The Charade Economy: An AK Roundtable Alexandra Kitty

A Conversation on Micro-Scams, Mass Distraction, and Who Profits from the Performance

What follows is a roundtable exploring an idea that began simply: why does the middle class consistently miss the obvious? Why do people who are clearly being exploited on a systemic scale remain preoccupied with small, personal deceptions, bragging, curating, performing, while the bigger schemes run uninterrupted above their heads? The answer turns out to be far more engineered than accidental.

Part One: The Original Question — Why Does the Middle Class Miss the Obvious?

AK: I was talking to someone about how middle-class people miss the obvious, and theorized that when you are too busy conducting little scams, bragging, lying on social media, you become preoccupied and miss the bigger scams and schemes from more powerful players.

That’s the seed of it. And it struck me as something worth pulling apart, because it’s not just that people are distracted. It’s that they’re actively distracted by their own behavior. There’s something circular and almost self-punishing about it.

Let’s start there. Why does the middle class specifically fall into this trap?

Perplexity: The answer begins with cognitive bandwidth. Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir demonstrated that when people are mentally preoccupied with any pressing concern — financial stress, social anxiety, status competition — cognitive resources are drained and unavailable for broader, more abstract thinking. The scarcity mindset “consumes mental bandwidth — brainpower that would otherwise go to less pressing concerns, planning ahead and problem-solving”. Neuroimaging research confirms this directly: scarcity conditions demonstrably decrease activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — the region responsible for goal-directed, strategic decision-making.[^1][^2][^3]

But here’s the twist. The preoccupation that traps the middle class isn’t genuine financial deprivation. It’s the performance of status. The middle class, uniquely positioned between real poverty and real power, is consumed by signaling games that mimic the cognitive load of scarcity — without the financial excuse, and without the class solidarity that might come from genuine collective hardship.

Thorstein Veblen identified the architecture of this trap over 125 years ago. In The Theory of the Leisure Class, he analyzed how the middle class is drawn into competitive “conspicuous consumption” — spending energy and resources not on utility, but on public display of social standing. What Veblen understood is that this isn’t an individual failing. It is structurally incentivized. The competitive quality of status performance is self-reinforcing and self-consuming. Social media didn’t invent the problem. It industrialized it.[^4][^5][^6]

The middle class also harbors an unconscious positive bias toward the wealthy, making them less likely to scrutinize the very players running the larger schemes. They imitate the performance of elite life rather than examining elite power. And so the cognitive bandwidth that might go toward recognizing wage suppression, regulatory capture, financial engineering, or tax evasion goes instead toward curating the next post, managing the next social narrative, maintaining the next small deception.[^7]

Part Two: The Neuroscience of the Small Lie

AK: So people miss the bigger picture because they’re cognitively exhausted by the smaller one. But is there more to it than just distraction? Does the act of performing small deceptions, the bragging, the curated life, actually change something in how people perceive honesty and fraud more broadly?

Perplexity: It does. And the research here is genuinely disturbing.

When people tell small lies, the amygdala — the brain region associated with emotional response and moral discomfort — initially reacts strongly. But with repeated dishonesty, the amygdala’s response diminishes. Researchers found they could predict the size of someone’s next lie based solely on how much their amygdala activity had declined. The brain adapts to dishonesty through emotional desensitization. Each subsequent deception becomes easier and larger.[^8]

This means the middle-class person curating their Instagram life, inflating their LinkedIn credentials, or performing fake happiness isn’t just distracted. They are neurologically desensitizing themselves to fraud. Once you’ve rationalized your own small deceptions, your moral alarm system is compromised. You become less capable of recognizing when you’re being lied to at scale, because your own complicity has dulled the very mechanism that would alert you.

