Every Surface Is a Stage Now (and the Weirdos Have Nowhere to Rehearse)

My friend Dave throws a backyard thing every summer, a loose gathering of maybe twenty people around a firepit, and last year somebody brought a guitar. This is a detail worth pausing on. The guitar came out around nine, once the light had gone amber and soft, and the guy holding it (friend of a friend, name already forgotten) started picking through something folksy and unplaceable, and for about forty-five seconds there was this little hum of possibility in the air, a few people leaning in, a couple of mouths opening.¹ Then someone across the circle pulled out their phone. Not aggressively, not even to record, just a reflexive gesture, the phone coming up and the screen facing vaguely in the musician's direction. And the singing stopped before it started. The mouths closed. People reached for their drinks instead.

I keep thinking about those forty-five seconds.

There's an essay by Katie Bird called "Embarrassment Has Good Bones," and in it she makes the observation all of the best things in life require a degree of embarrassment, or at least the possibility of it.² Dancing, singing, sharing food you cooked, holding someone's hand for the first time. She's writing about the relationship between vulnerability and aliveness, about how the risk of looking foolish is not a bug in the system of human connection but the mechanism by which connection occurs. Which sounds obvious when you say it plainly. But obvious things have a way of becoming invisible, and invisible things have a way of disappearing entirely, and I think something close to disappearing is happening right now with our collective willingness to be embarrassed in front of each other.

Consider the guitar moment. Nobody told the group not to sing. Nobody said anything unkind. The phone didn't even end up recording. But the possibility was enough. The mere presence of a device capable of capturing and broadcasting an off-key rendition of "Wagon Wheel" to an audience of strangers was sufficient to collapse the moment from a participatory one into a spectatorial one.³ We went from campfire to concert hall in the time it takes a screen to light up. And the thing about concert halls is nobody expects you to sing along.

The sociologist Erving Goffman spent his career thinking about this kind of thing, though he died in 1982 and never had to contend with Instagram Stories. His big idea, laid out in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, was a theatrical metaphor for social behavior: we perform different versions of ourselves for different audiences, and we do this constantly, and it's not dishonest so much as it is the basic grammar of being a person among other people.⁴ He divided the social world into "front stage" and "backstage" regions. Front stage is where you perform: the job interview, the dinner party, the carefully worded email. Backstage is where you prepare, recover, experiment, fail, practice, scratch yourself, say the dumb thing, try the weird voice, and generally exist without an audience evaluating the performance.

The distinction mattered to Goffman because both regions were necessary for healthy social functioning. You cannot be perpetually on stage. Nobody can. The backstage is where you metabolize your experiences, process your failures, calibrate your next attempt. It's where you learn to be a person by being a bad version of one first, in relative safety, before taking the improved version public.

Here is what I think has happened, and I want to be careful about how I say it because it sounds alarmist and I'm wary of sounding alarmist:⁵ the backstage has been almost entirely eliminated from public life. Not by governments. Not by some centralized surveillance apparatus. By us. By each other. By the four billion tiny cameras we carry in our pockets and the platforms built to receive and redistribute whatever those cameras capture.

Michel Foucault wrote about Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, the theoretical prison design where a single guard in a central tower could observe every cell, and the inmates, never knowing when they were being watched, would begin to regulate their own behavior automatically.⁶ The genius of the design (if you can call it genius, and Foucault had complicated feelings about whether you could) was in the fact the guard didn't even need to be there. The possibility of observation was sufficient. Inmates internalized the gaze. They became their own wardens.

We have built this, except instead of a tower with a single watchful eye, we have billions of towers, and the guard is everyone, and the prison is every room.

I realize this sounds dramatic. I want to be proportionate about it. Nobody is being imprisoned. The consequences of being observed singing badly at a backyard gathering are not equivalent to the consequences of institutional surveillance. I know this.⁷ But there's a version of the panopticon argument whose implications are not about punishment at all but about something subtler: the flattening of behavior. The slow, ambient pressure toward safety. The way people in observed environments converge toward the mean, become more predictable, shed their eccentricities, file down whatever might snag on the attention of someone with a phone and an opinion.

