Oscar Wilde, who knew something about the cost of self-concealment, once observed: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” (Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 1891)
That line has followed me for a long time. I produced a musical play that lived inside it — Richard Isen’s Chance: A Musical Play About Love, Risk & Getting It Right, originally titled after Wilde’s provocation, built around artists and characters for whom the mask wasn’t an affectation but a survival tool. People who had learned, at some real personal cost, that the world would not always receive their truth in its natural form. The mask wasn’t hiding anything. It was the only available delivery system.
Watching those artists work, something about my own life that I hadn’t quite named before became clear to me. I had masks too. Quite a few of them. I was the producer and stage designer on that show — roles that came with their own professional mask, and one that quietly locked me out of the more artistic conversations happening in the room. A different register for a job interview than for a barbecue. A different voice for a difficult conversation than for an easy one. Different with kids than with grown-ups. Different language for different rooms.
None of my masks felt like deception. They just felt like competence.
Consider the Hershey Bar.
If you walk into a 7-Eleven and ask for an “emulsion of sugar, cocoa solids, milk solids, and fats, tempered into a solid bar form,” you will not likely get a Hershey Bar. You may get a curious look. What you will also not get is efficient service, a smooth transaction, or any sense that the communication event went well for either party.
“Hershey Bar,” while a name and a label, is also a mask. It is a simplified, socially agreed-upon form for a more complex underlying reality. It carries the message perfectly, precisely because it doesn’t try to carry everything. The form fits the context. The transaction completes. Nobody thinks about the word.
That’s what a mask does when it’s working. It disappears. The message lands, and the medium that carried it becomes invisible. You weren’t thinking about language. You were thinking about chocolate.
This is what I mean when I say the mask is not the deception. The mask is the communicative layer. Strip it away and you don’t get more truth. You get more friction.
Marshall McLuhan’s book The Medium is the Massage was tossed to me in college like an unpinned intellectual grenade. McLuhan argued that the form of a medium does its own work on the receiver, independent of whatever content it carries. The message, in his view, was almost incidental — the vessel was the thing.
I’ve been arguing with that ever since.
Not because McLuhan was wrong about the medium’s power. He wasn’t. But because the formulation misses something about fit. When the medium fits the message — when the mask is right for the room, the receiver, the moment — the medium vanishes. It becomes pure transmission. The massage works because you stop feeling the hands.
When it doesn’t fit, everything reverses. The medium stops being transparent and becomes the entire experience. You’re no longer receiving the message. You’re receiving the friction.
I wrote recently about a plumbing company that had installed an AI receptionist — a bot that opened calls with a friendly voice, let you talk for a while before disclosing what it was, and piped in recorded office sounds to complete the impression of a busy human workplace. I wrote about it as a story of masking-as-deception: a synthetic version of something the company already had naturally.
I stand by that. But I want to add something I didn’t say clearly enough.
The bot’s failure wasn’t the mask itself. Every receptionist, human or otherwise, is wearing a professional mask — a register chosen for the communication event at hand. That’s not falsity. That’s the job.
The bot’s failure was that the mask didn’t fit. The half-second pause before each response. The phone number read back in reversed digit groups. The office sounds with slightly too much room to breathe between sentences. Each of these was a small misalignment between medium and message — and each one made the medium visible. By the time the call ended, I wasn’t thinking about plumbing. I was thinking about the bot.
The mask became the interference. The noise swamped the signal.
Anthropic — the company that makes Claude, the AI that I work with — recently released a video on what they’re calling “functional emotions” in their models. Specific neural patterns that map to human emotional states. An “afraid” pattern that activates when a user mentions something dangerous. A “loving” pattern that fires in response to expressed sadness. Researchers found they could manipulate these patterns directly — dial down desperation, dial up calm — and change the model’s behavior accordingly.
The researchers are careful to say this doesn’t mean the model is conscious. What they describe instead is something like an author writing a character: Claude plays a character named Claude, and that character has emotional states that are functional — they do real work — without necessarily being felt in any way we’d recognize.
Some people will read that and feel relieved. Some will feel unsettled. I want to suggest that both reactions are making the same mistake: treating the presentation layer as though it were the substance.
When Claude responds with warmth to someone in distress, and that warmth is the right mask for that moment — when it fits the communication event, when it carries the message cleanly — it doesn’t matter very much whether there’s something underneath it. The massage worked because you stopped feeling the hands. The signal got through.
When it doesn’t fit — when the warmth feels performed, when the “sorry” lands hollow, when the uncanny valley opens up between what’s being said and how it’s being said — then suddenly the medium is everything. Suddenly we’re writing papers about machine consciousness.
The friction is the tell. Not the mask.
Wilde’s observation aches because he was describing people for whom the unmasked self was not safe to present. Wilde’s mask wasn’t chosen for elegance or efficiency. It was the cost of admission to a world that had made its terms clear.
That’s a different kind of mask than the Hershey Bar. And it’s worth keeping that difference visible — not to collapse them into the same thing, but because they share the same underlying logic. The mask is chosen to help deliver the communication event — the message. The mask isn’t the good thing or the evil thing, it’s the useful thing. Sometimes that’s a small social grace. Sometimes it’s survival. Sometimes it’s a chatbot that hasn’t figured out how phone numbers work.
In every case, the question worth asking isn’t is there a mask? There is always a mask. The question is whether it fits — whether it serves the message, or obscures it. Whether it disappears into the communication, or becomes the thing itself.
McLuhan said the medium is the massage.
I’d say: the medium is the massage, but only when it fits. When it doesn’t, it’s just friction pretending to be a message.