AHMAD MAKIA         🛒   📖   🔭   📺   📚    HYPERHOUSE



THE LITERARY CONFESSIONAL: LARPING AND BECOMING 





INTRO


ahmad
makia
I don’t actually know many softboys personally, but I spot them everywhere. Birkenstocks, line-art tattoos, veins on muscled arms, pushing a stroller. I don’t believe these guys are reading Audre Lorde or sitting with their privilege, but there is something about the softboy aesthetic and its complete, staged absolution from the threat of traditional manhood that makes it fascinating to watch. Holistic living, queer-adjacent posturing: there is perversity in pursuing wisdom, introspection, and inner complication, as a personal branding strategy.


This iteration and play on the ‘performative reading’ phenomenon is straightforward: how does a contemporary publishing practice weaponize media trends that generate erotic capital around books and reading? The result is a series of ‘faux’ book jackets that hype up the marginal, the radical, and the dispossessed in West Asian history, treating their suffering as luxury accessories for a generation of alpha-softboys. A different kind of streetwear. The trajectory runs from Enheduanna, the Sumerian high priestess, through female fighter martyrdom via the PKK and Mia Khalifa sexual positivism to the Queen Boat raid in Cairo. On the back covers: a mock starter-pack guide on how to performatively “soften” your own manhood for social clout.
Hyperhouse’s
mock book jackets
performed by Amir Hazim

Alongside the covers, Hadi Afif was invited to write an essay responding to these online subcultures and how they construct contemporary male identity across the region. His text deconstructs a precise modern archetype: the man who navigates late capitalism through an accumulation of curated accessories, intellectual posturing, and book fetishism—all tempered by a healthy, media-sanctioned dose of performative self-awareness. Ultimately, we catch the man trapped in his own theatrical pursuit of pose and fashion, exposing how the entire project of ‘knowledge’ is a stage for handsome men's soliloquies.

To ground the visual language, we invited the best softboy we know, Amir Hazim, to show up as he normally does, decked out in gear and accessories, and pose with the mock book jackets. The work as a whole wanted to capture the hyper-internettified performative reader, but cross-breed him with an evolutionary ancestor: the rancher-type West Asian man, anchored in pan-Arab heritage, heavy stubble, animal hides, and benevolent dominance. The kind of guy who insists he has a “metaphysical side,” yet snaps at his girl: “You think I’m a fucking white guy? When I tell you to pick up the phone, you better fucking pick up the phone.” The guy who unironically uses terms like الجنس اللطيف, the ‘gentler sex’, and believes he belongs to an elite, top-heavy gene pool.


These geolocated, fabricated covers are built for you. They are an invitation for drifting, because there’s no better companion for an aging heart than a book.
 

     




     






THE LITERARY CONFESSIONAL:
LARPING AND BECOMING



by Hadi Afif

for Hyperhouse
self-published
10/2026




The internet’s mass obsession with pointing out performativity is the latest manifestation of an increasingly self-aware, policing internet culture. For all the anxiety about Gen Z being more conservative than millennials, and the broader tendency to pathologize and categorize the generation as some great rupture from what came before, caused by late-stage capitalism, internet overexposure, global politics, and/or all of the above – the kids seem to love pointing out the larpers among them. The great break, if there is one, is definitely not that public persona is performance: It is the weaponization of this meta-awareness as a tool for policing the performance in others. There is a moralistic dimension here, a question of performing the “right” (read authentic) way. (01)



We embody the fact that existing online, much like existing IRL, is an intensified performance, and that posting means constructing a version of the self for an imagined audience. We are well past any revelation on that front. In this text, we zoom in on the obsession with identifying that performance in others. The apparent satisfaction of catching someone in the act of trying to appear a certain way. The idea that wanting to be seen reading, listening to the right music, dressing a certain way, or caring about a particular thing somehow exposes the desire itself as insincere.



Performative reading is one of the many versions of this accusation. The discourse around it is weighty, and naturally, the soft boy is one of its primary suspects. Sensitive, well-dressed, emotionally literate and so incredibly cultured, the soft boy’s softness is always treated with warranted suspicion. And the book makes for an almost perfect accessory. A man reading Sally Rooney on the subway is presumed to be advertising his sensitivity to a pool of Paul Mescal-loving women. 




