This is anecdotal, but non-Anglo people tend to be generally less surprised by my “X is theater” shtick. Because their suspension of theater awareness is less complete.
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The backstage is where many complex coordination problems in a high-tech civilizational stack emerge. The pretense that they can all be solved with a theater of individualist freedom cornering all political power, with all else labeled Actual Communism and Gulags is doomed.
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The backstage is a complex, varied space. It is not a space where nature takes kindly to attempts to solve The Mask Question via a calculus of theatrical freedom calculations. It punishes attempts to do so with 10s of 1000s dead.
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If you can’t feel human unless you’re in the spotlight of the Great Neo-Victorian Dream Type 32a, being acknowledged and validated as exactly the kind of Free Cog in the System you think you are, the future will be a very uncomfortable place for you.
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To the extent that we’re all Victorian now, especially in the middle classes around the world, it’s going to be a challenge for all of us, adapting to a world where front-stage public theaters is no longer the essence of civilization.
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The idea that we all belong in a universal “story of humanity” is peculiarly Victorian I think. I see few signs of it in other times/places. The closest is evangelical religions, which act like everyone will eventually either be part of their one true faith or condemned to hell.
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Addendum: I think a big part of the Great Theatricalization of Victorian-descended middle-class societies is that they started seeing their lives reflected in TV and movies. For most of the world, movies and TV, even local rather than global-Hollywood, is Not About Us.
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Which incidentally gets at why representation in movies/tv (the mirror of the theatrical society) is such a flashpoint. You’re not a real free human until you’re represented on screen as a fictional free human, and you can’t access political power until you are.
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I guess he just thought the backstage would handle something like the virus via sci fi magic
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