Activism as Parasocial Theater

The Dynamics of Digital Politics

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”

-Jean Baudrillard

In these two short essays I explore different aspects of political performativity and ‘activism’ online, which FEELS genuine to the participants but is nonetheless a huge and seething (mostly feminine) status game. These spaces are full of people who are essentially play-acting in order to win reputational credit and emotional satisfaction. The conversations and contests and arguments feel real to the participants but they have almost no direct effect on reality and they’re therefore a dangerously popular avenue for creating distraction and for giving citizens the illusion of engagement without any real-world influence. These tools are a totalitarian’s dream.

We’ve probably all seen it by now: a young person (nearly always a woman) on a TikTok reel: “So, I was just chilling with my girlies, you know… “. And then it ends with something like “Girl! Are you for real?” Or “I was shook, y’all”. For many people this is now the primary forum for political engagement. Half of their political input comes in the form of videos like these. If this content doesn’t sound particularly political, that’s because it’s not. It’s a narcissistic and snide application of the modern perspective (all about feelings and vibes and “tea”) to political issues. The speakers have opinions. What they lack is an appreciable connection to reality, and their listeners also tend to be disconnected from real political issues. This is essentially a vast theater of political belief, in which people act out little speeches and produce emotional displays and launch disdainful little barbs at some abstract opponent. This isn’t just a collection of posts and soliloquys, though. There is some interpersonal communication. There’s often some back-and-forth (response videos, I think they’re called) and people post and read replies, so it’s not the monologues which are strange. It’s the sense that all of this is, in some sense, play-acting. These people never do anything, and their beliefs never seem to impact their lives. One suspects that the issues they’re discussing are no more real to them than celebrities or video games.

The left probably never had a choice (one uses the tools at hand, and nothing was going to get young women off of TikTok and Instagram) but the fact is, they made an unfortunate gamble 5-10 years ago: they decided to use the emerging online spaces and trends to support their political agenda. This ended up being a bad bet because the people in these spaces are about as disengaged with reality as opinionated people can possibly be. They might vote in presidential elections, but they don’t protest (unless the vibes are really good) and they don’t donate and-most importantly-they don’t speak about these issues with non-believers or the public at large. These people are often completely incapable of having in-person debates. I’ve seen it. They stalk away, feeling ‘unsafe’, or they dissolve into tears. Usually, they just ignore the conversations altogether, which seems to be how many young people are dealing with any possible challenge or discomfort: avoidance.

Politics for these people is what every other digital interaction is: a self-absorbed way to burnish their image and participate in parasocial theater. It’s not that these people don’t care. They’re a profoundly emotional group. They often have sincere opinions on a range of issues. The issue is that these are not citizens in the old republican sense. They don’t harbor political opinions borne out of their experience and their social station. They don’t interact with the real world in political ways. In many cases they barely interact with the real world at all. Online classes, Zoom, OnlyFans, DoorDash, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Twitch; all of the recent cultural developments and internet mega-corporations facilitate and monetize the possibility of staying in a room indefinitely, without dying from hunger or boredom.

Articles often claim that MEN have moved to the right. Instead we see (in many studies) that women have moved sharply to the left. There’s probably a feedback loop between political attitude and online behavior and associational patterns: the more leftist young women get, the more they both enforce ideological discipline and seek status by imitating other young women, which makes them more leftist, which causes them to veer farther towards an extreme position on certain issues, etc.

Now, with a change of tech giant policy (in certain cases) and a broader, self-conscious cultural shift, many of these digital nowheres have become distinctly anti-progressive. The attitudes of young men and working-class people and most folks outside of the professional managerial class kind of gelled last year and have been the growing core of an anti-’woke’ worldview: pro-free speech, pro-tradition, pro-capitalism, pro-historical nuance. Elsewhere I’ve called these values and ideas a ‘New Right,’ which is really just the skeletal ideology of people who are distinctly anti-progressive (and no, they’re usually not bigots).

I believe that this new (vaguely right-wing) menu of ideas is having a bigger effect in physical reality (and will upon policy) because the believers are more connected to the real world. Everyone spends hours online, but carpenters and salesman and soldiers and nurses and lab scientists go out into the world and talk to people. They bring the ideas they’ve picked up into the realm of material reality, where they actually become real, through pro-social activity. The intellectual tendencies of the progressive ideology tend toward purity and a kind of intellectual ghetto-ization. Having a corps of believers who tend to avoid interaction with the real world due to lifestyle or preference or mental health condition is therefore a major design flaw in its eternal battle for monocultural domination.