There are hot boys reading on the subway and 1.3 million people on Instagram are eating it up.(02)



Opening a book in public invites an investigation, and the soft boy is one of many characters that the reader can play. But, without ostracizing the soft boy more than he already is and maybe should be, it’s worth pulling the curtain back a bit more.






Reading carries cultural capital. It is an object that can be consumed privately and displayed publicly, proof not only of what you like but of what you might know. Essential Pierre Bourdieu reading ensues here. (03) The book does not need to actually be read to perform its cultural function. It needs to be identifiable as a book, and more specifically as the right kind of book. It becomes a sign of reading detached from the act itself, an image of high literacy and intelligence that can be signaled without requiring the presence of either. One could imagine how this process is intensified and accelerated in the panopticon of the online world.


Over the past three to four years, large language models (LLMs) have made the performance of literacy extraordinarily easy. You no longer necessarily need to have read a book to summarize its argument, pull out its major themes or produce a convincing interpretation of it (ChatGPT-speak detection aside). The outputs historically associated with reading can now, for the first time in human history, be generated in seconds, at extraordinary scale, without the act itself being involved. The rift between literacy and its performance is canyon-sized.


This is not to say that literacy has not historically been privileged and institutionalized, functioning as a gatekeeping mechanism and justification for particular ideologies and ideas of social progress. It carries with it the idea of the rational, autonomous, and free subject. In that sense, literacy as we understand it has always contained a manufactured element, not just at the individual level. What is interesting about the rise of LLMs, however, is that they make the artifice more apparent. We are witnessing a popular culture that looks increasingly literate without necessarily becoming more literate. Undoubtedly, there is the harder question of what kind of reading is actually taking place, and with what depth or attention. That is much harder to discern or measure.


At the moment, across much of the “developed world”, literacy proficiency is stagnating or declining. In the US and UK, measures of reading for pleasure are falling too. (04) On the other hand, the cultural prestige of literacy is moving in the opposite direction. Books are everywhere. The book, or at least its image, as in the image of literacy, is becoming more symbolically valuable as the capacities it represents are degenerating.



 

Reading instead of scrolling. 

Read before bed. 

Read fifty books this year. 

Become articulate to become interesting. 

Improve your decaying attention span. 

Have better conversations. 

Acquire an inner life. 


In a culture increasingly anxious about what the internet has done to the brain, reading is a restorative exercise. It is presented as both evidence that you have escaped your screen(s) and a method for doing so. (05) None of which is to say that reading more and scrolling less is not excellent advice.


Fashion has been particularly quick to cash in on this moment. Miu Miu has run a Literary Club since 2024, staging conversations around writers from Simone de Beauvoir to Fumiko Enchi, alongside its Summer Reads pop-ups handing out feminist literature in cities around the world. (06) Dior has printed the covers of classics like Ulysses and Dracula across its Book Totes; Coach collaborated with Penguin on fully readable miniature classics to hang from bags; Chanel hosts its own literary rendezvous series. (07)


 Publishing, fashion and celebrities have moved into close proximity in this space too. Earlier this year, The Guardian called it the rise of the “hot literati,” pointing to an i-D shoot of the team behind New York literary journal The Whitney Review, billed as the “hot literati reshaping criticism.” (08) Nepo model Kaia Gerber runs her book club Library Science; philanthropist and literacy champion pop star Dua Lipa has Service95, an entire platform built around books, travel, and good taste, and recently opened a library in Porto (09); Miu Miu has made the literary salon part of the brand world. (10) Bookishness is having a very busy cultural moment, and the literary figure is fashionable, stylish, and desirable.(11)


Reading has long been understood as a technology of becoming. In Self Writing, Michel Foucault looks to the hupomnemata of Greco-Roman antiquity, notebooks used to collect quotations, fragments from books, examples, arguments and observations encountered in everyday life. These were not diaries in the modern sense, nor records of what someone had read. They were material to be returned to, meditated upon and eventually incorporated into the self. Quoting Seneca, the first-century stoic Roman philosopher, Foucault describes a practice of selecting something from one's reading to be “thoroughly digested”: “from the many things which I have read, I claim some part for myself.” (12) Seneca argues that what has been absorbed must be digested until it becomes “part of us.”