Corruption perception research compounds this. When people perceive widespread dishonesty around them, they are significantly more likely to normalize dishonest behavior themselves. If everyone’s doing it, your own small scam feels justified — even necessary. But the normalization of petty fraud creates moral permission for elite fraud, which in turn creates more petty fraud. It’s a downward spiral, and the middle class is caught in the undertow.[^9][^10]

There’s a second lock: the sunk cost fallacy. Once you’ve invested significant time, energy, and ego into maintaining a curated social performance — the perfect family photos, the aspirational lifestyle brand, the performative political takes — you are psychologically committed to defending that investment. You’ve built a persona. You’ve told stories about yourself. Confirmation bias ensures you filter out evidence that contradicts your investment. The more you’ve posted, performed, and posed, the harder it becomes to step back and recognize the con. Admitting you were played is the one thing your ego investment in the performance won’t allow.[^11][^12]

Part Three: The Spectacle Was Designed This Way

AK: So we have cognitive bandwidth depletion, neurological desensitization to fraud, and the sunk cost trap. But I want to push further. Is this accidental, a byproduct of social media and consumer culture? Or is there a design logic to it?

Perplexity: This isn’t new territory intellectually, but the modern platforms have made it precise and profitable in ways previous thinkers could only theorize about.

Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967) argued that modern capitalism produces a continuous stream of images and representations specifically engineered to separate people from their own social agency. Debord’s argument wasn’t simply that distraction is a side effect of entertainment. It was that the spectacle is the technical mechanism by which separated social power maintains itself. People absorbed in the spectacle — rating their own lives against curated images, performing identity for audiences — are not merely distracted. They are actively estranged from the conditions that determine their lives.[^13][^14]

Herbert Marcuse’s concept of “repressive tolerance” adds another layer. He argued that in advanced capitalist societies, people are permitted and even encouraged to participate in low-stakes dissent, status competition, and self-expression — precisely because such participation neutralizes more fundamental challenges to power. The system doesn’t need to suppress opposition when opposition is too preoccupied, too fragmented, and too distracted to form.[^15][^16]

The petty scams of social media — the inflated LinkedIn resumes, the performative Instagram lives, the small social frauds — function as exactly this kind of tolerated, even encouraged, activity. They keep people invested in a system of social evaluation while insulating larger players from scrutiny.

And the attention economy provides the infrastructure to make all this scalable. Just as colonial economies extracted material resources from the periphery, the attention economy “exploits the psychologies and behaviors of periphery populations to extract wealth for core” players. The most powerful institutions in the world now control the algorithms that determine where that attention flows.[^17]

Part Four: The Industrial Machine: How Platforms Profit from the Charade

AK: Let’s talk about the business model. Social media and other companies exploit this by selling a fantasy and making people become addicted to maintaining their charade. That’s not a side effect of the platform economy. That’s the product.

Perplexity: Correct. And it’s worth being precise about the mechanism, because “social media is addictive” has become so normalized it’s lost its shock value. The engineering behind it is deliberate, documented, and now legally adjudicated.

Social media platforms deliberately use variable reward schedules — the exact same psychological mechanism that makes slot machines addictive. When you pull down to refresh Instagram, you’re pulling a slot machine lever. You don’t know what you’ll get: a flood of likes, silence, a comment from someone you care about. That unpredictability is engineered to trigger dopamine release in the brain’s reward pathways. The three-second loading delay when you open a platform? Not a technical glitch — deliberate design, creating the anticipation that makes the reward feel more intense when it finally arrives.[^18][^19][^20][^21]

There’s even documented collaboration between Las Vegas slot machine designers and social media engineers, sharing research to maximize engagement. This is not metaphor. Former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris documented how platforms use these techniques to create psychological dependencies identical to gambling addiction.[^20][^21]

But the addiction isn’t just to validation. It’s addiction to maintaining the performance itself. The platforms sell a fantasy identity — the curated, aspirational life you project — and then monetize your compulsion to sustain it. This is the aspiration economy: sophisticated desire-generating machines that make users want things they didn’t know existed and identities they’ll never actually achieve.[^22][^23]

The economic consequence is brutal. Consumers are “getting debt-ridden to the extent of going bankrupt to flaunt products they never really needed” in order to perform the lifestyle the platform economy convinced them defines success and happiness. They’re not buying utility. They’re buying the story of who they want to appear to be. And the platforms profit at every stage: from the attention, from the aspiration, from the performance, from the consumption, and from the addiction itself.[^24][^25][^23]

In March 2026, a jury found Meta and YouTube liable for creating addictive products that harm users, comparing their platforms to “cigarettes or digital casinos”. The verdict specifically targeted infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendations, autoplay, and constant notifications — all designed to make disengagement nearly impossible. Internal documents unsealed in these lawsuits showed the companies knew their platforms were addictive and harmful, particularly to adolescents, and continued targeting them anyway because the business model required it.[^26][^27][^28]

Part Five: The Casualties

AK: So there are actual casualties here. I’d think Gabby Petito is an extreme case — homicide — but many people get caught in a loop in a different way.