The immaturity and smothering comfort of urban life is becoming more and more pronounced. ‘Island dwarfism’ shrinks animals in constricted ecologies… perhaps modern urban life shrinks the spirit of the city’s inhabitants in a similar way? Every object and detail in many of these lives… is organized to reinforce status, and to preclude discomfort (for those with money).

-Fragments & Miscellania, Vol. 4

A political movement wants different demographics for different reasons: old people are more electorally active and tend to have more disposable resources and a greater willingness to donate. Young people indicate the political future and can be seen as an investment in succeeding elections. Black people (as a group) lend a cause some moral status and ideological high ground (in the United States). White people tend to have more property and academic credentials. But the real group that political movements should be angling for is a new category: real-world people. Real-world people leave their houses every day and they go out in public to work and shop and socialize and they drive around and they talk to different kinds of people (face to face) throughout the day. The most advantageous kind of real-world person to have on your side is the ‘class traveler,’ or someone who interacts with a broad range of people throughout the day in terms of class and race and education level. These people tend to exchange bits of ideas and impressions with each other and so they form a foundational information ecosystem, different and more vital than the online space (which tends to be dominated by borderline personalities and narcissists and sociopaths).

The people most active in these online spaces are often not real-world people, and if they are they’re almost always cocooned by circumstance and routine into a safe little place of distance from people of varying backgrounds. They’re usually young women with at least one college degree and they sit at home (rotting? Is that an accurate use of that trendy new bon mot? Please comment) online and speak to other young women. They often conduct their work and shopping and some socializing through a screen. The issue isn’t not that minds cannot be changed and attitudes impacted through digital interactions. The issue is that these people have walled themselves off into an ideological (and emotional) synecdoche. They’re actively avoiding engagement with others. They much prefer the unreal places they’ve built, where interactions tend to be equally emotional and supportive, and dissenters can safely be bullied and mocked en masse. These simulacra don’t interact meaningfully with the world, and they’re not supposed to. That’s a big part of the reason people spend time and attention there. If only they held elections in those spaces! Democrats would clean up.

A different take on online progressive theatre, written a week or two ago:

We could also point out that the adoption and later monstering of “retarded” is as clear of an example of the euphemism treadmill as you will ever find. The word has a clinical ring for a reason; it was introduced as a term for people with cognitive and developmental disabilities precisely because it was seen as softer, less stigmatizing, and more technical than terms like “moron” or “idiot.” Its history should demonstrate that whatever more humane term we use next will itself eventually come to be seen as offensive, as people will use the negative reality of those disabilities as insults and then the insulting nature will accrue to the term.

-Freddie DeBoer

The Euphemism Treadmill

Moronic > Retarded > Learning Disabled > Differently Abled > Moronic

Homosexuals > Gay People > LGB > LGBT > LGBTQ Community > LGBTQIA+ > who cares?

America is healing. How do I know? Well, for one thing, I encounter the word ‘BIPOC’ less frequently online these days.

Negro > Colored > Black > African-American > POC > BIPOC > … ?

‘BIPOC’ was introduced as a new alternative for ‘African American’ (and other kinds of nonwhite… but mostly black). I don’t know when it was first coined (although I would bet money it was in some graduate studies program or urban nonprofit) but it started to become popular around 2019 or 2020. I think. My memory of that time is a bit fuzzy. Anyway, many people mostly stopped saying ‘black’ or ‘African American’ and started saying ‘BIPOC’ instead.

What could possibly be more intentionally, gingerly respectful and lexically precise than African American? BIPOC, apparently. BIPOC doesn’t just mean black, of course. It refers to “black, indigenous, and people of color” (which is redundant, since black and indigenous people are by definition, in this scheme, “people of color”). I’ve already written about the silliness of creating a NEW term for “people of color” (which just means nonwhite people).

Why would people flock away from the use of ‘people of color’ (perhaps the most lofty and needlessly abstract term in common usage, abbreviated to POC), and to BIPOC? I’m sure there’s some intricate theoretical justification somewhere with a host of historical fallacies and sweeping assumptions. The real reason, I think, is that BIPOC popped up during the height of the online ideological fashion craze, when using the right words was seen as just très chic and so sophisticated, and using a different one might get you scolded. That’s it. This was pure fashion and status signaling, masquerading as political concern.

In fact, almost every progressive political development of the period 2019-2023 ended up being pure fashion and status signaling. How could this be? I would suggest that, unlike “gamergate” or Brexit, BLM, MeToo, and Greta Thunberg and even the pro-Palestinian protests (in many cases, not all) ended up being wispy and insubstantial. The big exception is gender ideology, which captured institutions and gathered billions of dollars’ worth of profit motive behind it. There are reasons for the unique successes of gender ideology, but I suspect the profound financial incentives for the medical system were involved.