Excessive reading also has a scattering effect, as moving between one book and another leaves one liable to retain nothing, spreading oneself across different thoughts. The hupomnemata were partly a defense against this. Reading alone does not guarantee transformation, it must be combined with writing, gathering what has been read so that it can be returned to and made one’s own. Foucault takes the image further still, describing writing as transforming what has been read into “tissue and blood.” (13) In this account, the model of the good versus bad reader becomes quite clear.



To write, read, copy, reread and reflect was to gather material from everyday life and gradually make it one's own, enables a shaping of the self. This parallels the fervent renewed pop cultural faith in reading as a route toward becoming more cultured, disciplined, or intelligent. In addition, it is a parallel of the 21st century’s self-improvement industrial complex as a whole: the endless project of becoming better. Say someone buys a particular book because they would like to be the kind of person who reads [insert author here]. Performing the reader becomes a way of reaching for everything that the reader is imagined to be. The depth of the reading or engagement with the book does not matter here, but the book itself does, of course. Sally Rooney produces a different imagined reader than Dostoevsky, or, say, Julia Fox.


In the world of celebrity culture, two examples of this signaling come to mind: In October 2021, shortly after Elon Musk announced that he and Grimes were “semi-separated,” the former pop-art avant-gardist turned AI slop artist was photographed in Los Angeles dressed like a cyberpunk monk reading Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto. The associated headlines loosely stated that Grimes had turned to Marx and communism after splitting from the world’s richest man. This was, she later explained, a stunt. She was not a communist and was in fact still living with Musk. (14)






Two years later, TikTok-star-turned-mega-pop-star Addison Rae offered a counter-performance. In October 2023, she was photographed in Los Angeles buying Britney Spears’s newly released memoir, The Woman in Me, and apparently beginning to read it as she walked down the street. The images were perfect. Pink baby tee, miniskirt, little pink bag, Britney’s face visible on the cover. British Vogue noted at the time that the outfit itself recalled Spears’s early Y2K style. (15) Rae, then still navigating the awkward transformation from TikTok celebrity into serious pop star, was (pictured) reading herself into Spears’s pop lineage, self-foreshadowing the critically rehabilitated pop figure she would become.

Grimes knowingly uses the image of the book to produce an image of herself she does not embody. Rae, on the other hand, manifests her image into existence. The experimental artist parodies the gap between the sign and self, the pop star sets out to close it.

Becoming, here, contains an element of performance. In Technologies of the Self, Foucault traces a movement from Greco-Roman practices of self-formation toward early Christian practices in which examining oneself becomes increasingly bound to disclosing oneself. Through practices such as exomologesis and exagoreusis, the Christian subject was required not only to scrutinize the self but to manifest or verbalize what was found there. (16) Self-examination was no longer entirely an interior affair, but required, and as a result acquired, an audience.



Writing about the digital manifestation of this Christian pastorate, social theorist Diana Stypinska argues that today's “preoccupation with digital performances” only intensifies pastoral logic, albeit via a “secular intensification.” (17) Social media folds onto itself what Foucault calls the “conduct of conducts” (conduire des conduites): self-conduction, being conducted and conducting others become increasingly difficult to separate. (18) We construct ourselves for an audience, adjust to its response, and participate in doing the same to everyone else. The performer and the performativity police inhabit the same house, and the call comes from inside that same house.

This understanding of self-transformation and self-disclosure as a two-way process is remarkably timeless but also contemporary; the influencer/celebrity market has everything to show for it. Reading is accompanied by an apparatus for making reading visible. Instagram is the monastery and confessional apparatus, and your digital footprint is the confession. Users employ these platforms as “confessional self-management tools,” publicly manifesting themselves in search of recognition, substantiation, advice, and improvement. (19)




Ultimately, there is little liberating about the digital confessional. The freedom to endlessly make and remake oneself is also a demand of performance and efficiency. What emerges is Stypinska’s “spectral subject,” whose humanity is increasingly indexed to efficiency, becoming at once “adverts for, and instruments of, the economic command.” (20) The endpoint of this whole process is the capture of everything within a utilitarian sphere, where little is allowed to remain without function. And so, the spectral subject is not a subversive figure of self-invention. The apparent freedom to endlessly make and remake oneself takes place within a system that has already made certain forms of selfhood desirable and consumable. Humility before God is replaced by humility before the market. (21)



Is it cynical to view the renewed interest in reading as a contemporary market trend? It is more generative, perhaps, to read it as a sign of the times. The millennial columnist announcing the death of reading is a sign of the times. So is the pop star starting a book club. So is the hot boy reading on the subway and the million people watching him do it. Reading is apparently dying and everywhere at the same time: declining as a habit, ubiquitous as an image, and prescribed as a solution to the big forces driving this decline. Culture en masse is telling us to read to reclaim our attention, improve ourselves, become more articulate, more interesting, more whole.

