This post was originally posted on www.albertdong.com. On June 5th, 2019, it has been transferred here.
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Happy Tuesday everyone.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about status games. Eugene Wei’s brilliant post on Status-as-a-Service has got me pondering the nature of these games within my own circles and within myself. I’m not sure I like what I see.
Much of these status games, both digital and physical, seems to build off the idea of performativity.
In tech, performativity manifests as people being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. It’s masking cheap advice as aphorisms exclusive only to those “in the know”. It’s delivering opinions on topics that they believe people of their stature and title must deliver, regardless of their actual knowledge on that topic. Performativity here is the delta between who you are and who you say you are; the delta between the knowledge you have the knowledge you pretend to have.
It’s faking expertise as a means to acquire or preserve status.
We all have some form of status — within digital networks, within small groups, within families, and all to varying degrees. Simply holding status is an opt-in into the status game and performative behavior can help one move up in the status game.
The danger here is dual-fold. The first is when the person’s performativity is exposed, dropping the person’s status by a multiple of the status gained from performative behavior. The second is the artificial ceiling on personal growth that's constructed as the person develops a false identity around their inflated level of status.
False-identity construction around status is scarily simple. As the frequency and the magnitude of their performative behavior increases, the person constructs an identity around it. The person begins to believe in the notion that they have a level of knowledge greater than what they actually have. Their performative behavior, while initially directed at others, has begun to fool themselves.
Example: An entrepreneur specializing in medical adherence positioning themselves as an expert in all things healthcare. As they continues this facade, they begins to believe that they are actually an expert in all things healthcare. Their reactions to the opinions of others, the information in which they consume, and the practices in which they engage in, all become representative of this falsely-constructed identity and what they believe a person of that identity must know/do.
Holding opinions is valuable. Having tangential knowledge of any topic is valuable. Falsely identifying yourself as an expert is not, a honest understanding of what you know and don’t know is necessary. The ability to grow comes from the acknowledgment that one’s present knowledge will forever be a drop in the vast ocean of information.
Be comfortable with your ignorance and be excited for what you’ve yet to learn.
Within tech, the false-identity construction trap is an easy one to fall into. The stratification of society based on networks, the deification of successful founders/VCs, and the newfound social mobility with poetic aphorisms as its currency, has made tech an especially fertile breeding ground for this identity to arise and prosper.
I’m not above this either and I’ve been recognizing more symptoms of this affliction within myself even as I write this post. While I’ve been working on reducing the causes — and I’ve found myself happier and more invigorated when I do — there’s still much work left to be done.
There’s an irony here in writing a public post about how I’ve been reducing my own performativity as I engage in, what can be interpreted as performative, self-congratulatory behavior. Blogging is a status game like any other after all.
I hope you don’t read this blog as performative though. This is my way to refining my thoughts and finding smart people to riff on ideas together. With it, I hope to become a bit more aware of my own ignorance and subsequently reduce that ignorance. So feel free to push back on these ideas, rip them apart, or build upon them. I’m here to listen to your thoughts and learn from you. ❤️
Anyways, I started a couple of fun projects recently with some really inspiring friends (old and new!) that I'm pretty excited about. Can't wait to make headway on them and show them off to y'all soon.
Have a blessed day 🙏🏼