Performance Era
Social media, trendiness, and surface-level culture
The performative man has been around forever. In his contemporary rendition, he’s been identifiable for a couple of years: Carhartt, mustache, curls or a mullet, vinyl records, wired earbuds playing Clairo. He’s Gen Z’s evolution from the Starbucks-dwelling manbunned Brooklynite hipster of the early 2010s, having traded in his skinny jeans for painter’s pants and his vape for nicotine pouches. While appearances mark the stereotype, they’re only half of the equation re: performance: These men are no different from bros or jocks in their pursuit of women but think themselves superior because (in their mind) they resemble everything women want. They’re the nice guys in touch with their sensitive sides, awakened to women’s feelings and capable of relating to them in a way the more masculine-appearing men cannot. Notice my earmarked copy of The White Album resting on the table beside me while I drink my matcha and stare out from beneath my beat-up Yankees hat. I know what you want, says the performative man. You want a man who can reference feminist scholars from the 70s off the dome, a man who will play Joni Mitchell to you while you sit on his bed and admire his Frank Ocean posters, a man who can cry in front of you because he knows that the myths of masculinity were constructed by capitalist media and fast food companies in the 1950s. They get you.
The performative man is having his moment in the summer of 2025, and by moment, I mean in the strictest sense. As with most short-lived phenomena in the 2020s, he’s become layered in irony so dense that he will soon collapse in on himself and form a black hole, sucking the relevance of his identifiers in with him. (Hopefully Clairo will survive.) Washington Square Park was recently home to an unofficial performative man contest, which could be the paragon of 2020s internet ephemera. (For now, though, it’s still kind of funny.) The quick death of irony on the internet is nothing new, of course, but—believing himself capable of harnessing irony—the performative man will no doubt try to struggle against his inevitable irrelevance by absorbing it. I’m wearing my Phoebe Bridgers shirt ironically, and that’s funny, you should love me because I’m a funny guy. But funniness is only part of the performative man’s appeal, and not an essential part. What’s essential is what I described earlier—the wholesomeness, the yearning, the ability to be in touch with feelings: the water to irony’s oil. Hence the performance: Irony is not the right avenue for the survival of the performative man. Authenticity is. But authenticity is at odds with internet trends and performance. So, this breed of individual will soon seem as dated as hoverboards and box mods and buttoning your plaid short-sleeved button-up all the way to your neck.
This may all sound like internet brainrot, and much of it is. But the arrival of the performative man in the discourse is aptly timed for a discussion of internet-aided performance culture. Appearance is currency, ever more so in 2025, when more and more friendships/relationships are beginning on or at least engaging constantly with technology. It’s becoming easier and easier to get to know people and even maintain relationships online, and while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with long distance being more achievable, there’s still a greater risk in familiarizing yourself with someone through the internet. And internet trends have a greater reach now than they once did, even if the trends themselves die out quicker and with less flair. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, performative man.
How’d We Get Here?
“Male manipulator” discourse was prevalent in the early 2020s, a precursor to performative man discourse, pointing out that certain artists in a man’s record collection or Spotify playlist could signal red-flag tendencies. Tendencies included gaslighting, manipulation, mansplaining, exploitation, and lacking empathy. Artists included Radiohead, Neutral Milk Hotel, Kanye West, The Smiths, Joy Division, Sonic Youth, The Strokes, and Weezer. It didn’t matter whether or not these artists were good—most of them were—what mattered was the signal that listening to them gave off, whether it was coolness or sophistication or mystery. Most of the time, the signal was a false one, and people found out that the costume was just a costume. Of course, this is all as reductive and stereotypical as the identifiers of the performative man; the problem was that they were all empirically sound.
Male manipulator music started in early 2020 as a joke on TikTok and eventually became a signifier of the performative man, perhaps his first and greatest signifier. He would use these artists to relate his emotional depth, instruct his date on what made this music so (objectively) good, or simply tout the artist’s work as though he wrote the music himself. Like a Polaroid, the image of this man faded slowly into the public consciousness. One day the man who rambled about LCD Soundsystem and wrote Letterboxd essays had a face, an outline, a Dickey’s jacket. You could glimpse the twinkling of his eyes beneath his eyebrow piercing. You could catch the tenor of his voice insisting that Kanye’s deplorableness was subversive meta-commentary.
The performative man is not categorically different from the hipster, or any of his other previous renditions. (Picture the guitar-toting guy on the stairs in Animal House.) He’s just the resurrected version who’s adapted to the times. They’re all icons of a trend that’s all about assuming the coolness of being “other” with the primary goal of looking romantically appealing—listening to indie music, purporting extreme (but not too extreme!) left-wing views, rejecting the status quo, being generally un-basic yet unpunkishly safe. What’s different is that, with the pervasiveness of internet and social media culture, the performative man has a chance of sticking around a bit longer than the rest.
