This Is Not a Game / Learn to Play the Game: Metamodern Malaise & Postdigital Performances of Belief

The political crises and technological accelerationism over the past two decades have made the possibility in a secure and stable future feel unimaginable (Žižek 2024). This has manifested as a crisis of belief that democratic politics can build a more just world. However, individuals are paradoxically turning towards concepts such as betterment, self-actualisation and universal truths (Drayton 2024; Radchencko 2019) whilst simultaneously understanding the unreality, falsity, and frailties of these concepts (cf. Vermeulen & van den Akker 2010). This metamodern form of belief (cf. Ceriello 2018; 2022) – or what we call performances of belief – is not only manifest in the cultural elements already devoured by late-stage capitalism (neo-craft industries, the wellness market, and the experience economy [Gerosa 2023]), but in people’s participation in extremist and conspiracy communities online.

This paper draws on research into internet theatre (Lavender 2017; Scott 2022) to examine how the digital world turns citizens into data subjects who participate in democracy – as bio-techno hybrids (Dunne-Howrie 2022) – through the dissemination of political (dis)information. Understanding the QAnon conspiracy as an Alternative Reality Game (ARG) (Berkowitz 2020), we treat this postdigital participation as symptomatic of the post-millennial desire to gain control over truth in a political (offline) reality that participants have little agency within. The power of participatory, performative storytelling in the QAnon ARG rests in each individual participant being able to do ‘the research’ and find ‘the truth’ themselves – whilst also working as part of a collective identity who are preparing for a civilizational war (Houck & Allan 2022). This recentring of both individual and collective power over the chaos of contemporary reality fabricates a ‘main-character’ sensibility that ‘further blurs the lines between lived and constructed realities’ (Ceriello 2018: 108).

We use theories of post-immersive (Lopes Ramos et al. 2020) and metamodern theatre practice (Drayton 2024) to examine how participatory performance strategies in postdigital spaces enable users to rehearse, perform and participate in extremist ideologies as avatars and embodied subjects. The online performance Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy (The Civilians 2020) and the hybrid performance R△bbit Hole (Feral Theatre 2021) act as case studies to argue that audience participation within the far-right digital world embodies the metamodern desire for centrality of narrative (Radchenko 2019) and, therefore, the re-imagining of participants' selves as the main characters – or part of the hero's team – in apocalyptic role-play.