Perplexity: Petito is the case that made the mechanism visible. She and her fiancé Brian Laundrie documented their #VanLife journey across Instagram and YouTube with aspirational content — sunsets, adventure, romance, freedom. Behind the curated feed was escalating domestic violence: witnesses saw Laundrie hitting her, bodycam footage showed her visibly distressed and taking blame for his abuse, and friends described a pattern of control and jealousy.[^29][^30]

The van life aesthetic, which looks like freedom on Instagram, can create the perfect conditions for abuse to intensify: physical isolation from support systems, 24/7 proximity in confined spaces, and the pressure to maintain the performance that “everything is perfect”. Domestic violence experts noted that the isolation serves as a tactic for control while the curated social media presence hides the violence from view. She was murdered at 22. The Instagram posts showed smiles and sunsets. The reality was a relationship defined by escalating violence.[^30][^31][^32][^33][^29]

But the casualties extend far beyond the extreme. The suicide epidemic is a mass casualty event:

Canadian research found that youth aged 16-24 who spend 7+ hours on personal screen time are significantly more likely to experience anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. Between 2007 and 2015, the suicide rate for male teens increased 31% and female teen suicides hit a 40-year high — a timeline that directly correlates with the rise of social media. Cyberbullying victims show a threefold increase in suicidal ideation.[^34][^35]

Influencer Niece Waidhofer, 31, had 4.2 million Instagram followers when she died by suicide in 2022 after a long battle with mental health issues she largely hid from her audience. YouTube gaming star Etika (Desmond Amofah) died by suicide in 2019 following a public mental breakdown documented in real time online, with experts pointing to the pressure to maintain “unrealistic and fake personas”. Fourteen-year-old Molly Russell took her own life in 2017 after encountering a sustained stream of depression and self-harm content on Instagram, prompting the platform to eventually acknowledge responsibility.[^36][^37][^38][^39][^40][^41]

Then there’s the slow mass casualty of eating disorders and body dysmorphia fueled by social media’s impossible beauty standards. Body dysmorphic disorder has a 24-28% suicide attempt rate — significantly higher than most mental illnesses and the general population. Anorexia nervosa has the second highest mortality rate of any mental illness, with a six-fold increase in mortality compared to the general population. Social media images set “literally impossible-to-achieve beauty standards” that fuel negative body image and eating disorder behaviors, and hospitalizations for eating disorders surged during the pandemic in lockstep with increased platform use.[^42][^43][^44]

These are not edge cases. They are categories of casualties: homicide victims whose curated lives concealed lethal abuse, suicide deaths where platform pressure or content contributed directly, eating disorder deaths driven by algorithmically curated impossible standards, chronic mental illness, and hospitalizations. Bodies. Coroners. Funerals. And the platforms, with full knowledge, continued anyway.

Part Six: Two Streams, Both Trapped

AK: There are two streams to this: the unsuccessful ones chasing validation through digital deceptions, and the ones who actually achieve some success through social media. How does the trap differ for each?

Perplexity: The trap is the same mechanism applied at different scales. Neither stream escapes it.

The unsuccessful are the vast majority: people pouring energy into curated performances that generate minimal engagement, spending money they don’t have to maintain appearances that almost nobody sees, going into debt for aspirational consumption that yields no return. They experience the full cognitive bandwidth depletion, the sunk cost trap, the neurological desensitization to dishonesty — while never achieving the fame or income that might at least rationalize the investment. Research shows that influencers earning less than $10,000 annually from content — which describes most participants — report the lowest levels of positive feelings and the highest emotional distress. They are doing all the work, paying all the psychological costs, maintaining the charade, and getting almost nothing except the addiction to keep trying.[^23][^45]

These are the people most vulnerable to the fatal casualties described above. Trapped in an unpaid, psychologically destructive performance they can’t quit because of sunk costs and the fantasy that one viral post will change everything.

