A man walks into a bar with Infinite Jest. He orders a drink, opens the book, and starts to read.

For a normal person, that’s where the story ends.

For the Extremely Online, that’s where the investigation begins.

Brady Brickner-Wood has a piece in The New Yorker about “performative reading” — the guy in the bar with Infinite Jest or Moby-Dick, the TikToks mocking him for showing off, the mother hens online clucking over whether people are reading “sincerely” enough. It’s written in the lamentable house style: a little Kant and Rousseau, a little Foucault, some David Foster Wallace, an obligatory swipe at “consumerism and market capitalism,” and it’s not very interesting or informative. What stuck with me, though, wasn’t the analysis of the guy with the book. It was the fact that we’ve reached a point where a stranger quietly reading a book in public has to be treated as a potentially suspicious performance at all.

In the early 2010s, remember, this kind of paranoia was still in remission. Social media was going to democratize everything, topple dictators, spark “color revolutions,” forge connections between lonely people, and usher in a global conversation. A decade later, that fantasy has curdled. We now know what the global conversation actually sounds like, and we’ve seen what happens when you give every crank, fanatic and snake-oil salesman a megaphone. Add AI to the mix — deepfakes, bots, autogenerated sludge that can fill any text box on command — and it’s not irrational to feel that the online environment is fundamentally untrustworthy. You’d be a fool not to doubt a lot of what you see on a screen.

But once that habit sets in, once you’ve trained yourself to read everything online as branding, manipulation, or fakery, the anxiety spills over the edge of its container. If you spend all day marinating in synthetic “content,” it becomes harder to believe in the unremarkable reality happening right in front of you. A stranger reading a book in public no longer registers as “man passing time with a paperback”; he’s “performative reading guy,” a real-world instance of the same insincerity you see everywhere on your feed. Once you’ve spent enough time online, the unofficial slogan becomes “Trust No One” — not even the person reading Middlemarch while sipping her coffee. There must be an angle. There must be a bit. There must be content being harvested!

Ironically, books are one of the last cheap, sturdy, physical symbols of “realness” most people have access to in a world of ephemeral media. You hold them. They don’t ping you. They don’t refresh themselves or run an update overnight. They don’t hypocritically promise “authentic connection” while trying to sell you something. They don’t (yet) hallucinate their citations. If anything in modern life deserves to be exempt from the endless fraud inspection, it’s the quiet, analog act of sitting down and reading a long book for no one’s benefit but your own.

So of course the online-poisoned imagination can’t allow that exemption. It has to colonize this last patch of non-digital ground and declare it suspect. If influencers fake their “candid” photos, if brands fake their wokeness, if AI fakes its expertise, then surely this guy must be faking his absorption in Proust. The environment has trained people to assume there is always a camera, always an audience, always a layer of calculation behind anything that looks sincere. The tragedy is that this stance, which began as a sane response to a polluted information ecosystem, ends by making it impossible to recognize a simple, sane act when we see one.

I don’t know what the motives of the man with the book are, and I don’t care. Mixed motives are the human default. Maybe he likes being seen with a big novel; maybe he’s just tired of staring at his phone; maybe he really is hoping some pretty lady will swoon over his endnotes. I want to believe… he’s just reading. But the point is that reading itself doesn’t need to be put on trial. When the culture gets to the stage where even that has to be defended against charges of fraudulence, the problem is not the reader. The problem is a way of looking at the world that has been so warped by screens that it can’t imagine any act that isn’t performed for one.