Performative mails: when the Frankfurt School DMs a VC
Why 'DM me' is a trap in venture capital when the Frankfurt School goes to Sand Hill Road/Herbert Marcuse’s work on the one-dimensional man, repressive tolerance, & the warm intro industrial complex
You should see all the men sliding into my DMs.
Just kidding, but I have been thinking about DMs lately and what they represent, what they promise, and what they tell us about ourselves. People meet and marry through DMs. People become friends, change careers, intervene for strangers in crisis, serve as private sounding boards for each other’s chaos.
The direct message is the most intimate unit of internet communication in all its possibilities as a purely private play, a one-on-one entity entirely bypassing the pluribus and performance of the public feed.
Taken a step further, really, one could argue if anything, getting a DM is a reaffirmation of your full-blooded humanness. Someone, somewhere, somehow, is saying something specifically for you.
A DM is not just a dopamine hit to your brain, but an unabashed embrace of your existence.
After all, there’s a reason “sliding into DMs” has the connotation it does. It’s transgressive. It’s hopeful. It’s possible power, possible violence, possible sex, and everything else in between in the messy intimacies of human relations professional and personal. The DM is the cold approach in digital form, a message in a Nikita Bier broken bottle communicating the audacity of reaching out to someone who hasn’t invited you, the vulnerability of wanting something from someone who doesn’t know you exist, and god knows what else. No wonder why some people charge others just to receive a DM.
A DM is many things, sometimes answered, sometimes not, but a DM is also what I coin a performative mail because there is also the DM that is not actually sought but solicited for.
You know what I’m talking about. It’s the VC who tweets “DM me”, the editor who posts “always open to pitches!”, the founder who announces “hiring, ping me!” but mysteriously, their words are as empty as the blank space on the screen they’re taking up. So why do that?
You DM. You wait. You watch them post about their morning workout, their hot take on the funding round, their commitment to “founders who don’t look like the typical founder.” They do not respond. They are posting about Peloton or Elon or Elon on a Peloton (someday?). They have still not responded.
What just happened? You were invited. You showed up. Except the door doesn’t exist and you’re not even in an Asterix cartoon dealing with a forgotten circle of hell with l’administration française.
This is about a structure so elegant in its design that you can’t even name what just happened to you. She said her DMs were open. She said to reach out. The door had a welcome mat.
The term for this isn’t that they’re busy or bad timing, but Performative Mails (insert trademark emoji here). A German by the name of Herbert Marcuse who looked like someone’s disappointed grandfather figured out the scam in 1964.
Pay attention, because the next time you’re cornered by some insufferable Bay Area optimizer LARPing as an intellectual at a party name-dropping the Frankfurt School, here’s your fodder.
The warm intro industrial complex
For readers who have heard about VC and wondered what it actually means, here’s how venture capital works, in case the mythology has obscured it. Just to clear the air before we get started, no, VC does not stand for vulture capital though the acronym remains the same.
Venture capital is, at its core, a bet. Whether it be a good bet or not is another discussion. How this works in practice is like thinking about the most aggressive kid you knew selling candy to fundraise through school who hit up literally every damn person they could find in the community and then some. Similarly to children hawking chocolate bars to fundraise for schools, a VC firm pools money from wealthy individuals, pension funds, university endowments, and other institutional investors (called limited partners, or LPs) into a fund. The VC then deploys that money, henceforth subject to a descriptive glow up christening it as capital, into early-stage companies in exchange for equity, hoping that one or two of those bets will return 10000000000000000000000x and cover all the losses from the rest. If not 10000000000000000000000x returns, then 100x returns would suffice too, I guess.
The math of VC as an industry is brutal given that most startups fail, a few break even, and the rare unicorn pays for everything. It kind of reminds you of people who open up their relationships searching for an elusive third party unicorn but end up obliterating everything they had along the way, but for the rare VC or ethically non-monogamous couple, a unicorn does work out. Now, the partners who run the VC fund charge a management fee (often around 2% annually) and take a cut of profits (often around 20% and called “carried interest”). If the fund does well, everyone gets rich. If it doesn’t, the partners still collected their management fees and the LPs eat the loss. If this sounds like someone you would not trust to play Monopoly fair and square, you wouldn’t be wrong, I think.
Famous VC wins include Sequoia’s early bet on Apple and Kleiner Perkins backing Google. These stories form the mythology and the backbone of the proverbial VC corpse that arguably itself carries all these wins and their carried interest forward for multiple decades now - but I digress, because this mythology from many years past obscures how the deal flow actually works still nowadays.
