I don't think people suddenly started LARPing.
I think the internet just made it impossible to pretend they weren't.
You open Twitter and there is a 22-year-old with a marble statue PFP posting like a retired hedge fund manager. Instagram is full of people whose entire life appears to happen inside beige hotel rooms. TikTok has teenagers speaking with the confidence of people who have spent 40 years studying geopolitics. LinkedIn is basically corporate roleplay with headshots.
Then there are the anonymous accounts.
Those make the whole thing easier to see because nobody is even pretending the profile is the complete person anymore.
The username is a character. The PFP is a character. The bio is a character. The way the account types is part of it.
Sometimes the character is basically the person with the boring parts edited out.
Sometimes it is an exaggerated version.
Sometimes it is complete bullshit.
Most of the internet lives somewhere in the middle.
The old internet already worked like this
People used to log onto forums with names like xXShadowSniperXx and nobody needed a philosophical explanation for it.
You picked a name.
You picked an avatar.
You became known for something.
Maybe you were the guy who knew everything about overclocking Pentium processors. Maybe you were the person who always posted leaked skate videos. Maybe you were a complete asshole in one forum and incredibly helpful in another.
Nobody expected your screen name to match your driver's licence.
Then social media spent about fifteen years pushing the opposite idea.
Real name. Real photo. Real school. Real employer. Real family. Real vacation. Real breakfast.
Your profile was supposed to be you.
Except it never actually was.
People were still editing.
They just started editing themselves while using their real names.
The guy posting gym photos did not post the forty minutes he spent lying on the couch afterward.
The entrepreneur posted the Stripe notification, not the six failed projects before it.
The couple posted the vacation photo, not the argument in the airport.
That is still a character.
It is just a character with government identification attached.
Now the character is obvious again
The internet feels like it is drifting back toward usernames, aliases, themed accounts, avatars and people separating their online identity from their normal life.
Crypto helped.
Meme pages helped.
Gaming never stopped doing it.
Discord and Telegram normalized it.
Now AI has poured gasoline on the entire thing because one person can suddenly produce enough images, writing, graphics, voices and video to make a tiny fictional universe look weirdly complete.
A few years ago, building a convincing online character required either talent, money, or an unhealthy amount of free time.
Now you can create the name, visual identity, profile picture, fake magazine cover, landing page, twenty posts and a mildly concerning amount of lore before lunch.
That doesn't mean the character is good.
Most of them are terrible.
But the friction disappeared.
Everyone has also figured out that normal people are hard to remember
This is probably the bigger reason.
Platforms reward recognizable things.
Not necessarily good things. Recognizable things.
The finance guy.
The anonymous crypto whale.
The weird design account.
The productivity psychopath who wakes up at 4:17 every morning.
The guy who only posts screenshots with no explanation.
The girl who lives in a perfectly white apartment and somehow owns twelve identical grey sweaters.
You understand the character quickly.
That matters when somebody sees you for three seconds between a meme, an ad, a war video and somebody arguing about seed oils.
A normal person contains too much information.
A character is compressed.
You take twenty parts of yourself and turn the volume up on four.
That is basically what a good internet persona is.
AI didn't invent this. It just removed the excuse.
There is a lot of panic about AI making the internet fake.
Fair.
It absolutely makes fake things cheaper.
But the internet was already full of performance.
AI just makes the machinery more visible.
A person can now run five accounts with different aesthetics. A founder can make their tiny project look like it has an entire creative department. An anonymous account can build a consistent visual world without ever showing a face.
Some of that will become scams.
Some of it will become art.
Most of it will probably become mediocre content nobody remembers.
The interesting part is that identity itself is becoming more editable.
You no longer need to accept whatever combination of name, face, hometown, job title and social circle you happened to start with as your only usable internet identity.
You can make another one.
People always could.
They are just doing it more deliberately now.
And once you notice that, a lot of the internet starts looking less like profiles and more like costumes.
Not necessarily fake costumes.
Just costumes people forgot they were wearing.