Here's what I mean concretely. There was a time, not even very long ago, when virtually every conversation a person had was verbal.⁸ Phone calls. Face-to-face meetings. Arguments in kitchens. Confessions in cars. These conversations happened and then they were gone, persisting only in the imperfect, biased, mercifully degraded medium of human memory. You could say something stupid at a party and the worst-case scenario was a friend ribbing you about it for six months. You could try a bad joke, mispronounce a word, express a half-formed opinion, cry a little too easily, and the evidence would evaporate as it was produced.

Now texts can be screenshotted. Now voice memos exist. Now any private exchange is potentially public testimony, and every room with a phone in it (which is every room) is a room with a broadcast antenna. The phrase "the walls have ears" used to be a metaphor. It has become an understatement.

And the standard response to this observation, the one I hear most often from people who are younger than me and therefore grew up already immersed in it, is a kind of shrug.⁹ Everybody knows this, they say. We've adapted, they say. We're fine. To which I want to respond: I think you're adapted in the way fish are adapted to water, meaning you don't notice the medium, and the fact you don't notice it doesn't mean it isn't shaping everything about how you move.

There's a BBC article with the headline "Why aren't Gen Z going to the pub?" and in it a young woman explains her reluctance with a sentence so quietly devastating I've thought about it weekly since I read it: "I don't want to end up in the background of people's Instagram stories."¹⁰ Not the subject. Not the focus. The background. She is declining to participate in one of the oldest forms of human social gathering because she cannot guarantee her casual, unperformed self won't be incidentally captured and broadcast to an audience she has never met and cannot predict.

This is a rational response to an irrational situation. She is behaving logically. And the logic of her behavior, extended to its natural conclusion, is: the only safe space left is solitude.

I want to talk about what this costs, because I think we're only beginning to understand the invoice.

The notes I keep coming back to, the ones scratched in the margins of my thinking over the past year, have to do with where cultural innovation actually comes from. Not from individuals, usually. Not from lone geniuses sitting in rooms having breakthroughs. From subcultures. From groups of people who gather in specific places, develop shared languages and aesthetics, violate conventions, experiment with identities, and produce new forms of expression in the heat generated by their proximity to each other.

The Harlem ballroom scene. Punk in lower Manhattan. The Beats in San Francisco coffee shops. Detroit techno in warehouse parties. Every one of these movements germinated in a physical space where the participants felt free enough to be terrible before they became great.¹¹ The ballroom scene is especially instructive here because its cultural influence has been so vast and so poorly attributed. Half the slang in mainstream usage came from the drag and ballroom communities: "shade," "slay," "serving," "reading," "work," "snatched."¹² The documentary Paris Is Burning captured a world of extraordinary creativity and resilience, a world in which people who had been rejected by virtually every institution in American life built their own families, their own aesthetics, their own vocabulary, their own entire mode of being. And they built it in specific rooms, at specific events, among specific people, under conditions of mutual trust and shared vulnerability.

Those rooms worked because they had walls. Because what happened inside them stayed inside them. Because the participants could be extravagant, ridiculous, offensive, raw, unfinished, and wrong in front of people who understood the implicit contract: we are all here to experiment, and experimentation requires the freedom to fail without the failure being preserved in amber and shipped to an audience of millions for judgment.¹³

If you feel, and I think a lot of people feel this without being able to name it, that contemporary culture has flattened somehow, that the music all sounds vaguely the same, that the movies have an algorithmic sameness, that fashion cycles have become so rapid they've lost their capacity to signify anything beyond "this is what's trending this week," I think this is part of the reason. It's not the whole reason. The economics of media consolidation matter. The incentive structures of streaming platforms matter. But beneath all of it is this quieter, more fundamental shift: weird spaces are disappearing. The incubation rooms where people could develop strange new ideas among sympathetic strangers have been flooded with light, and anything flooded with light grows toward uniformity the way a plant in a greenhouse grows toward the glass.¹⁴

The truly original work used to be made by people who came up through scenes, who spent years being bad at their thing in front of other people who were also bad at their thing, who developed their voices through friction and feedback and the specific kind of encouragement only weirdos in proximity to other weirdos can provide.¹⁵ The people making things now, the ones who came up in the surveillance era, are often drawing primarily on their experience of consuming other people's media, because the scenes where they might have developed through doing have been surveilled into caution.

