Larpers, scammers and spoofers: how the language of pretence has evolved

All the world’s a stage, and all the people merely larpers. It’s not how the Shakespeare line ends, but a 2026 take might finish it that way.

Larping is a new entry in our expanding lexicon of pretence. I like it, because it’s a jaunty, harmless-sounding verb. A day with a spot of larping is surely a fun day. You might lightly accuse someone of larping without falling out with them, or label yourself a larper in a moment of self-mockery. A Generation Alpha informant tells me they would call a friend a larper if they posted an image of themselves outside a Chanel or Gucci store to imply they had shopped there when they had done no such thing. Parents of teenagers are at high risk of being dubbed larpers. Last week a friend and her husband went to an art exhibition where the prices seemed tantalisingly affordable. Maybe they could think about a modest purchase for once? This, to their son, was classic larper behaviour. His parents were larping as “art people”.

The word “larping” derives from the acronym for Live Action Role Playing, a social activity involving simulated combat with foam weapons. The term spread in the late 2010s, when it lurched into a pejorative expression for the grim posturing of extremely online people who adopted “edgelord” personas for clout, attention and, in some cases, money. When larping entered its TikTok era, it evolved again, and softened. Its harshness varies with usage, but to my ears, it is neither as cold as “performative”, nor as withering as one of its immediate predecessors: “poser” (or poseur, if you’re fancy).

Larping has instead circled back into something you might do intentionally and transparently. It’s a cousin of two words well known to my people (journalists): bluffing and blagging. When younger generations talk about larping, they often appear to do so with a jokey acceptance that acting outside of your authentic self – whoever that might be – is part of the job description for being human. This is my optimistic take. Young people have long been keen auditors of how “real” others are being, but it would be nice to think the next generation is a little more relaxed and sophisticated about it than my own.

In the 1990s of my Generation X youth, authenticity was a prized virtue within the music subcultures that defined the first half of the decade. This wasn’t new, but it was overt, and it took a disturbingly literal form in 1991 when, after a backstage conversation with a sceptical NME journalist, Richey Edwards from the Manic Street Preachers carved the words “4 Real” into his own arm. The result of his self-harm, which required hospital treatment and stitches, was photographed and the incident was much mythologised after Edwards disappeared in 1995.

Lyrics lamented the spectre of fans who didn’t have the right bona fides. On the Nirvana song In Bloom, Kurt Cobain dissed a man who “likes all our pretty songs” and “likes to sing along” but “knows not what it means” – we might now allege that such a person was “cosplaying” as a grunge fan.

But songwriters were seeing artificiality and superficiality everywhere. On Fake Plastic Trees, Thom Yorke of Radiohead sang of a “cracked polystyrene man” who “used to do surgery for girls in the Eighties”. By the end, he is wearily addressing his own “fake plastic love” and darkly contemplating the idea of being whoever they want him to be.

“What drives you on can drive you mad/A million lies to sell yourself is all you ever had,” sang Shirley Manson on Stupid Girl. This top-five UK hit for Garbage in 1996 seems to anticipate the rise of influencer culture by a solid two decades.

Beyond this reinforcement of inauthenticity as a vice to be called out, “spoofers” and “fakers” were people to avoid. Spoofers could be armchair experts, fantasists, or both. Fakers were insincere types whose niceness had either been proven by their actions to be false or was simply considered suspect, probably without cause. The conspicuous effort of “try-hards” was eye-roll worthy and tantamount to duplicity. We didn’t know the word “fabulist” then, but if we did, the bar for it would have been set low.

Some insults for spoofery wane. I have used ‘pseudo’ as a prefix to sigh at things I’ve considered pseudo-egalitarian, pseudo-philosophical or pseudo-feminist, but never in my life have I uttered or (until now) written the noun “pseud”. That’s an older person’s word. A pseud is really a 1960s beast. It survives in Pseuds Corner, the section of satirical magazine Private Eye dedicated to the pretentious and pseudo-intellectual. (A recent edition includes the assertion that private karaoke booths are “the death of socialism”.)

Before the pseud, we had the phoney, or “phony” in JD Salinger’s American English. The disparagement of choice for Holden Caulfield, the 16-year-old narrator of his novel The Catcher in the Rye, a phony can be disingenuous or “show-offy”, another word in Holden’s vocabulary of cynicism. Although, troublingly to him, they might not know it, people in his “crumby”, “lousy” world can be phony, and so too can their modes of communication: handshakes, letters, words, voices, smiles and tears are all bestowed with the tag.

The paranoia that laces the novel is a form of projection. Holden hates that he is a “terrific liar” who will say he is going to the opera when he’s on his way to the store to buy a magazine. He professes to despise actors, but he’s an exhibitionist who imitates “those guys in the movies” by tap-dancing. He pretends to be older to procure a drink in a New York lounge, where he gives a fake name.

