Tapestries-17 | The world is your stage

Why we prioritize the performative over the substantive, and what that means for responding to complex issues.

Photo by David Anderson

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The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has swept the US and parts of the globe. While BLM is the prompt, this is not a piece about the movement itself. This is a piece about how we’ve become a society of performers; a society where we focus energy on things we can share and project, at the expense of the more humble and dignified. Where we value the performative over the substantive.

“The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching.”
— John Wooden

Unfortunately, we are consumed by the things we do when people are watching. And today, everyone is watching, all the time. Our digital avatars, in whom we invest so much time and effort, are engaged in an endless performance. We optimize our actions for where our attention sits - online - at the expense of the real world where small acts of decency live, and where the potential to affect change truly exists.

In a world of many important causes, infinite complexity and limited bandwidth, how we initially respond matters; not just for BLM, but for every cause that’s come before and those that will follow.

Optimizing for performance and investing in avatars

We have convinced ourselves that our public personas - our digital avatars - embody who we are. We therefore curate them to project a particular appearance or brand. But the reality is that they do not fully represent us. They are merely performances.

They have origin stories (baby photos/high school/hometown details), narrative arcs (*aspiring professional moves to New York*), triumphs (promotions/engagements), tragedies (deaths/redundancies), growth (new job/new skill/marathon training) and every other ingredient a good story or performance demands. It’s therefore a logical consequence that they now include our values and what we stand for or against.

Despite the comprehensiveness of our avatars (e.g. Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts), to suggest that they come together to accurately reflect us as real-life human beings, is clearly absurd. But because we’ve invested so much time, energy and emotion into curating these avatars, we channel every possible human expression through them. When our entire professional and personal life is online, every absence is conspicuous, and that which is not posted about is as much a part of our brand as that which actually makes it onto our profiles.

The brilliance of the platforms’ models is that once you begin sharing, it becomes difficult to determine what is actually worth sharing. In the absence of a clear guide, and in pursuit of that little red-circle-induced dopamine hit, we share it all. We then end up with an internal and external expectation that our avatars must reflect us in our entirety. If you went on a vacation, got a promotion at work, or identify with a social movement, but don’t post about it, did it happen? Or if any of those things occur and you didn’t post about it, what can we infer?

In this world of personal brand curation and endless performance, we are inauthentic by design. Just like we critique a movie or a concert, we critique the online presence of those around us; when we say “[X]’s Instagram is batshit crazy”, we do so knowing that [X] themselves most likely is not. Online discourse and culture can be more aggressive, toxic and disingenuous, precisely because we know that we are not dealing with other humans.

My digital brand reflects the real me as much as a Coldplay concert reflects who Chris Martin actually is. They are both carefully curated performances; one is just more honest than the other.

The relevance of sacrifice and cost

Back to BLM as the prompt. Taking a stand on a particular issue necessitates some form of sacrifice. The sacrifice or cost involved does not need to be significant; it is generally the small actions and sacrifices of the masses that create change, not martyrs. Turning to the BLM example, posting a black square involves no cost.

#BlackoutTuesday, the decision to post or not post, and the reaction to the posts, shows that we continue to have an uncomfortable relationship with activism and social movements in the digital age. The internet and social media enable frictionless and effortless engagement. But social change requires friction, and I don’t mean the hassle of squeezing a thought into 280 characters or sharpening a caption.

Change is not free. Change requires making a sacrifice, donating to a cause, starting an uncomfortable conversation. Importantly, actions like these aren’t necessarily “shareable” or performative. You could share a screenshot of a conversation with a friend or a donation receipt, but that would probably violate social media norms.

The BLM movement has shone a light upon police brutality and endemic racism that we absolutely must confront and address. We want to participate, to lend support, to make it clear who we are and what principles we stand for. And given that social media is our traditional mode of expression (and where we get our updates from), that’s where we channel our emotion and begin posting.

Expressing solidarity with a movement by posting a black square is a net-positive act and should be commended; millions of black squares are impactful as they push the BLM conversation deeper into message groups, living rooms and boardrooms. But if our outward expressions are performative, the risk is that this is where the activism and striving for change ends. And importantly, police brutality and racism are just two of the many critical issues we need to collectively address.