Consider how generically rendered, a protypical VC tweets “always looking for great founders” or a VC hosts “office hours” that actually require you to already know someone who knows them to get a slot (isn’t the whole point of office hours to be open to…nevermind). Consider also how a VC posts about “democratizing access to capital” while their actual deal flow comes from approximately the same group of three people they went to Stanford all stacked on top of each other in a trench coat loitering somewhere along Palo Alto, castles made on Sand Hill, and all along the watchtower of slop lately.
The castles made on Sand Hill, however, gatekeep, and man, they do not want you infringing upon their status quo. The protypical VC set-up is worth flagging for its failures to put money where its mouth is about democratizing this or that in the mirage of meritocracy it prides itself on. Black investors represent about 4% of VCs in the United States. All-female founder teams in Europe received less than 1% of venture capital in 2024. McKinsey’s analysis of the highest-funded startups at exit, white founders raised about $212 million on average. Underrepresented founders? $91 million. Ratio’d, absolutely ratio’d, as one would colloquially say nowadays, because when you benchmark those figures comparatively, that’s 43 cents on the dollar, which is not a gap but instead a gaping wound.
What is presented as an observation to some is an indictment to others.
Del Johnson, himself a VC, put it more bluntly when sharing in a Medium post that “The tech community prides itself on being a meritocracy, but warm introduction requirements are a shockingly anti-meritocratic practice.” Eleanor Kaye of the Newton Venture Program calls it “knowledge gatekeeping, holding information and power close to their chests.”
So what’s the link between the mirage of meritocracy and performative mails? It’s about performing openness so loudly that the gates become invisible because “DM me” is not an invitation when a VC does it. When the founder who DMed doesn’t get a response, the failure looks like theirs alone for whatever reason imagined, say, for example, they didn’t have the right pitch or they didn’t catch the VC at the right time or they weren’t ready anyway, so on and so forth. But to lend ourselves of some break-up lore, it’s not me and it’s not you, it’s the VC.
The VC was never hiding the gatekeeping. The VC never had to say no to begin with. The VC system just has to keep saying yes in ways that don’t mean anything. The performative portion of it is like a public acknowledgement of the private disbarment because it’s not like the VC ecosystem could go around talking openly about how their structural exclusion gets personalized, right? Instead, VCs just do the kabuki theater of their performative mail or in some cases publicly accuse innocent people of being shooters on university campuses.
The one-dimensional man and how language dies
Enter stage left Herbert Marcuse, our old friend, a part of the Frankfurt School who has come to meet us again from the same intellectual universe of critical theory so richly and oft referenced by those who do and do not understand what they are actually talking about. One tries to imagine Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer as a Marvel team assembly of theories on society and, god, they would have recoiled at the comparison on so many levels, even absurdist examples have their limits and value in demonstration.
Marcuse became this strange countercultural figure in the sixties because he was the one who engaged directly with student movements, showed up at protests, and wrote in a way that activists could actually use. The New Left loved him because he gave them theory that explained their rage. He looked like someone’s disappointed grandfather and wrote things that made the establishment deeply uncomfortable because he kept pointing out that their comfort was everyone else’s cage.
In his book One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse argued that advanced industrial society controls people not through obvious repression but through something more insidious - the absorption of revolutionary language until it means nothing at all.
What better place to see this in action than by looking at the bio of the average VC who ghosted you?
“Democratizing access to capital.” “Disrupting hierarchy.” “Building community.”
These are political words. They’re words about power. They’re also empty words because the system has eaten them.
Marcuse’s insight was that modern society creates what he called “one-dimensional” existence, a world where critique gets absorbed into the system it critiques, where radical ideas get turned into marketing copy, where the language of liberation becomes a containment strategy. You can say anything you want. You can criticize anything you want. And nothing changes, because your criticism has already been priced in, turned into a tagline, made safe, sanitized, and accepted.
The one-dimensional society doesn’t control through deprivation. It controls through satisfaction. It creates needs and then fulfills them. You’re not oppressed if you’re comfortable, right? Except it’s so obvious, the comfort itself is manufactured to keep you docile. You’re not really satisfied, but the emptiness and hollowing out of agency is the point even in the paradox of abundant choice. Hear me out - have you ever stood paralyzed at the Starbucks menu, overwhelmed by the illusion of choice in what is functionally a four-item selection? There you go. I am using tropes and cliches (be glad I did not resort to hamburger and fries on the menu) to drive the point home because the sheer amount of possibilities themselves in the illusion of choice are dizzying, and that’s why you don’t bite the hand that feeds you
Repressive tolerance, or the open door is the trap
Marcuse refused to believe that comfort and freedom meant the same thing. In his essay “Repressive Tolerance,” he coined a concept that explains your empty inbox and the role of performative mails perfectly.
The idea is simple - in a system of unequal power, “tolerance” is a weaponized tool used to be anything but neutral.