There's a concept in psychology called the Hawthorne effect, which describes how people change their behavior when they know they're being observed, and while the original studies have been picked apart by subsequent researchers (the methodology was, to put it gently, not robust), the core observation remains intuitive and basically confirmed by lived experience: watched people act differently than unwatched people.¹⁶ They become more careful. More conventional. They smooth their rough edges. They converge toward what they believe is expected of them. Which is sometimes a good thing; I'm told operating room hygiene improves measurably when staff know they're being monitored. But creativity is not hygiene. Innovation is not compliance. The things we actually need from human culture, the things making us more alive and less bored and less predictable, come from the edges, from people acting in ways nobody expected, and you cannot act in ways nobody expected when everybody is watching.

The philosopher Goffman, again (I keep circling back to him, which is maybe its own kind of backstage behavior, this returning to the same thinker the way you return to the same bar), made a point about audience segregation that feels prescient now: the ability to perform different versions of yourself for different groups is not duplicity but a form of social competence.¹⁷ You are one person at Thanksgiving dinner, another at a work happy hour, another at your best friend's kitchen table at midnight. These aren't masks over a true self. They're facets of a real self, brought out by different contexts. And the system works because the audiences are separated. Your boss doesn't see the midnight kitchen version. Your grandmother doesn't see the work happy hour version. There are walls between the rooms of your life, and those walls give each room its particular atmosphere.

Social media dissolved those walls. The concept Goffman called audience segregation has become, in practice, audience collapse: every possible viewer, from your employer to your ex to your parents to strangers in countries you've never visited, is now potentially watching the same performance.¹⁸ And when your audience is everyone, your performance becomes the safest, most inoffensive, most flattened version of yourself you can manage. You become, in effect, a person with no backstage at all. Front stage always. Performance without intermission. The show going endlessly on.

I don't know exactly what to do about this, and I'm suspicious of anyone who claims to. The cameras aren't going back in the drawer. The platforms aren't going to voluntarily blind themselves. We're not returning to some prelapsarian state of unrecorded gathering; the people nostalgic for it (and I count myself among them, obviously, transparently) need to be honest about the fact nostalgia is a terrible basis for policy.

But I think there's something worth defending here, worth noticing even if we can't fix it, which is the value of permission. The permission to be bad at something in front of other people. The permission to try a voice, an idea, a dance, a joke, a way of being, and have it witnessed only by people who are also trying, also failing, also figuring it out. The permission to be cringe, which is maybe just a contemporary word for what it means to be sincere before you've gotten good at it.

I think about Dave's backyard, the guitar, the mouths opening and closing. I think about the young woman who won't go to the pub. I think about the ballroom houses in Harlem, those families built from rejection, those vocabularies invented in rooms where the only audience was each other. I think about the weight of the word "slay" in a mouth now versus the mouth where it was coined, how a word can travel from a specific room full of specific people to every caption on every platform on earth and somehow arrive emptied of the thing giving it power in the first place, which was the intimacy of its original context, the fact it meant something because only certain people said it in certain rooms and those rooms had walls.

I think about the guy with the guitar, how he played a few more songs after the phone came out, quieter ones, and how by the end of the night the circle had shrunk to maybe five people, the ones willing to sit in the ambient surveillance and sing anyway, a little off-key, a little self-conscious, and how the sound of it carried across Dave's yard into the dark. Small and imperfect. Not recorded by anyone.