The broader implications of a focus on performing

“The human brain isn’t designed to process all of the world’s emergencies in realtime.”
— Naval Ravikant

2020 is an emotionally taxing time. Australian bushfires; COVID-19; mass unemployment; soaring inequality; existential global warming. These calamities play out in our world and on our phones.

We have limited bandwidth for all of these issues. When one of them hits a tipping point and compels us to participate, we begin by more closely following it. And given the discussion above regarding the comprehensiveness of our avatars, our immediate reaction is to turn to social media. And let’s be honest: maintaining our digital avatars is time-consuming and stressful at the best of times.

Expressing a responsible and nuanced view is very difficult today! It initially requires investing energy in understanding the issue more broadly, which is sort of the point. As a potential newcomer to an issue, you want to do your diligence and understand the perspectives of those more intimately involved. Given the state of modern media, this is becoming increasingly hard to do without ending up confused, angry or scared. Nevertheless, the investment here is incredibly worthwhile and the entire point of raising awareness.

But how do we make this fit the need to perform? You can’t screenshot every article or tweet you read and share it on your Story. What you can do is post about the issue in a way that acknowledges your investment. But the issue is likely complex. How do you post about it in a way that registers your interest, but also doesn’t give the impression that you’re wading in too deeply or insensitively? Or how do you ensure that your post doesn’t reveal a gaping hole in your understanding? These are all real questions that everybody must consider when posting about anything that possesses an element of emotion.

The energy invested in understanding, then performing mental gymnastics to craft an appropriate response, can be significant. There is an opportunity cost to agonizing over what the right public response is. We only have so much time, energy and bandwidth. And I believe we squander much of it on the optics, the performance, at the expense of other more private actions.

What comes after awareness?

An appropriate response to this view is “what’s the harm in posting about issues of social importance?” to which I’d answer: very little. I’d further add that raising awareness of an issue is the first step in creating change. The problem I see is in our follow-ups, or lack of.

Where to from there? Are we willing to then invest the time and effort in private actions that actually constitute the change? Or are we (a) mentally exhausted by that point, (b) scared of engaging “incorrectly” and subjecting ourselves to public shaming, or (c) not willing to invest time in something that can’t support a performance of some sort?

Having an honest conversation with a colleague, friend or family member is hard and potentially uncomfortable. Attending a rally or event requires us to make the effort to get out and assemble. Donating money to a cause involves a financial commitment. Once we’ve created awareness, these are the actions that bring change. But because they can’t all be shared or performed, I believe the cost-benefit analysis doesn’t compel us to act.

I acknowledge that this is a cynical view, but it’s one I keep returning to. The risk I am looking to identify and mitigate is that movements occur as cultural phenomenons to be engaged with, just like an NBA game or Game of Thrones release. We “engage” with them because that’s what the platforms we voluntary live within and devote ourselves to, incentivize and promote.

“It’s performer and audience melded together.”
— Bo Burnham

This blurring of the lines of content creator and consumer is making us crazy, and is making it harder to think clearly and react decisively.

Bringing it together

With the rise of each new social movement, I am torn between hope and frustration. Social media has allowed movements to spread globally within a matter of days and weeks: Occupy, #MeToo, The Women’s March, Parkland, The Climate March, and now BLM. Inequality, women’s rights, gun control, climate change, police brutality and endemic racism are all causes worth fighting for. But maddeningly, I think we optimize for the wrong outcomes.

I have written previously about what over-investing in our avatars does to our behavior. It saps our attention, puts distance between the real and perceived versions of ourselves, and in this case - focuses our energy and attention on the performative over the substantive.

“Social media - it’s just the market’s answer to a generation that demanded to perform so the market said, here - perform. Perform everything to each other, all the time for no reason… I know very little about anything. But what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.”
— Bo Burnham, Make Happy

I think the need to perform is destructive. When overlayed on issues of real social importance, it diverts attention away from the simple but impactful moments that constitute the gears of change.

We are all crying out for a more decent and humble society. But decency and humility are virtues that are hard to project, for good reason. They are complex, require sacrifice and often manifest in deeply personal moments. I think we need to be honest with ourselves and each other, and acknowledge that in the pursuit of delivering flawless performances, we can lose sight of what really matters.