Palimpsest self, parasocial media

It became common, somewhere in the 2010s, to read social media through Foucault. The argument was easy to make and easier to repeat: the timeline is a panopticon, the user a docile body, the algorithm a watchtower whose occupant is unknown but whose gaze is internalized. The reading flattered everyone involved. It made critics sound rigorous and users sound oppressed, and it had the additional virtue of being partly true. Surveillance had migrated from the state to the platform, and discipline now arrived through metrics rather than through walls.

The reading is partly true and mostly wrong. Foucault's panopticon describes a subject who is the same person whether observed or not, and who is corrected — bent toward a norm — through the unverifiable possibility of the gaze. The disturbance at the heart of Discipline and Punish is the proximity of the true self to the controlled surface. The cell collapses them. What is striking about reality television, Instagram, and now TikTok is the opposite movement. The surveillance is voluntary, the rules of conduct are overt, the punishments — elimination from the format, the public tribunal of the comments — are advertised in advance. None of this looks like an internalized fear. It looks like a job description.

There is a further problem with the disciplinary reading, and it is structural rather than textual. Foucault's society of discipline, and even Deleuze's society of control, presume a subject whose ultimate horizon is compliance. The norm is a ceiling. Once the body has been bent toward it, the institution has, in a sense, completed its work. What contemporary platforms produce is not compliance but performance, and performance has no ceiling. Reach can grow, audience can grow, monetization can grow, and the metric of success keeps moving. The frame that fits this is not Foucault's. It is Byung-Chul Han's: the subject as entrepreneur of itself, the corporation of the self, where freedom and self-exploitation become indistinguishable because the work is voluntary and the capital is uncapped.

Genette's Palimpsestes is what makes the mechanism legible. A palimpsest is a manuscript scraped clean and written over, where the prior text remains legible underneath. Genette extended the figure to literature: every text is layered upon prior texts, and meaning emerges from the friction between the over-writing and what survives beneath it. Pastiche, parody, continuation, transposition — all are operations performed on a text that already exists. The reader who knows the under-text reads twice.

This is the structure that organizes contemporary self-presentation. The performance does not happen under a gaze that watches for deviation from a norm. It happens on top of a script that has been written and rewritten across many seasons, many accounts, many cycles of capital. The performer is not corrected by the watcher. The performer is cited by the format. And because the capital generated by the performance is uncapped in Han's sense, the citation is endless.

Reality television as the first draft

Serialized reality programming — Big Brother, Survivor, The Real World, the long line of dating formats that followed — produced the first widely shared archive of this kind. By the third or fourth season of any of these shows, contestants were no longer entering a documentary apparatus. They were entering a literary one. They knew what a villain edit looked like because they had seen it. They knew what a showmance was because the term had been invented by previous casts and refined by editors. They knew which confessional postures aged well and which became compilations on YouTube.

What appears at first to be sincere conduct under surveillance is, more accurately, a writing-over of prior performances. The contestant is not unaware of being watched. The contestant is reading the previous seasons while performing, and the audience is reading the previous seasons while watching. The format thickens with each cycle, because every new season inherits and partly cancels the one before it. This is Genette, not Foucault. The disturbance is not that the self has nowhere to hide. The disturbance is that the self has been pre-empted by its own genre.

The interesting consequence is that the conventional anxiety about authenticity dissolves. Authenticity was the panoptic problem — the worry that being watched would deform the inner subject. In a palimpsestic structure there is no inner subject being deformed in real time, because the performance is being read off a script that was already there. What gets produced instead is a separation. The performer and the performed gradually decant. They were never identical, and the longer the format runs, the more the gap is acknowledged by everyone involved, contestants and viewers alike.

Instagram as the classical case

Instagram, between roughly 2012 and 2018, generalized this structure for the rest of us. The conventions arrived first through a vanguard — fashion bloggers, early lifestyle accounts, the small set of users who established what a flat-lay, a golden-hour portrait, an engagement carousel were supposed to look like. Then mass adoption did its work. Within a few years, the grammar had become so internalized that ordinary users were producing engagement photos that cited engagement photos that cited engagement photos. The under-text grew thicker every month.

Millennial perfectionism — the kitchen counter shot, the meticulously composed coffee, the Greek island in soft light — is the visible residue of this layering. It looked at the time like an ideology of self-improvement, and was often diagnosed as such. It is more accurate to call it a writing practice. Each post was a small act of pastiche, performed against a corpus that everyone could see. The platform did not surveil the user into self-correction. It supplied the prior text against which the user's post would be read, and supplied also the metric — likes, follows, saves — by which the writing-over could be assessed and capitalized.