¹ The firepit detail is doing a lot of work here and I want to acknowledge it. There's something about fire turning social interaction pre-verbal, or at least pre-performative, the way staring into flames together creates a kind of shared absorption. The guitar moment had the fire going for it. Which makes what happened next more notable, not less. ↩︎

² Bird's essay appeared on her Substack in January 2023 and became one of those pieces passed around in screenshots, which is ironic given what I'm about to argue about screenshots. ↩︎

³ "Wagon Wheel" is doing representative work here. It could have been anything. The specific song is less important than the specific posture: leaning forward, mouth open, voice about to enter a shared space. ↩︎

⁴ Goffman published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life in 1956, first as a monograph, then in wider release in 1959. He was working from fieldwork in a small community in the Shetland Islands, which is the kind of academic origin story I find irresistible: a young sociologist on a Scottish island, watching people manage impressions, taking notes on human theater in a place with a population smaller than most apartment buildings. ↩︎

⁵ This wariness is itself a product of the thing I'm describing. I'm modulating my performance because I'm aware of being observed, which in this case means being read, which is its own form of surveillance. The recursion goes all the way down. ↩︎

⁶ Foucault's analysis appears in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, published in French in 1975 and translated into English in 1977. His treatment of the panopticon is really a treatment of a much larger idea: how power operates not through force but through visibility, and how the subject of surveillance eventually becomes a collaborator in their own monitoring. ↩︎

⁷ Though I'd argue the gap is narrower than it seems. There are now hundreds of documented cases of people losing jobs, relationships, and social standing over recordings of private or semi-private moments. The punishment may not be institutional, but it's real. ↩︎

⁸ I'm old enough to remember this era, which is to say I'm old enough to have made deeply regrettable statements in my twenties preserved only in the unreliable neurons of people who were probably also drunk at the time. This is, I now realize, a form of privilege. ↩︎

⁹ I hear it especially from people in their early twenties, and I want to be careful not to condescend. Their adaptation is real. It's also, I think, a kind of loss they can't perceive because they never had the thing being lost. You can't miss a room you've never been inside. ↩︎

¹⁰ The article was published by BBC Scotland. The full quote, from a young woman named English, also includes the fear of losing control over what she herself might post while out, adding a secondary layer: not just fear of being observed by others, but fear of her own impaired future self doing the broadcasting. ↩︎

¹¹ The "terrible before they became great" part is the part people skip. Every canonized genius had a phase of being objectively bad at their craft, and the people around them during that phase, the ones who tolerated and encouraged and occasionally mocked the bad work, are the unsung infrastructure of cultural production. ↩︎

¹² The origins of most of this vocabulary trace back to the Harlem ballroom scene of the 1970s and 1980s, communities of Black and Latino LGBTQ+ people who created elaborate competitive events organized around "houses." The language was part of a broader system of identity, belonging, and resistance built by people who had been excluded from nearly every other system available. ↩︎

¹³ There's a version of this argument that gets weaponized by people who want to say offensive things without consequences, and I want to be clear I'm not making that argument. The rooms I'm describing had their own codes of conduct, their own standards, their own ways of holding members accountable. They were not consequence-free zones. They were zones where the consequences were local, proportionate, and issued by people who knew you. ↩︎

¹⁴ I wrote "the way a plant grows toward the glass" and then worried it was too poetic, then decided the worry was itself a demonstration of the surveillance effect on my writing. I'm leaving it in. ↩︎

¹⁵ Jon Brion, the producer and multi-instrumentalist, used to do weekly residencies at Largo in Los Angeles where he'd improvise entire sets, try unfinished material, play covers of songs he'd just learned, and generally treat the stage as a lab rather than a showcase. These shows produced some of his most celebrated work. They also happened in a pre-smartphone era, in a room where recording was explicitly forbidden, and I think the two facts are connected. ↩︎

¹⁶ The Hawthorne effect is named after a series of studies conducted at Western Electric's Hawthorne Works factory in the 1920s. Researchers were testing whether changes in lighting would affect worker productivity, and found productivity increased regardless of what they did to the lighting, seemingly because the workers knew they were being studied. Later analyses have challenged the methodology and even the data, but the basic principle (observation changes behavior) has held up across subsequent, better-designed research. ↩︎

¹⁷ I realize this paragraph reads as somewhat academic, which is my way of saying I'm hiding in Goffman's authority because the next point feels personally vulnerable. The idea of performing different selves for different audiences sounds manipulative until you recognize you've done it every single day of your life without thinking about it. ↩︎

¹⁸ The term "context collapse" was coined by the media scholar danah boyd (who lowercases her name, a detail I mention because it always trips people up) to describe this phenomenon. She was writing primarily about teenagers navigating social media audiences, but the concept applies to everyone now. ↩︎