Why are we so quick to dismiss “performative” learning? An exploration of intellectual aesthetics, social media, and the democratization of knowledge.
To be “disgustingly educated” online today is less about what you’ve understood than about what you’ve successfully signalled. What started as a compulsion to learn has, somewhere along the line, been quietly replaced by a compulsion to look like you’re learning. You have probably seen more copies of The Bell Jar and more quotes by Franz Kafka and Susan Sontag on Instagram than you ever will elsewhere. I’m not above falling victim to the algorithm’s insistent recommendations myself. At some point, the aesthetic overtook the actual appetite for the thing.
Yet it seems unkind, even a little myopic, to mock someone for trying to claw their way out of the hole we are all collectively stuck in – the same brainrot, the same forty-second attention span, the same three-hour scroll that ends nowhere. If the education system has failed us as thoroughly as it has, then what exactly is the harm in a trend that fills even a fraction of that gap? There are plenty of cases where performative gestures lead to real engagement. People begin by posting reading lists or reviews to keep up appearances, only to find themselves drawn into the conversations that follow and gradually craving a deeper understanding. Sometimes the performance is simply the nudge that turns display into curiosity.
There’s a moral purism that likes to insist learning should exist in pursuit of some untouched, capital-T Truth – that the moment money or aesthetics enter the room, the whole enterprise is corrupted. I find this a little precious, mostly because it isn’t how the actual production of knowledge works, and never has been. A university professor isn’t teaching solely out of love for Kant; they are also, notably, drawing a salary. The YouTube essayist breaking down existentialism in fifteen minutes wants your watch-time as much as your enlightenment. Passion and payment have always sat in the same room together – the difference now is that the room has better lighting and a ring light.
Underneath the eye-rolling is something less charming than taste. Access threatens hierarchy. That hierarchy limits, quietly and very deliberately, who gets to be legible as intelligent, and there is a particular kind of person who benefits from that limitation staying intact.
The internet flattened the gatekeeping without flattening the desire for distinction. If everyone can buy the same Penguin Classics edition or watch the same lecture online, distinction simply migrates elsewhere – to annotations, aesthetics, carefully curated reading lists, and performance. The gate never really disappeared; it just moved.
Pierre Bourdieu saw this coming from several decades away. In Distinction, his study of how cultural preference maps almost exactly onto class position, he wrote that “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.” Which is to say: what you read, and how visibly you’re seen reading it, has never really been about the book. It’s a badge. It tells everyone else where you stand. The discomfort around “performative” intellectualism, I’d argue, isn’t discomfort at the performance at all; it’s discomfort that the badge is now available to people who weren’t supposed to have access to the shop.
One explanation, I think, is that someone already accepted as an intellectual can casually mention Simone de Beauvoir and be taken at face value, while @lifeofpuja, sitting down on Instagram to talk through the same book, still strikes some people as surprising. People still struggle to reconcile the idea that intelligence – or the performance of it – might exist somewhere outside the postcode it was assigned.
Whether any of this actually democratizes knowledge, or just redraws who’s allowed to perform it, is a fair question, and I don’t think the honest answer is a clean one. More people are almost certainly reading Fanon because creators like @lifeofpuja exist than would have otherwise. But the culture increasingly rewards reading that is public, photogenic, and consistently visible, as though it only counts once it’s been documented. Access undoubtedly widened, but a new kind of audition got added on top of it.
Perhaps the only way to resist that pressure is to become comfortable with being unfinished in public. Share questions instead of conclusions. Admit confusion. Let conversations matter more than performances. The point isn’t to disappear from the internet, but to stop treating every interaction as an audition.
And yet. There is undoubtedly an elitism baked into all of this too, one that’s harder to defend, because nothing escapes commodification, least of all the appearance of being knowledgeable. There are Instagram businesses that will coffee stain, dog-ear, and annotate a book for a fee, engineering exactly the right amount of visible love. Etsy sellers do the same: margin notes, underlining, and a highlighter’s careful, deliberate mess are sold as a finished aesthetic object rather than the residue of someone’s actual thinking. It’s the second-hand bookshop, gutted and resold to you as content.
People rush to fulfil the visual component because it’s faster than the real thing. Actually engaging with a text is slow, the learning curve is humiliating, and it demands a persistence that doesn’t photograph well.
Performance isn’t always vanity. Sometimes it’s accountability. Sometimes it’s aspiration. Sometimes people perform the version of themselves they’re trying to become. The internet has always blurred the line between identity and ambition; reading publicly is often less about claiming expertise than rehearsing it.
If there’s any way out of this particular loop, it’s almost insultingly unglamorous. Buy the second-hand book that got dog-eared by accident, not by design. Mark it up badly, honestly, and for no one. For what it’s worth, the times I’ve learned the most have rarely looked impressive: getting lost in a book so dense I filled the margins with question marks, pages bent at the bottom of my bag, whole paragraphs underlined out of confusion rather than confidence. Keep reading past the point where it stops being cute and starts being boring and a little confusing, because that’s usually where the actual thinking begins. Let your annotations reflect your actual thoughts, even if they aren’t particularly eloquent, instead of leaving them there as decoration. None of this might fill your phone storage with aesthetic pictures, which is more or less the point. The goal isn’t to reject aesthetics. It’s to make sure they remain evidence of learning rather than a substitute for it. Resistance to a market built entirely on visibility tends to look like doing the thing when the camera isn’t out.
Something tells me 2015 StudyTube didn’t lead anywhere by accident. It goes from colour-coded notes to dark academia to thought daughter, each stage borrowing the last one’s costume while insisting it’s finally, this time, about the substance. With every iteration, intelligence became a little more aesthetic and a little less private. Maybe, for some people, the curriculum gets built and actually read. Maybe the annotations happen before the coffee stain does. I’m not entirely willing to write the whole trend off as vanity, if only because the alternative – a generation genuinely giving up on curiosity altogether – feels considerably worse to me than one mildly insufferable enough to caption their reading list.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think the line sits between the person who reads at home and the person who reads at a café with good lighting, which is kind of where most of the mockery assumes it does. It sits between chasing an aesthetic and public validation that replaces the reading and the aesthetic that simply survives it. A mood board is not a crime. A “personal curriculum” is actually a great thing. The trouble starts only when the styling becomes the entire transaction – like sitting with an AI chatbot to generate your opinions and summaries because working through the text feels like too much to ask.
Learning has always been social, and it has always been performative to some degree. The question isn’t whether we’re performing it; it’s whether there’s still something real beneath the performance.
Aamna Rehman
Image Source: Patrick Tomasso – Unsplash.com
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