This is where Han's argument becomes load-bearing. The Instagram subject is not disciplined. The Instagram subject is enterprising. There is no point at which the account has accumulated enough — no compliance ceiling beyond which the work stops. The capital generated by the performance is symbolic before it is monetary, but it is convertible, and conversion is the point. The vanguard becomes professional, the professional becomes monetized, the monetized becomes the template, and the template is what the next user writes against. The cult of the billionaire creator is not an aberration of this logic. It is its asymptote — the figure who has most fully decanted the residual self into the corporate persona is venerated, because the venerated form of life under self-corporation is the one that has scaled.

TikTok as the hyper-state

TikTok compressed the cycle to the point where the script writes faster than the performer can read it. A trend now lives for days. The sound is the citation, the gesture is the citation, the framing is the citation. Performance is no longer composed against a stable archive — it is fitted into a moving template that the algorithm distributes at the rate of neuro-stimulation. The vanguard-to-mass cycle that took Instagram four years now takes a weekend.

Inside this compression, performativity tightens rather than loosens. There is less room for the performer to inflect the script, because the script's economic value depends on its replicability. To deviate is to lose distribution. The under-text is no longer something the performer reads before composing; it is something the performer is fed in real time, and the performance is judged by how cleanly it overlays the template. The corporation of the self has, on TikTok, fully internalized its production line.

The encompassing mechanism, across all three formats, is the one you see clearly only from a distance. A vanguard establishes a form. Mass media appropriates it. Capital consolidates around the appropriated form. The form thickens into a script, the script displaces the performer who originated it, and the performer who arrives later is left to overlay an increasingly tight template in pursuit of an increasingly fragmented attention. The palimpsest is the document of this process. What it eats is not authenticity in the abstract — that was always a confused notion — but the residual self, the part that did not need to be composed for circulation. That part recedes because the pursuit of the capital these performances generate is, by Han's diagnosis, structurally without limit.

What it has actually become

danah boyd has recently argued that the term social media should be retired and replaced with parasocial media. Her observation is that posting has waned and scrolling has won, that ordinary users now consume strategically produced content from creators they will never meet, and that the relationship the platform mediates is no longer reciprocal. It is the one-sided emotional attachment that mass media first produced around television personalities — extended to a far larger cast, distributed at far higher frequency, but structurally the same.

Read through the essay so far, the diagnosis sharpens. The model was never original. It is television, performed on social media, with celebrities built through the palimpsest rather than through the studio system. The script that thickens across reality TV seasons, across Instagram years, across TikTok weekends is precisely what produces the parasocial relation: a persona that has been decanted from the person, written against an archive of prior personas, optimized for circulation rather than for encounter. The viewer's relationship is to the over-text, not to the writer. The writer is somewhere else, increasingly difficult to locate even by themselves.

This is why the conventional critique of social media — that it produces inauthentic selves under the pressure of the gaze — kept missing the target. The gaze was never the disciplining force. The script was. The capital that the script generated was uncapped, the self-corporation that pursued it had no ceiling at which to stop, and the parasociality that boyd now names is the consumption-side residue of a production-side logic that has been operating, more or less openly, for two decades.

The mechanized palimpsest

This is where the AI turn becomes inevitable, and brief. Generative models are the palimpsest as infrastructure. The training corpus is the under-text — every prior post, every prior caption, every prior gesture, ingested and made statistically available. The prompt is the over-writing. What the model produces is a fluent citation of a corpus the user did not need to read. The decanting that took Instagram a decade to perform, and that TikTok accelerated to a week, is now offered as a service. The persona arrives pre-composed. The self that remains — whatever has not been ingested, whatever resists the prompt — is what the next decade of design and strategy will have to learn to recognize, because it is the only material the machines do not already have.

References: boyd, danah. 2026. "Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media." Social Media + Society 12 (2). — Foucault, Michel. 1975. Surveiller et punir. Paris: Gallimard. — Genette, Gérard. 1982. Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré. Paris: Seuil. — Han, Byung-Chul. 2010. Müdigkeitsgesellschaft. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz. — Han, Byung-Chul. 2014. Psychopolitik. Frankfurt: S. Fischer.