The performance of consumption *is* the consumption.

That's what Less Than Zero understood before anyone had language for it — Clay doesn't want the Ferrari or the cocaine or even the sex, but rather the version of himself that wants these things, and he knows he can only conjure that version by narrating it.

When he describes a party, he's not describing what happened — he's describing how to describe what happened so that the description becomes the only real part. The mechanics are specific: Clay moves through scenes with a camera's passivity, recording without preference, because a detail about Trent's apartment gets the same observational weight as a detail about his own emotional state.

For Clay they're the same thing — surfaces that can be arranged into a story — which means this isn't depression masquerading as detachment. It's a different problem entirely. Clay has internalized the idea that experience only becomes real when it's transmissible, so a drug high that can't be narrated collapses into nothing. Ellis makes this the novel's architecture: not that the characters are empty, but that emptiness *is* the condition of trying to experience yourself through someone else's future reception of your experience.

The real prediction isn't about social media's existence — it's that platforms would eventually make this loop of desire, documentation, audience, and validation so tight and so instant that the gap between wanting something and wanting to have wanted it would close completely, leaving us unable to know which one we were doing anymore.