Performance and the Life Cycle of Trends
Trends necessitate a departure from authentic movements. Most trends at least begin with authenticity. Inevitably, however, a movement becomes recognized as “cool” for different reasons than it started, and once this happens the trend is initiated. People engage with the movement in a shallow, performative way. Performance begets trends, trends beget internet trends, internet trends beget further performance until we reach the singularity of corporatization. Ryan Pomarico, writing on his Substack ANTIART, notes that the type of corporatization exemplified by a Dimes Square H&M shirt is “the last stop on the train of culture.” He continues: “Grunge had its time—now the faded logos of Soundgarden and Nirvana adorn $30 T-shirts. Any microtrend there ever was eventually dies and finds an afterlife at the dreaded store. It’s like a headstone for cool.” This is around the time that people usually recognize that the joke isn’t funny anymore, like when news anchors report on a meme or a patently uncool talk show host adopts internet slang. This is the fate that met the hipster.
Trends are fleeting and shallow, which make them bad to pair with your identity. The performative man is a trend made up of trends. He is the suspender-wearing trend-despising hipster who realized he had become the very thing he sought to destroy. His only way out is irony. His performance is an ironic act, and if called out for his performativeness, he will act hurt and reveal that sentimentality, meant to signal authenticity, is also part of the performance. Whittling away at this front of authenticity is the performative man’s weakness: he may be post-cool, but he is not post-authentic.
Dimes Square and Performance
Dimes Square, the proverbial home of 2020s-era New York art culture, offers many lessons for the performative man. As Pomarico writes it, New York’s art scene had a valid track record of culture-defining and trendsetting creative output, from Warhol and The Velvet Underground in the 60s to Azealia Banks and Neon Indian in the 2010s. People flocked to New York in pursuit of a vibrant artistic community. In the 2020s, the era of Dasha Nekrasova and The Dare, people flocked to New York in pursuit of being cool in New York. “The commentary and the hanging out came first,” said Pomarico. “Then the art was made as an excuse to justify its existence.” This became evident through “misaligned morals and principles” and “ladder climbing,” where pursuing artistic relevance was perverted into clout chasing.
Dean Kissick, writing in Spike in 2022, describes the scene as associated with and created by “relentless self-mythologizing.” His rendering of the Dimes Square art scene reads like an experiment of authenticity in which one must arrive at the truth by stating only lies:
People everywhere are making their lives into content, and this is simply the New York arthouse version of that for a cultural moment driven by podcasts and more recently newsletters. In this version though, a lot of your story is written by others. You write your autofiction about yourself and others write their fictions about you, often anonymously, on Substacks, subreddits, messageboards like Lolcow, on Twitter and Instagram and podcasts too, and this makes things different from what has come before.
Here we have some kind of democratic, dystopian, art- and media-centered alternate reality, in which one’s existence is doubled by a referential autofiction, and one’s society is doubled by the autofictional environment surrounding her own. As if social media platforms could be their own self-referential novel or art piece. But Kissick continues: “The most powerful cultural forms in the attention economy are your personality, your identity, and your image, which combine in the stories you tell about yourself, and these have become an increasingly large part of what makes an artist a star.” In the era of influencers, podcasters, and performative men, “image” no doubt takes the dominant form, tasked with encapsulating identity and personality.
Autofiction is the literary shadow of the performative man. You can practically see him there, Moleskin notebook and Blackwing pencil out on a park bench, scribbling his opus, half-focused on what he’s writing while the other half is in the future, imagining the reception of his published work and ping-ponging between the warm feeling of praise and the bitter chill of criticism. He nobly stretches himself out upon the chopping block, laying bare all his flaws for which we, as an audience, have already forgiven him.
Autofiction is a fitting art form for a scene that exists for the sake of existing, made up of people whose greatest interest is existing in a scene, and for whom making art is a justification for that existence. Done well, autofiction hones in on universal joy and suffering through the reality of one’s life, with creative license (like invented dialogue) taken to mimic the form of a novel. Done poorly, autofiction relinquishes its claim to universality by channeling too deeply into the particulars of one’s life. A Dimes Square novelist, eager to make his life interesting by moving to Dimes Square to write a novel about moving to Dimes Square to write a novel, will undoubtedly fill said novel with cultural particulars and issues that mean very little to the average reader. This type of autofiction, as with Dimes Square and the performative man himself, will not stand when it has exhausted all its claims to authenticity—it will become another siloed first-person narrative whose central figure is more interested in self-flagellation than storytelling.