In practice, repressive tolerance looks like considering how when the system tolerates all voices, when the VC invites all DMs, it creates the illusion of a free marketplace of access. This illusion itself neutralizes actual opposition to the performative mails and exclusionary gatekeeping VCs are known for because you can’t claim you’re being silenced or excluded if the “door is open.”
To ground this a bit more concretely, consider the converse. If a gate is locked and has a “Members Only, Sucks For You, Non-Stanford Scum” sign, you obviously know you’re an outsider. You might get angry. You could go build your own club. That closed gate and its exclusion are at minimum honest compared to the performative mails touting an open door that doesn’t exist.
You’re told to DM, to write, but if the gate is wide open, and the sign says “Community,” and you walk through only to find yourself in an empty room while the real party happens behind soundproof glass where you’re never heard or privy to lukewarm soggy fried shrimp and creamy orange sauce? Well, you don’t (likely) get angry at the system then, but instead get angry at yourself.
Maybe my pitch wasn’t good enough. Maybe I didn’t use the right emoji. Maybe I’m just not “founder material.” Maybe there’s not enough slop in my product offering. Maybe I didn’t go to the right Burning Man caravan.
This systemic judo move in using your own illusion is the genius of repressive tolerance par excellence. Marcuse clocked how it transforms structural exclusion and the internalization of such exclusion becomes more often than not a narrative of personal failure from all accounts of it I’ve encountered, read about, and have seen discussed. In repressive tolerance, the performative mail thrives because the supposedly “Open DM” mentality absorbs your demand for access without ever having to grant it. It allows the gatekeepers to hoard social capital while LARPing as egalitarians.
Translating Marcuse to the structural mechanisms of how VCs operate, when the VC says “DM me,” she’s not lying. Instead, she’s doing something much more sophisticated. She’s creating a structure that feels open, performs openness, and therefore makes it impossible for you to name the exclusion because of this performative amenability to the possibility. You can’t say “I’m being excluded” because look, she said to reach out. She said anyone could apply. The sign is right there. She said ping her. DM her. Duh! It’s so obvious.
Tough luck to you that there is no way to DM this person on the platform because they’ve changed their settings, that there is no public contact info for them, and that what exactly did they mean with “ping me” to begin with anyways?
The media exception that proves the rule
I also want to flag a quick note on media and journalism, because it operates on the same logic.
Major media figures tweet “pitch me!” Their inboxes are, technically, open. Their submission forms exist. Their editorial guidelines are public. It all looks very accessible if you don’t think about it too hard. All the same tomfoolery from earlier applies here.
Then you try to actually pitch them, and you realize: the pitches that get through are from people who already know them. The “open” submission process exists alongside a parallel track of warm introductions, referrals from other journalists, and DMs from people with big enough platforms that ignoring them would be professionally costly.
The point, again and again, is the structure. Perform openness loudly enough and you never have to say no. The rejection is invisible. You’re only aware of the network if you’re already in it. That’s just how information ecosystems work. The accessibility is real to the extent you’re already inside, and as such also illusory.
Bring back Dutch directness, honest rejection, or just acknowledging you’re a gatekeeper
I’m going to say something controversial: I miss the OG gatekeepers of doom and directness (aka the Dutch) whenever it comes to tough moments of communications needing clarity.
Genuinely, I miss the days when Dutch directness cut to the point and to the bone when I lived in the Netherlands. You knew exactly what and when and where and why something wasn’t happening. Gatekeepers didn’t LARP as being part of some collective grander than the networks they actually respond to DMs for. None of this kabuki theater exists. Is it less sophisticated? Well, who cares, the Dutch look like all those gorgeous 90s black and white Calvin Klein ads, and Dutch VC deal flow isn’t the point of this piece. The point is that at least the Dutch have the decency to be direct, unlike the Performative Mails ecosystem, which is worse because it at best coerces you and at worst tricks you into auditioning for a role that doesn’t exist. It demands your labor, your perfectly crafted DM, your vulnerable pitch, your hope, and gives you nothing in return. Not even the dignity of a “no.”
The receipts of this deception and its indignity are embarrassing for the ecosystem too, if you think about how much it prides itself on such a digression and delusion from the democracy it claims. Despite a decade of “Open DMs” and “Office Hours” and “Democratization,” survey data shows most VC deal flow is still network-mediated via professional networks, referrals from other investors, and portfolio company intros. Cold inbound leads, like from a performative mail soliciting DMs, are just a silver of this.
I said it earlier and I’ll say it again - the meritocracy is a network in a trench coat propped up by three kids who attended Stanford but never made it to the Forbes 30 under 30 list (and accordingly, never wasted taxpayer money in a federal trial, I guess. I try to be fair in my takes and writing. I really do. Let’s give them that.)
Performative mails means the door is supposedly open, but the numbers indicate it’s still closed.