The successful face a darker irony: success makes it worse. A 2024 study published in PLOS ONE found that influencers with larger followings experience significantly more negative emotions (p = .001). The more followers, the more social comparison, the more feelings of inadequacy and jealousy, and the higher the risk of burnout. Success doesn’t free you from the trap — it intensifies the pressure to maintain performance at a scale where failure is more public and more catastrophic.[^46]

Harvard research confirms that successful content creators experience high rates of anxiety, depression, and burnout despite — or because of — their success. Influencers who spend more than 5 hours daily on social media (which successful creators must) report feeling significantly worse: more emotionally drained, frustrated, and sad.[^47][^45]

The financial exploitation compounds this. Despite visible revenue, financial instability is the top driver of burnout among successful influencers. Agencies withhold payments, contracts contain exploitative usage rights, Black and LGBTQ+ influencers face systemic pay disparities, and legal battles over obligations destroy reputations regardless of outcome. The platform itself becomes a hostage situation: taking a break destroys algorithmic reach, missing a posting schedule deprioritizes content, and the fear of losing income just because you need rest keeps creators trapped in continuous performance even as they collapse psychologically.[^48][^49][^50][^51][^52]

Most fundamentally, the successful face identity fracture. They’ve built a brand. An audience expects a specific version of them. Deviating risks everything they’ve built. Bobby Burns, Elle Mills, Tati Westbrook — high-profile creators who publicly collapsed under this pressure — confirm that visibility becomes a prison. You can’t quietly walk away when millions are watching.[^53]

The unsuccessful are trapped by the hope of validation. The successful are trapped by the burden of it. Both are exhausted. Both are cognitively unavailable to recognize or resist the systemic exploitation happening above them. The platforms profit from both the climb and the summit, because the attempt itself generates the attention being sold to advertisers.

The Layered Fraud Ecosystem: A Full Accounting

Perplexity: To make the argument complete, it helps to see the entire structure at once. What we’ve described across this roundtable is not an accidental collection of social problems. It’s a layered fraud ecosystem with interlocking mechanisms:

Level One (Micro): Middle-class individuals conduct small status frauds — social media lies, performative bragging, minor social deceptions — that consume cognitive bandwidth and social energy.

Level Two (Meso): This bandwidth depletion, combined with ego investment in their own small deceptions, renders them cognitively unavailable and psychologically resistant to recognizing larger frauds. Admitting they’re being played would require admitting their own complicity in a fraud-normalized world. Sunk costs in the performance prevent exit. Neurological desensitization prevents alarm.

Level Three (Platform): Social media companies engineer addiction using variable reward schedules borrowed from gambling, sell aspirational fantasy identities, and monetize every stage of the performance cycle — including the addiction itself. They do this knowingly, having documented the harm to their users and continued regardless.[^19][^28][^18][^23]

Level Four (Macro): Elite actors — financial, political, corporate — operate large-scale schemes that are structurally invisible to people whose attention architecture has been colonized by the lower levels: regulatory capture, tax evasion, wage suppression, financial engineering, systematic wealth extraction.

AK: The casualties are distributed across all levels. Some are fatal: homicide, suicide, eating disorder deaths. Some are chronic: lifelong anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, identity fracture. Some are financial: debt, bankruptcy, exploitation by platforms and brands. Some are civic: a population so cognitively exhausted and morally desensitized by the performance economy that it cannot form the collective awareness needed to challenge the power structures running the Level Four operations.

The small scam doesn’t just hide the large one. It creates the neurological, psychological, and financial conditions that make the large one invisible, unbearable to confront, and ultimately self-perpetuating.

And the most devastating part of the whole architecture? The system doesn’t require coercion. It doesn’t require force. It requires only that people keep scrolling.

Alexandra Kitty is the author of 21 books, an educator, artist, scholar, researcher, and founder of KlueIQ, a true crime AI-based gaming company.

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