Performativism Plague and Our Craving for Authenticity

Vibecore doesn't merely flatten us into algorithms; it also incentivizes real self-awareness. In a landscape of AI-generated homogeneity, authentic taste becomes social capital—a career advantage, an entry ticket, a source of relevance

You're no longer just professing an opinion, you're being the type of person who would profess such an opinion .

There's a key point that our actions do fundamentally change in some ways when we think someone's watching us. David Elkind, a child psychologist of high repute (repute as a psychologist I mean, not as a child), coined the term Imaginary Audience in 1967. He coined it to point to a belief that we are under constant observation by peers.

So: we have a desperate need for more authenticity these days. At the same time as performative measures are increasing in number.

And I think they’re related.

As we’ve gotten more and more interconnected, we’re all ever present in front of each other. Everything we do has become performative. And even as this reality has seeped into the public... See more

It wants vibes that can be both unmistakable and transmissible. This is the strange paradox of our moment: the most valuable selfhood is the one that is scarce enough to be non-fungible, yet legible enough to circulate frictionlessly through the algorithmic and economic marketplace.

This only works if you truly know yourself. All this “vibe externalization” assumes you’ve put in the existential legwork of interrogating your preferences, separating signal from noise, distinguishing between the shoes you love and the shoes Instagram loves for you. It presumes you have a coherent vibe to transmit, not just a Pinterest board in... See more

Dating, he says, morphs into a sophisticated swap-meet for sameness. We swipe to find our own reflection. Narcissus, patron saint of the algorithm, beckons us back to the mirror.