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The paper examines how authenticity is performed in a digital landscape shaped by social media and conspiracy theories.

April 17, 2026Open Access

Performing Authenticity in the Age of Feeds: Irony, Conspiracy, and the Fragmented Self in Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts

Key Points

The paper examines how authenticity is performed in a digital landscape shaped by social media and conspiracy theories.
Literary analysis of Lauren Oyler’s novel Fake Accounts
Application of theories from Goffman, Baudrillard, and Turkle
Exploration of themes like skepticism, identity curation, and emotional transparency
Identity in digital culture is often curated and commodified.
Conspiracy thinking and irony coexist, reflecting instability in truth.
The narrator's commentary critiques the culture of exposure and attention economy.

Abstract

Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts (2021) offers a sharp metafictional exploration of digital subjectivity, irony fatigue, and the commodification of authenticity in the age of social media. The unnamed narrator discovers that her boyfriend, Felix, secretly operates a popular conspiracy-theory Instagram account. This revelation triggers a meditation on deception—both interpersonal and epistemic—within a culture dominated by feeds, curated identities, and algorithmic visibility. This paper argues that Fake Accounts stages authenticity as performance. The narrator’s hyper-analytic voice, oscillating between detachment and vulnerability, reflects a generational condition marked by skepticism toward sincerity and exhaustion with ideological spectacle. Social media platforms function as laboratories of self-construction, where political belief, aesthetic identity, and moral stance are constantly curated, revised, and monetized. In this environment, conspiracy thinking and ironic self-awareness coexist uneasily, each feeding on the instability of truth in networked culture. Drawing on theories of postmodern subjectivity and digital self-fashioning from Erving Goffman, Jean Baudrillard, and Sherry Turkle, the study contends that the novel’s fragmented, essayistic structure mirrors the discontinuous temporality of scrolling and posting. The narrator’s relentless commentary functions as both critique and symptom: her refusal of emotional transparency serves as a defense against a world in which exposure is routine and attention is currency. The proliferation of “fake accounts” signals not only literal online deception but the broader condition of mediated identity, where sincerity is suspect and selfhood is perpetually provisional. Ultimately, this paper positions Fake Accounts as a novel of platform modernity, capturing the psychological texture of life lived online. By interrogating the instability of truth, intimacy, and belief in a hyperconnected era, Oyler’s work reveals how digital culture reshapes not only public discourse but the inner architecture of the self.

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