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Like take cuisine. In the US “home made” versions of classic dishes (chili, barbecue, apple pie) are first-class members of public identity theater. If you have a great chili recipe you’ll likely enter contests or otherwise become known for it.
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In India, sure every family tends to have a recipe for say sambar or garam masala and part of invisible life is passing these around etc backstage. There is a clear distinction between “restaurant” versions of recipes and home-made ones. And the latter are not “on stage” as much.
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Okay, but long-winded point of this. Covid is a weirdly hard challenge for such kayfabe cultures because the logic of tackling them lies backstage and doesn’t lend itself to on-stage performance scripting. I mean the best Trump could Do was weakly aim for “masks are patriotic”
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OTOH you can’t tackle them backstage either because a) you won’t admit there IS a backstage b) the backstage is a barren cultural desert, with everything making it lovable culturally strip-mined for theatrical use
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And here’s the funny thing. The US tends to solve it’s “backstage” problems that require human culture by filling roles with non-anglo immigrants. But the moment these immigrants get acculturated they want to get on-stage too. Because they recognize that’s where the power is.
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So the “Victorian” mindset of pretending the theater is the whole thing is contagious. It’s a virus in its own right. A pretty powerful one. For a century the Anglo-middle-class victorian-roots virus spread across the world, creating hypocritical kayfabe middle classes everywhere
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But nowhere did it get as strong as in its native lands, and nowhere did it exterminate the backstage as a cultural zone as completely as in the US/UK. And nowhere else did the theatrical frontfalse consciousness become the *only* available consciousness to inhabit.
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Now let’s ask: does Stephenson’s original extrapolation still work? I think it doesn’t. Covid is the first of many systemic backstage challenges to come, and they’ll only get trickier. The frontstage/backstage cultural architecture with front denying the back is untenable.
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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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