The book is our salvation, 
and the posture is 
beautifully devotional. 

Head bowed, book open.
 
Reading and praying at once.




by Hadi Afif 
for Hyperhouse

self-published
09/2026 Hyperhouse dust jackets

performed by Amir Hazim

visuals and desktop publishing
by Lars Oschmann


(01) See Sarah J. Snyder, “Always-on Authenticity: Challenging the BeReal Ideal of ‘Being Real’”, Media, Culture & Society 46, no. 2 (2024), which examines how BeReal turns authenticity into an explicitly policed norm, including by notifying users when posts are late or retaken.

(02) See Hot Dudes Reading, an Instagram account documenting attractive men reading on public transport.

(03)  Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 241–258; see also Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). Bourdieu distinguishes between embodied, objectified and institutionalized cultural capital; books are among his examples of cultural capital in its objectified state.  Distinction develops the broader argument that taste functions socially as a means of differentiation and classification.

(04) OECD, Do Adults Have the Skills They Need to Thrive in a Changing World? (2024), finding adult literacy proficiency stagnant or declining in most participating countries over the preceding decade. See also National Literacy Trust, Children and Young People’s Reading in 2026 (2026), which found that only 20.3% of UK 8–18-year-olds read daily in their free time, despite a modest recovery from a 20-year low in 2025.

(05) See Max Benwell, “‘I read 35 books this year!’: the Guardian readers who cut their phone use in 2024”, The Guardian, January 13, 2025; and “‘I’m back!’: how Guardian readers reclaimed their brains and cut their screen times by 40%”, The Guardian, March 19, 2024. Both are part of the newspaper’s Reclaim Your Brain project.

(06)   Miu Miu launched its Literary Club in Milan in 2024 and returned in 2025 with A Woman’s Education, organized around Simone de Beauvoir and Fumiko Enchi. Its 2024 Summer Reads project distributed works by female authors through branded newsstands and pop-ups across eight cities. See Miu Miu, “Literary Club 2025: A Woman’s Education”; Miu Miu, “Summer Reads”; Madeleine Schulz, “Book Girl Summer: Why Brands Are Leaning into the Literary World”, Vogue Business, June 17, 2024.

(07) Michaela Makusha, “The Rise of the ‘Hot Literati’: How Reading Became Sexy”, The Guardian, July 22, 2026.
(08)  Makusha, “The Rise of the ‘Hot Literati.’”

(09) Service95 opened the Manifesto Library in partnership with Livraria Lello in Porto in June 2026. The permanent collection comprises 100 books and is described as the first physical expression of Dua Lipa’s vision for the Service95 Book Club. See Service95, “Inside The Manifesto Library: Service95 Book Club’s Permanent Collection At Livraria Lello, Porto”, July 10, 2026.

(10) Makusha, “The Rise of the ‘Hot Literati.’”
(11) Idil Galip, “The Writer As Image”, Protein, May 19, 2026. Galip examines the increasing importance of visibility, attractiveness, and personal branding within contemporary literary culture.

(12) Michel Foucault, “Self Writing,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al., Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 1 (New York: The New Press, 1997), 211–12.  

(13) Foucault, “Self Writing,” 213.

(14)  Emily Kirkpatrick, “Grimes Says She’s Not a Communist, Just a Troll, After Being Photographed Reading Karl Marx”, Vanity Fair, October 4, 2021.

(15)  Alex Kessler, “Addison Rae Is Reading Britney’s Memoir Just Like the Rest of Us”, British Vogue, October 26, 2023.  

(16) Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al., Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 1 (New York: The New Press, 1997), 242–48.

(17) Diana Stypinska, “Pastorate Digitalized: Social Media and (De)Subjectification,” Theory, Culture & Society (January 18, 2024), SAGE Journals.

(18) Stypinska, “Pastorate Digitalized.”

(19) Stypinska, “Pastorate Digitalized.”

(20) Stypinska, “Pastorate Digitalized.”

(21) Stypinska, “Pastorate Digitalized.”