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”
Conversation
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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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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