“Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell.”
A generation that came of age online during the era of cancel culture, found community through social media during a global health pandemic, and continues to form its political consciousness amid child trafficking scandals, apartheid, and presidents who wage war through tweets, would inevitably develop a complicated relationship with that very space.
Amid the sheer bombardment of content, news, and narratives, it is only natural that the youth feel constant pressure to be on the right side of things. A lot of this pressure is dealt with through projection, where teenagers will shame other teenagers for not posting enough awareness content on their private Instagrams, even though they could well be making monetary contributions to the very causes. The shamers could be people who have, in reality, not even made an effort to educate themselves beyond the buzzwords they picked up from social media. This could be due to the rise of short-form media, where a 60-second TikTok that utilises the first 10 seconds to hook a consumer will lead them to only inherit political vocabularies before understanding the systems behind them. Yes, the world cannot afford an apolitical demeanour, but when silence itself becomes morally criminalised, and visibility replaces contribution as proof of morality, a culture is born where people fear appearing immoral more than being uninformed. This is a culture that breeds inauthenticity, which can never lead to a strong pursuit of action.
In the 2014 research paper How the Social Observability of an Initial Act of Token Support Affects Subsequent Prosocial Action, Kristofferson et al defined slacktivism as a willingness to perform a relatively costless, token display of support for a social cause, with an accompanying lack of willingness to devote significant effort to enact meaningful change.
Token support can include signing a petition or wearing a bracelet or pin. The paper demonstrated how, when the context of token support is highly observable to others, impression-management motives become active. Under such public conditions, the show of token support satisfies these motives, reducing the desire to engage in subsequent support. One hundred thirty-two English-speaking undergraduates from the University of British Columbia participated in this study in exchange for $10 and were randomly assigned to one of three conditions in a between-participants design: public token support, private token support, or no support. It was found that participants providing private token support were significantly more likely to provide meaningful support than were participants providing public token support.
It also made reference to UNICEF Sweden’s “Likes Don’t Save Lives” campaign, which asked consumers for meaningful financial contributions to protect children in developing nations against disease, rather than mere token displays of support for the cause.
When silence itself becomes morally criminalised, and visibility replaces contribution as proof of morality, a culture is born where people fear appearing immoral more than being uninformed
This is the major issue with new-age fast media activism. This essay is not anti-activism or arguing that everyone is performative online, for in the 21st century, online activism is the single most powerful tool which has, in the past, spread awareness, mobilised protests, raised funds, and exposed injustices ignored by traditional media. Whether it was the #MeToo movement or Black Lives Matter, or the West discovering that there were no weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, it was social media that orchestrated the shift. The limitation with such activism, however, is that it often serves as a catharsis for justified political rage, allowing people to feel like they did all they could.
The problem is not digital activism itself, but the replacement of sustained political engagement with symbolic visibility. Digital culture has transformed activism from collective political action into a performance of identity, producing the feeling of moral participation while weakening meaningful structural engagement. It is the systemic change with low-effort, self-serving digital gestures that obstruct the change we are collectively capable of producing. It therefore creates an illusion of impact without the necessary follow-up.
Jonathan Bishop frames pseudo-activism as a type of group-think, social loafing, or free-riding, where people join organisations based on activism, but their intentions are based more around a kind of empathy, where it is more important to be part of a group that believes than be part of a movement that does.
A major barrier this creates to a progressive move forward is the illusion of progress it perpetuates. The notion stems from the moral licensing theory, whereby engaging in visible, low-effort activism such as sharing an infographic creates a psychological "moral credit." People subconsciously check off their moral obligation and feel they have done their part for a cause. Not only does this justify inaction at an individual internal level, but in some cases, the self-assurance of being morally sound through convenient performative actions can unconsciously function as licences for contradictory behaviour. This looks like corporations that may engage in social media campaigns while simultaneously continuing questionable environmental or labour practices behind the scenes because, at a commercial level, movements are treated as marketing strategies, causing vital social issues to be reduced to fleeting, commodified frameworks.
Everyone is at an individual level also trying to market themselves to maximise new-age social currency. The most successful content creator is one who brands themselves in an evergreen manner, one who remains relevant and “unproblematic” through all trend transitions. Celebrities that are apolitical are now shamed; however, these people don't necessarily lose work or revenue, just a general popularity. People feel morally involved and self-assured in their efforts without materially changing institutions. If anything, the engagement benefits the group that is under scrutiny. Corporations are often structurally insulated from online outrage unless outrage threatens profit at scale.
In that sense, it would not be wrong to claim that cancel culture is an inherent manifestation of a superiority complex; people feel the need to cancel others for their lack of activism to feel good about their own flawed moral codes. This can be especially true for men who try to compensate for the newly established unpopularity of their gender through what the internet calls a performative male epidemic. It isn’t just a ploy to get laid; it is an active effort to make themselves stand out as “one of the good ones.” The incongruity here is that if they actually cared about issues like patriarchy, they would actively try to dismantle the very structures that perpetuate them in the first place, instead of feeling good about their lack of participation in the heteronormative male model through a tote bag and a cup of matcha.
Increasingly, activism has become an identity consumption. People no longer simply hold beliefs. They display beliefs. Political stances have become indicators of belonging, intellectual capital, and class. Activism functions as a social performance through which individuals curate identity.
Goffman, in his famous book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, presented the idea of human beings as performers who act on a ‘social stage’ for the benefit of an audience and ultimately themselves. In this act, individuals put on a front to maintain a social identity. A performer often provokes in his audience the idea that he is related to them in a more ideal way than is always the case. When a certain narrative, concept of morality, or perspective seems to gain the most attention, most people will jump on the bandwagon to engage their audience, albeit of what their actual position on the matter is. In this way, measuring activism through social media posts is inherently flawed because what one posts is not always representative of their beliefs and attitudes in real life.
Moreover, users also passively become a part of this cycle because the medium holds inherent shortcomings, most importantly, the sham of it being a neutral space. Algorithms reward outrage and overwroughtness, but these have historically not been adequate as sole drivers of meaningful political change. That can only come as a product of patience, institutional pressure, policy literacy, and long-term organising. In that way, the architecture of social media itself favours performative activism over effective activism.
This is not an attempt to place the blame on a certain group; as stated in the very opening, this is an extremely justified landscape considering the helplessness of the times. In fact, if digital culture rewards the appearance of moral consciousness more than material political effort, then no participant within that culture is entirely innocent of performance. Not the influencer posting an infographic, not the celebrity issuing statements, and perhaps not even the passionate adolescent tweeting. Maybe every generation just develops its own aesthetic for wanting to look morally awake. Ours just happens to come with ring lights, hashtags, and essays like this pretending they stand outside the problem.