The enduring resonance of this classic, published 75 years ago, lies in the fact that this is more than just wryly expressed angst. Beneath Holden’s misanthropic propensity to doubt and mistrust is an isolated, frightened boy who is depressed to the point of suicidal ideation.

The evolution and proliferation of another word, meanwhile, suggests that a preoccupation with realness is no longer the preserve of the young, if it ever was. Teenagers know and use the term “performative”, but they can’t be blamed for this one. As an adjective deployed in the ancient cause of blasting others for their insincerity, performative has exploded in recent years thanks to its popularity with a very particular demographic: adults who enjoy arguing online.

“Performative”, coined in 1955 by philosopher JL Austin, appeared only six times in The Irish Times before the year 2000. The first explanation in this newspaper of its original meaning appears in June 1999, in a syndicated comment article attributed to Viktor Orbán. Yes, that one. Orbán, then in his first term as prime minister of Hungary, noted that some verbs have a performative function: “By uttering the verb we actually perform an act: we christen a ship, we pronounce a couple man and wife.” The article finishes, as every article should, by quoting Emily Dickinson.

Just as a capacity to deceive others confers an advantage, so too does the ability to detect fakery in all its guises

Did a young Orbán have a penchant for the 19th century American poet? Perhaps he, or his ghostwriter, was being performative in the more modern sense? As the sociologist Daniel Hirschman has discussed, performative is now a contranym, or a word with two directly opposed meanings. It can refer to both Austin’s “speech acts” – the bringing of something into being – and behaviour deemed just for show.

“Performative” in The Irish Times was largely restricted to arts criticism until 2017. This is when the newer, negative meaning first popped up on these pages, likely due to the influence of Twitter (X), where it had started to regularly appear. Between 2019 and 2021, this newspaper highlighted perceived instances of performative rage, mourning, politicking, coupledom, allyship, victimhood, eccentricity, femininity, sweariness, ignorance and sea-swimming.

It’s a psychological trap to see everything as performative, even if some or much of it is. As a mindset, it speaks to a kind of lingering adolescence. It feels like residue from a solipsistic phase we’re meant to shake off. But in these fractious, intolerant times, powerful figureheads in politics and technology may have a vested interest in perpetuating paranoia and mistrust. In their rhetoric, certain groups in society are redefined as lesser “non-player characters” or “NPCs” (a term used by Elon Musk and OpenAI chief Sam Altman), while the integrity of opponents is denigrated through hyperbole.

A pernicious example of this linguistic inflation occurred last week after Raheem Kassam, a former aide to Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, attacked Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch by branding her a “Nigerian scammer”. Farage, claiming this was not racist, insisted on breaking down the phrase into “two different words”. Kassam had called her Nigerian, he said, because she grew up in Nigeria (she no longer identifies as such), while she was a “scammer” because she had said some things that were untrue.

Some slang can be politically convenient. That the internet’s nastier corners now apply “scammer” liberally, beyond its traditional use in the world of criminal activity, is one more reason why I want to root for larpers. Larper is such a silly word. No one is going to prison for larping. It’s a casual word for an age of casual unreality.

Are we ever going to completely stop weighing up who is being “true” and who isn’t? Someone larping as an evolutionary psychologist will have a clear answer: don’t count on it. Just as a capacity to deceive others confers an advantage, so too does the ability to detect fakery in all its guises.

[ Sarah Moss’s last Irish Times column: ‘Being hated on the internet has begun to tint my life’Opens in new window ]

That this watchfulness can curdle our relationships with other verified humans seems especially tragic now that our online interactions are no longer guaranteed to be with flesh and blood. Some will be with AI agents masquerading as the employees they replaced. Some might be with deepfakes. Confusingly, some might be with humans who double as unreliable “ghosts” and project less empathy than the average bot.

Unease in this era of compare-and-despair scrolling is, therefore, inevitable. Social media and messaging apps help us curate and adapt our identities, but our reliance on digital communication makes those identities harder to prove. It shouldn’t be any surprise if we’re hyper-alert, quick to castigate lifestyle “tourists”, celebrity “fauxmances” and other supposed crimes against authenticity.

The problem with authenticity is that as soon as it becomes an explicit goal, artifice creeps in. It’s a sort of “no-make-up make-up” for the soul.

Still, every now and again we are encouraged to try it, even on social media. Somewhat hilariously, authenticity was one of the “first principles” behind the founding of BeReal, an app that sends its users randomly timed daily notifications giving them two minutes to take a new photograph and upload it, with no filters, no editing tools and little chance to “optimise”.

The app briefly flourished in 2022, but the novelty soon wore off. It turned out we didn’t see the appeal or the point of being “real”. We might not love it when other people play pretend or dare to stray out of their lanes, but we absolutely reserve the right to do this ourselves.