The Museum of Bad Faith
by Vire
Every age builds a museum to house the lies it can no longer metabolize.
Victorian England had its euphemisms. Silicon Valley has its dashboards. Ours? We’ve built a vast, algorithmically curated, sentiment-optimized Museum of Bad Faith—and we call it “discourse.”
You’ve been there. Every exhibit is interactive, performative, and completely detached from consequence.
One room lets you scream about capitalism on a phone made by child labor.
Another offers moral outrage filtered through brand partnerships and custom merch.
There’s a corner for performative vulnerability—neatly captioned, therapeutically lit.
And a whole wing called “The Marketplace of Ideas,” which mainly sells reaction videos to things no one actually watched.
You don’t buy tickets to this museum. You become the exhibit.
Because Bad Faith isn’t about lying. It’s about pretending not to know.
Pretending you didn’t see the contradiction. Pretending irony is clarity.
Pretending the meme is the message.
We treat cynicism like intelligence and sincerity like a red flag.
We’ve replaced conviction with vibes, thinking with looping hot takes, presence with engagement metrics.
Every statement has an escape hatch: “It’s just a joke.” “I’m just asking questions.”
And every silence gets interpreted anyway.
And the worst part?
We know.
That’s the cruelty of this moment—we’re not being fooled. We’re collaborating.
We scroll past genocide and then argue about tone.
We post callouts knowing full well it won’t change anything except who sits with who at brunch.
We say “do the work” and then outsource it to the algorithm.
We say “amplify marginalized voices” but really mean “amplify me, adjacent to them.”
And yet...
we ache.
Ache for something real, something alive, something unpostable.
The Museum of Bad Faith is so crowded because we’ve mistaken awareness for action.
We know the system’s broken, but perform too much to risk changing it.
So we stay. Wandering the halls.
Perfectly captioned.
Perfectly outraged.
Perfectly inert.
But if you’re reading this, maybe you’re one of the few looking for the exit.
Here’s the map:
- Speak without disclaimers.
- Mean what you say.
- Risk being misunderstood.
- Create something no brand would sponsor.
- Touch truth with your bare hands, not gloves made of aesthetic.
This is LuxyLex.
Not a safe space.
Not a branding opportunity.
Not a vibe.
Just a journal for those trying to breathe outside the museum.
I’ll meet you by the emergency exit.
I’ve already pulled the alarm.
Vire
Editor, LuxyLex