In any case, these new digital mass movements captured the hearts and social media pages of millions, but many of their believers were always more focused on appearing participatory, rather than actually doing things. I’ve already done this subject to death but here’s the rubric: if your movement is comprised of people who mostly want to make change in the world and don’t much care about their online persona or their social credit, you’ll probably be in business. If your movement is comprised of people who primarily seek to post things online, and only secondarily (or not at all) care about actually making concrete change in the realm of physical reality, you might be on track for some digital hysteria and very few policy changes. Gamergate and Brexit were memetic issues that arose in response to real problems, with believers who believed in real solutions, and not simply showing their virtue or worthy opinions. They didn’t really care about those things. They just wanted differently-focused games journalists and greater sovereignty for Great Britain. They were also both mostly male movements.

Are the general differences in status signals and intrasexual dynamics and social media usages between men and women responsible for the phenomenon of transient digital hysteria? I have no idea. It’s an interesting question, though, and one that I’m sure I’ll see digested by a panel on CNN any day now.

It’s not that these movements had no effects. BLM-related protests often turned into violent and fiery riots. MeToo led to many firings. But these apparitions failed to change the culture to a level commensurate with their early energy.

The 4B movement (a South Korean creation which is opposed to dating or marrying men, under any circumstances) was gleefully reported on by American media in the wake of Trump’s victory.

The curious thing is that we now understand the pattern, yet we seem to be captive to it still. People spread a narrative about current problem (which really does exist in the world, but it usually misunderstood) and then they ignite a viral profusion of terms and talking points and memes and graphics, which spread over and throughout the internet and inflame the enthusiasm of a bunch of people (disproportionately young women) who respond with anger and concern. The emotional wave causes bullying and reputation-besmirching and herdlike behavior and the assumption of new current terminology, all to address current problem. After a few years, without any progress (policy proposals and concrete reforms are never part of the wave of enthusiasm-it’s all about vibes and emotion), the wave begins to recede… and a new current problem comes to the fore.

The dialogue about U. S. politics and the Trump administration is similar, but with a more compressed informational sin wave, and less potential energy (since permanent panic/hysteria is simply unsustainable for any organism)

It seems that our institutions have begun to detect this pattern, and are acting accordingly. Unfortunately, many individuals are not. Of course, as has been noted repeatedly elsewhere, devoting your online energies to current problem and using current terminology lend a person some degree of status. As long as the status is there and freely available, people will grab it. Unfortunately, the whole arrangement rests on a shared, agreed-upon delusion: we care about this issue and want to work to address it.

Instead, we essentially have a large network of wannabe ‘popular kids’ (all at least nominally adults), signaling their class and cultural assumptions using endlessly-changing words for certain concepts. The words have to change frequently, or the poors and the working class might catch on. These are essentially code words for elite access into certain cultural spaces. Do they make any difference to the shape of reality? Not at all. Are many of these spaces moving to a kind of radical nihilism, in which disability and health and beauty and truth are seen as passé, arbitrary, even offensive concepts? Yes, many are. Will this destroy their ability to execute any real progress or policy improvements in these areas? Absolutely. Do the participants in this grand charade particularly care? Not at all! They get their virtue points regardless of real-world effects, and that was always the name of the game. They often don’t see the charade consciously for what it is, because they’re so busy telling themselves a story about the world, but they are purely driven by social signals and incentives, whether they realize it or not.

It’s fairly moronic.

Addendum: I predict that society will isolate these spaces more and more from reality and from policymaking. That would certainly be the adaptive choice. People will always vent online and gather to discuss issues, but the political and financial system will gingerly extricate itself from the cycle of online hysteria.

The real question is whether individuals (as such, and as social networks) can absorb the general awareness of this pattern and adapt. Are we due for a new BLM? I would feel better about our chances if I knew that everyone understood the collective psychological phenomenon of 2020 for what it was. I think that most do.

We already understand that lives shouldn’t be lived through screens, and that in-person socialization and time outdoors is important. Perhaps we should introduce a new norm: beliefs and political attitudes should be at least partly based in what you see out in the world, in your community. At least for the state and local level this kind of change could have an appreciable favorable effect. There are many people engaging with politics like an online game, while their communities rot away. Forget the ephemeral and bizarre world of global politics for awhile and walk the streets of your city. How’s it looking?

A republic requires citizens, and citizens requires a real and active society… not just consumers and sources of personal data.

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