The art of Performatism:
A deep dive into performatism,
I’m drinking a coffee. I’m drinking an iced latte. I’m drinking an iced oat latte. From Blank Street. No, I’m drinking an iced oat matcha latte from a local cafe. It’s sugar free. It’s in a reusable cup. Made of glass!!
In today’s deep dive I’ll be exploring what it means to be ‘performative’ from the progressive male starter packs, to the influence of AI and my issue with performative politics on social media.
Is this what it means to be performative? If so, is it really a problem? At first nobody cared, or we as a society didn’t really pick up these facades as quickly as we do now - but this increase in performing to the public through the enhancement and forgery of daily life should mark questional warnings for the future of culture.
It’s a form of manipulation.
Effective or not, the aim of any performer is to convince (or trick) their audience into believing the portrayal before them. For an actor, the job is not simply to entertain, but to make the audience see and connect with a character rather than the person performing them. On the lower end of this spectrum of performance, we encounter the ‘performative progressive male’ or the habitual reposter on TikTok and Instagram. Their aim is similar: to convince you that they embody their own proclaimed beliefs, sometimes as a slightly enhanced version of themselves, sometimes as a completely fabricated version of the person they would like to be.
When considering the broader social impact of these performances, it might be fair to say they are largely harmless. At worst, they result in small-scale heartbreaks: the disappointment of realising you were deceived by the man who “reads feminist literature,” or fooled by the vintage-clad boy who secretly dismisses climate change. But in the grand scheme of things, so what?
The cycle of trends ensures these personas will always emerge, and yet social media responds with familiar intensity, labeling every participant as ‘performative.’ This is where the internet begins to ‘be too internet’: exaggerating, moralising, and flattening nuance. Our eagerness to coin these narratives stems partly from a protective instinct, warning others against minor deceptions, but also from a deeper cultural anxiety - a paranoia born of artificial intelligence and the rapid erosion of stable, individual identities.
The Paranoia of the AI generation:
With the rapid rise of artificial intelligence shaping our everyday lives, resistance is inevitable but resistance is not prevention. Whether embraced or opposed, AI is infiltrating nearly every aspect of society, including the very core of individualism.
Once, selfhood was forged through thought, effort, and expression. With the arrival of AI, the need to push oneself for ideas, creativity, or even basic articulation is fading. Why struggle through the slow process of forming a thought when ChatGPT can not only read your extract, but interpret it for you, critique it, and then generate an entire essay in ‘your perspective’. This convenience is seductive, but it carries a cost: a culture of intellectual laziness, a dependence that risks hollowing out the very practices of writing, debating, and creating, through which identity is constructed.
The consequences are not only personal but social. If an idea, a piece of art, or even a heartfelt message can so easily be outsourced to a machine, how do we know what remains authentically human? For those who refuse to lean into AI, life becomes a paranoid guessing game. A constant effort to discern who is real and who has become merely a mouthpiece for generative tools. Every opinion voiced online risks being dismissed as synthetic. Every essay, every image, every declaration of belief may now carry the shadow of suspicion. In this environment, trust fractures. The performance of sincerity (already fragile in the social media age) is further destabilized by AI. What once looked like exaggeration or performance for popularity now risks being mistaken for automation. The line between human and machine blurs, and with it, the stability of identity itself.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that while AI is designed to simulate human expression, it may end up eroding the value of human expression altogether. To be an individual in the AI generation is no longer simply to think and to create, it is to insist, to prove, that one has done so without the invisible hand of a machine.
Political performatism: Social Media
Admittedly, I live in a city that seems to produce the stereotypical “performative progressive male” in endless supply. Despite being constantly surrounded by these pop-up facades, what drew me to this deeper reflection was not simply the aesthetic posturing, but the growing issue of performative political activism, particularly on social media.
This type of performance stems from the habitual reposters: those who, behind the screen, have little to no understanding of the cause they are so eager to plaster across their stories. Their engagement begins and ends with the “share” button. And while silence in the face of injustice can feel like complicity, in a world where ignorance and forgeries are rampant, the least we can do is educate ourselves before we perform. It is disheartening, even embarrassing, to count the number of times I have seen serial-reposters championing lectures, readings, or causes they never actually engage with. Many cannot even comment on the subjects they so publicly endorse when pressed by a lecturer or peer. The spectacle is almost shocking - but in a sad way, perhaps it isn’t.
The issue is not just hypocrisy, but substitution. Increasingly, people are relying on social media to construct a sense of self-justice. A repost or an infographic becomes their guilt-free ticket to believing they’ve “done enough” for a political issue. But the truth is: it isn’t enough. Sharing content without knowledge, action, or accountability is not activism, it’s performance. And worse, it often functions as a deeply selfish form of politics, a way of centering oneself in a narrative of justice without ever shouldering the difficult, unglamorous work that justice demands.
True activism requires risk, commitment, and the humility to learn. A post can be a starting point, but when it becomes the end point (as it so often does) it reveals not solidarity, but vanity. In a digital world flooded with curated identities, the challenge is no longer just to speak, but to speak responsibly. To act not because it looks good, but because it matters.
In the end, performatism is not something we can fully escape. To live in a digital world is to curate, to perform, to project versions of ourselves for others to interpret. But the line between expression and deception, solidarity and self-promotion, is one we must consciously navigate. Society today is not defined by the end of authenticity, but by the need to redefine what authenticity means in an age of performance.
The danger of performatism is not that it exists (it always has) but that we confuse it for truth, for action, for identity. When reposts replace engagement, and facades replace conviction, society risks becoming a stage where the loudest actors drown out the quiet but necessary work of real change. If we are to move forward, we must demand more than performance: we must demand presence, knowledge, and accountability. Authenticity, then, may not lie in stripping away performance, but in learning to perform with integrity. The challenge is to ensure our performances do not merely look like change, but help create it. And if all the world is a stage, perhaps the question facing society today is whether we are still rehearsing or finally ready to act.
