Life Is Performance Art

 It is not possible to understand the 21st century without seeing the overwhelming influence of "performance art".

To be sure, this insight is not new:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players

- Shakespear

But in the time of Shakespeare, no ordinary person could acquire a million "fans" by offering online makeup advice. Nobody could step into a public shouting match while sitting with a laptop at the kitchen table.

We've always had opinions, but these days we have the feel the compulsion, even the obligation, to express our ideas through public performance.

My father's decision to join the Canadian Army and go off to war was almost casual. It was a job and a way to see the world. He didn't know much about world affairs, let alone the noble cause behind the war. There was little of the passion that millions of us seem to feel when we take to the street to publicly "demonstrate" -- feeling that, by doing this, we influence world affairs.

There was a time, not so long ago when we expressed our political opinions by casually voting from time to time.

Now, when an election doesn't follow the plot we have mistaken from reality, we feel the need to step onto a real-world stage: to commit real-world criminal acts simply to act out our need to participate in the political process.

Sometimes the real-world stakes are high. Historic. Life and death. What do we do? We "demonstrate".

We have lost the insight that all this performance is merely "signaling". In the world of Twitter and Facebook, we substitute participation in public shouting matches for actual, hand-on, real-world action to solve the problems we supposedly care about. That would eat into our Netflix time.

Increasingly, we substitute performance for meaningful action. 

If you don't understand this, the "news" will make no sense.  Looking for the logic behind Q-Anon is like looking for physics in a Superman comic.

Books are still be written about "influence" - the idea that we can somehow change other people in ways that have real-world impact. But if we read these books with a 21st-century eye, we see that these techniques tend to rely more on performance than persuasion. We don't expect to persuade through truth and logic, but rather through "smoke and mirrors".