A theory of performative engagement: or, how power actually works on Twitter and Substack

Be Wary of VCs and Podcasters

Anu Atluru recently wrote a very thoughtful piece on the performative nature of Twitter and Substack. A few lines that stood out to me include:

“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.”

And this anecdote:

“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.”

And this line, where if you actually read the tweet here, you will be utterly grossed out by the replies:

“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.”

This connects to another idea I can’t stop thinking about, from a review in the ACX everything-except-book-review contest:

“The best and most concise analogy I can come up with is this: in Japan, everyone is your girlfriend. You are responsible for understanding that when your boss asks about pastries, it means he wants you to buy the pastries for next week’s meeting. It means that when someone says yes to the thing you’ve been requesting for months, you should expect that tomorrow they’re going to ask you for something you don’t want to give, but if you don’t give the same yes back, they’re going to resent you forever and regret the ‘yes’ they gave you for the rest of their lives.

Japanese social interactions exist at a much higher resolution than American ones, and at times I felt that living in Japan as an allistic person gave me a reasonable understanding of what it might be like to be autistic in America. At all times there were subtle games being played, and things being communicated by other people to which I was not privy at all.”

Just as Japanese culture operates through unspoken reciprocal obligation — Twitter and Substack have created their own high-resolution status exchanging economy. The difference is that online, these transactions are conducted in public, performed for an audience.

Despite Foucault having become one of the great boogeymen of our time, and critical theory being discussed everywhere, very few discuss or realize how power actually operates within these ordinary, everyday interactions like those we see on Twitter and Substack.

One of the most surprising things for me when learning about the 1MDB scandal is that pudgy, socially awkward Malaysian fraudster Jho Low had Leonardo DiCaprio suck up to and befriend him, and supermodel Miranda Kerr dated him. It revealed something quite sad: that for some, no matter how rich or powerful they are, they will still whore themselves out for even more. The same dynamic plays out online, just with followers instead of billions.

In today’s legible and hyperconnected world of Twitter and Substack, this translates into an endless chase for more followers. Blogging is no longer a thing you do on a standalone personal website, for the love of talking about ideas. Now, you are part of the same ecosystem as everyone else, with them so easily able to click that heart or share/follow button. The rewards also have significant real world implications— more followers means more reach, more status, conference invitations, more job offers, more funding access. More, more, more! And one of the easiest ways to get more followers is to simply engage and get on the good side of accounts with even more followers than you.

If you ask yourself why nearly every public intellectual uses Twitter in their real name, but almost never Reddit, the answer is revealing. There are true purists—individuals like Scott Alexander, Gwern, Dynomight, Matt Lakeman—who are in it for the love of the game, who just genuinely love talking about ideas and DGAF about gaining followers, who unabashedly spend their time on Reddit rather than Twitter.

But the reason you see so many on Twitter rather than Reddit is that there is nothing to be gained from Reddit other than exchanging ideas. Said differently, they are on Twitter not primarily to learn and talk about ideas, but to accumulate status.

In short, my theory is that much of the activity you see on Twitter and Substack is for the explicit purpose of building one’s profile by leveraging the status and audience of others.

I see three distinct dynamics at play:

1. Courting Power: People constantly engage with powerful figures (VCs, tech founders, funders etc) because they want to be on their good side, hoping for some future benefit. When I was younger, I thought VCs were incredibly sharp because my online circles were filled with praise for them. Over time, it became clear this was pure fluff; they hadn’t earned an intellectual reputation for their thinking, but for what they could provide. But when someone retweets a VC, they don’t add the disclaimer, “I AM SHARING THIS SO I CAN MAYBE GET FUNDING ONE DAY.” This leaves the unacquainted to think the praise is for intellectual merit alone.

   1. Take Marc Andreessen, someone I cannot say enough terrible things about. If you get in with him, maybe he shares your content with his audience, funds you, gets you a job at a company he is connected to, or hires you at a16z. I’m reminded of a recent article on right-wing tech group chats where Andreessen asked the academic Richard Hanania to “’make me a chat of smart right-wing people.’” Why did Hanania do it? Not because they’re dear friends, but because Andreessen is powerful, and Hanania thought he could benefit from it. The article then shares that Erik Torenberg, now a partner at Andreessen’s firm, curated the successor chat. Torenberg is a perfect example of this phenomenon: incredibly successful and prominent in online discourse, not for any personal contribution, but due to his access and proximity to others, through his role as a hyper-connector of powerful people.

2. Strategic Alliances: People strategically engage with those who have equal or more followers than them to build “allies” and create the potential to be spotlighted to a broader audience. Here, the target of engagement isn’t necessarily the most interesting idea, but gaining the attention of those with larger audiences, and building a friend network by affirmatively supporting all those who are in a similar position to you.

3. Writing “Catnip”: People create content with the specific intent of being reshared by influential accounts. This is something I’ve caught myself thinking about. Each time my blog is posted on Marginal Revolution it’s a huge opportunity. But Tyler Cowen only posts what he likes. So, other than hoping to write great posts, how could I get featured again? Well, I could write “Tyler-nip”: a review of Solenoid, an essay on listening to Bach. While this is an extreme example, micro-decisions like this happen every day. People write posts not because it’s the content they want to write, but because they believe it’s catnip for a specific, larger account.

I want to make a note about podcasters, which I think have an extreme version of this effect. There are two kinds of podcasters: those with small audiences, trying to leverage the existing audience of their guests; and those with extremely large audiences, where the guests are trying to leverage the podcaster’s audience. In both cases, there are strong status dynamics going on, and the podcaster’s reach is likely far beyond what it would be if they were just a writer, sharing ideas on their own.

If this is all true, what updates should one make?

On an intellectual level, I think one should be wary of VCs, billionaires, podcasters and hyperconnectors — who are engaged with, not primarily due to the merit of their ideas, but for what they can offer. Those with larger audiences are likely, on the margin, overrated—not because they are bad, but because they have a much easier time staying in your feed due to the incentives for others to engage with them. Meanwhile, those with smaller audiences, especially those who spend their time in places like reddit or in other non-prestigious but earnest intellectual communities are on the margin, underrated— and they’re more likely to be saying what they actually think.