In certain corners of the internet, an idea has been gaining momentum: that social media has turned everyday life into one long, rolling series of self-inflicted embarrassments. Humiliation has become the currency of our digital age. It’s not exactly a new thought, but lately it seems to be hitting the nail on the head for more and more people – that creeping feeling that humiliation, or the threat of it, has become part of how we show up online. 

The idea gets a name and some serious clarity in P.E. Moskowitz’s recent GQ essay, “Is Everything a Humiliation Ritual?”. What began as a conspiracy theory with QAnon overtones – that celebrities are ritually humiliated to appease hidden elites – has, in a roundabout way, captured an emotional truth many now feel, even if they’d never admit it: that every anxious post from Instagram to TikTok is a performance for an invisible audience that may love us, loathe us – or even worse, ignore us.

Moskowitz blames techno-capitalism’s monetisation of human emotion. Social platforms, they argue, create environments in which users willingly contort themselves into ever more extreme versions of themselves – louder, cringier, more exposed – just to be seen. It’s the natural byproduct of systems that reward emotional spectacle and penalise silence or nuance. Every post is a content hook. The algorithm is optimised to reward outrage, irony and visibility at all costs. 

GQ's "Is Everything a Humiliation Ritual". Courtesy of Warner Bros. / Everett Collection

The result is what Moskowitz describes as a “mirror maze”. We enter social media hoping to express ourselves but instead see endless refractions – ourselves as we want to be seen, as others might perceive us, as the algorithm is training us to become.

All of this has consequences for how we think and feel. Our sense of self begins to dissolve under the pressure of constant feedback loops. We can no longer distinguish what we genuinely enjoy from what performs well. There’s a creeping suspicion that every gesture, every vulnerable confession, every candid moment is actually a kind of currency in a system we didn’t design but now can’t escape. Many people feel stuck in the performance economy, constructing their identities post by post – even when they’re hurting, bored or exhausted.