Performance and Identity
Greg Jackson’s lauded 2023 essay “Within the Pretense of No Pretense” tracks the rise in performative culture through the social media age. He begins with the concept of power, offering that social media has altered our relationship to it: Power was once what you could do to impact reality, make changes in the world—now power exists as the ability to make a series of meaningless choices. “You could choose a party, a religion or your personal beliefs. There was no need to justify your choice.” Choice, Jackson explains, is the opposite of power because unbound, unchallenged choice—the power granted to us by the internet—gave us freedom from obligation. The only problem is that obligation and responsibility, the means by which we become valuable to others, are the mechanics of power. Voicing approval and disapproval became the internet person’s closest claims to power.
Everything slowly became more surface-level and performative. “In the absence of responsibility,” writes Jackson, “personal belief became the locus of identity.” The critic is shouted down by the masses when he proclaims that “The Eternals” is a bad movie. The critic, beholden to “nuanced distinctions and honest reflection,” slowly morphs into the pundit, whose only responsibility is to placate their audience. The pundit sways a bit too far off course, the audience has the “power” to deplatform them. Everyone, as members of the global forum of the internet, realizes that they, too, may be deplatformed for espousing views contrary to their audiences’ preferences. Niceness—being appealing to others, treating them with abject pleasantness—becomes the only acceptable response to those who share the culturally appropriate beliefs. Contempt, the only response to the culturally inappropriate beliefs. Which beliefs are culturally appropriate and inappropriate has no impact, carries no weight.
The de-censoring of Twitter, rather than being a win for “free speech,” is symptomatic of this valueless shift. You don’t win arguments with structure or proximity to truth, you win them through likes. To ratio someone is to best them in gladiatorial combat, and the crowds cheer regardless of who wins. The increase in hateful ideologues on Twitter may have begun as merely an expansion of accepted speech, but it has since become a moral loosening—ideas that had been banished for their depravity can get a couple thousand likes, even some significant ratios. Suddenly you understand what Martin Amis was saying about political unboundedness.
In the background of all this, the performative man crawls into the picture, realizing that personal belief—as the bedrock of identity—is malleable. He dons his pearl necklace and takes to Twitter to sing praises to the new Tyler, the Creator album. His audience cheers, his critics…well, there are no critics, not yet, because he’s never been drawn into their algorithms. And if somehow he offends his base with his opinions, he is in no way responsible for them—he could either apologize and attempt to win back his audience or pivot altogether and pander to a new audience. In a place as evanescent as Twitter, grift and surface-level manipulation run rampant. Truth is harder to come by because so much exists in summary or even abbreviation. Commentary and discourse spring from summaries that misrepresent—sometimes intentionally—their original source. Well-intentioned people form opinions based on phantoms. Performative people add further to the noise, and are rewarded for it with views and likes. “Do not be fooled that reality is easy to grasp,” warns Jackson.
Reality and a Note of Hope (Maybe)
Reality and social media have always been at odds with each other. Attempts have been made at closing the gap, but exaggerated mob rule and obvious meddling profit incentives from app developers have made it difficult to narrow. There’s also a core difference in how you interact with your “audiences”—on the internet, it is easier to make yourself known of, and harder to make yourself known. Since social media makes it easy to put up a front, it becomes harder to decipher authenticity. Late-stage “cancel culture” grew from the idea that we could actually know a celebrity or microcelebrity through their platform—this made it much more of a betrayal when they were caught on camera cursing out the paparazzi or giving off a weird vibe while signing albums. Yet, for all the hate that came Chappell Roan’s way when she criticized weird online fan behavior, how many of us can say we would’ve acted differently? Shouldn’t she have been praised for directly cutting through the performative expectations placed on anybody with a platform?
This is a crucial point in the fight against performance culture: Internet behavior is weird. Examine it critically enough and you’ll find that many people don’t act like real people if they’ve been hyperimmersed in the algorithm for too long. This may sound intuitive, but it’s become less so the more time we spend scrolling and posting. There have been times when we have tried to shake ourselves free from the unrealness of social media. But, even after a year-plus in the COVID-era social media echo chamber, we eventually reverted back to our scrolling ways. If we can move on from lockdown-level distance from the real world and real people without having learned any lessons, then something has gone terribly wrong. But if we can recognize internet-induced behavior and set it apart from the way real people act and interact with each other, we’ll be closer to exiling further performance culture.
Seeing beyond performance, especially in internet times, requires vigilance, an eye to trends and a sense for sniffing out inauthenticity. We should be happy that the performative man has reached the discourse because it means enough people were able to recognize him as a joke. They’ve seen that, in many cases, his behavior is just manipulative and shallow, and because of the trend, the rest of us are better able to identify this behavior. So ignore that guy sitting alone in the cafe—he’s either trying to work/read on his own or he wants you to look at him. Don’t assume that you can listen to a curated Spotify playlist (probably an algorithm-generated one, at that) and fully comprehend the plight of single women in their 20s. Listen to the hot new indie artist and decide for yourself whether or not they’re worth listening to, then read criticism of their music and decide which critics are worth listening to.
