)
Notions of authenticity and sincerity have dominated Western thought since the Enlightenment, a period when Immanuel Kant argued that people should have the freedom to pursue knowledge as a means of better understanding the human condition and therefore their true identity. (“Therefore the motto of the Enlightenment is: Sapper hears!“,” wrote Kant. “Have the courage to use your own understanding.”) Kant's belief that “constant criticism of the world around us and of ourselves,” in the words of scholar Anita Seppa, enables people to “reach a more mature stage of existence and individual autonomy.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau was more sensitive to the mystical nature of existence, arguing that true individuality arises from within and is not entirely relational; the true self was a natural, fixed thing that in turn could be flexibly expressed in the world. Few philosophies speak as clearly to our current culture of self-absorption as this post-Enlightenment obsession with authenticity; The central promise of the American project is to free individuals from undue coercion and control, allowing them to discover their true selves and do whatever they set their mind to, regardless of their religion, race, gender or class background. This promise, despite centuries of uneven fulfillment, still fuels the atomizing engine of American mythology.
However, this absolutist vision of individualism undermines the systemic conditions that shape our relationship with the world and with ourselves. If we believe that the purpose of our lives is to discover and express an authentic version of our true nature, we risk ignoring the many associations and forces that determine how we perceive these premises in the first place. The philosopher Michel Foucault questioned this enduring belief that self-expression leads to liberation, arguing instead for the cessation of “all these forms of individuality, subjectivity, consciousness, ego, on which we have built and from which we have tried to build and constitute knowledge.” Foucault argued that such idealism distracts individuals from fighting and criticizing the power structures that lay claim to their actual freedoms—health care, reproductive rights, education, gender identity, and economic equality among them—which remain under the direction of “biopower,” a term Foucault used to refer to the state and social institutions that organize and control populations.
From this perspective, the phenomenon of performative reading looks less like a newfangled way of calling people pretentious and more like an odious reflection of society's growing depriorization of the written word. Reading a book is the opposite of scrolling; online platforms cannot replicate the slow, patient, challenging experience of reading a ponderous novel. This is especially significant because social media Maybe replicate a different art-consuming experience for users: one could listen exclusively to music, watch visual art, or watch videos via TikTok or Instagram and legitimately (if not depressingly) claim to have a relationship with those mediums—a genuine relationship fostered through the app. The only way the internet mind can understand someone reading a particular book in public is through the lens of how it will appear on the feed: as a grotesque performative pose, a false and self-flattering manipulation, or a desperate attempt to attract a romantic partner.
