The Hyper age of Performance is here!

Politics as Reality TV Show.

Something happened in the White House that felt strangely familiar to Goregaon West, Mumbai. The difference, of course, is that the White House is the office of the most powerful president in the world, while Goregaon West is home to the Bigg Boss set. But in our times, that distinction hardly matters. The line between governance and entertainment has melted like fake Nutralite butter on a Delhi vada pao. Everything is engineered for the internet, where news isn’t consumed but clipped, memed, and thrown onto the endless highway of doomscrolling.

When Donald Trump and Zelenskyy met in the Oval Office on February 28, 2025, Trump and President JD Vance behaved like bullies in front of the cameras. It felt like the behind-the-scenes footage had been released as the main film. The visuals were surreal, the outrage was immediate—but given who Trump is, was anyone really surprised?

In a hyper-online world where every moment is content, diplomacy has become just another viral genre. No one understood the internet’s raw, transactional nature better than Donald Trump. He didn’t move from reality TV to politics—he just made the season finale last four years. Infact his tweets weren’t policy—they were small plots. The White House press briefings were in TV series format of : Season 2, Episode 14: The Crooked Hillary's masterplan got spoiled.

When Twitter kicked him out, it was less a ban and more the abrupt cancellation of a hit show. So, like any star, he launched his own network. Truth Social was never about free speech. It was about an uninterrupted broadcast of his speech, free of interference, free of edits, and, ideally, free of fact-checking.

But this is the hyper-online age, and the hyper-online age demands relentless performers.When cameras are everywhere, existence itself becomes a live broadcast. Security cams blink from pan shops and toll booths. Dashcams script silent dramas on the roads. Mobile phones capture strangers mid-step, stitching them into reels they’ll never see. The metro records every movement, every pause, every unguarded second. Surveillance isn’t just watching, it’s directing.

I once saw a fight in Delhi where, in the middle of an argument, a man pulled out his phone and started recording. The other man saw this and instinctively took out his own phone, as if documenting the moment was his weapon of defense. Now, both were fighting with one hand while holding their cameras with the other. Watching this, I finally understood why they call it shooting.

If you're a doomscroller on YouTube and Reels, you've probably come across the e-lafda or gang fight videos from Delhi NCR—first, the raw footage of a brawl, then the follow-ups where they make peace, all carefully documented. Every skirmish, every truce, every dramatic twist unfolds on camera. It feels like a parallel, low-budget Bigg Boss cottage industry is running on the sidelines, churning out hyper-local reality TV for an algorithmic audience.

In this hyper-recorded world, everything demands evidence. Nothing can remain private. To exist is to be on camera. The tragedy isn’t that we’re always watched. It’s that we miss being watched. The real horror is an unrecorded life—no proof you mattered, no data of your existence. In an era where the mundane has been monetized through vlogging, you can no longer experience a moment without feeling the urge to record and broadcast it. There is a strange thrill in it, an addictive need to be seen. There’s a strange thrill in it, an addictive urgency to be seen. From a local gangster in Noida to the President of the United States, everyone is just a little too involved in digital image making.

Andy Warhole said this about Coca Cola which is also true about internet addiction: "You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."

Internet addiction, much like Coca-Cola in Warhol’s time, has a certain kind of allure—trapping everyone in the same algorithmic loop.

"Well, perhaps sometimes in bed, perhaps sometimes at breakfast or lunch or whatever," Trump said in an interview when asked about his tweeting habits.

Over twelve years (2009–2021), he posted around 57,000 tweets—perhaps more than most heads of state. While other leaders treated Twitter like a sanitized press release, their posts reading like ChatGPT-generated diplomacy, Trump wielded it like a drunk uncle at a karaoke mic—loud, shameless, and entertaining. He tweeted without hesitation, without a filter, without the tyranny of what-ifs.

In that sense, Twitter was his Mann Ki Baat in the truest sense.

The opposite of drama is decency and decorum—but what if that, too, is just another act? Politicians gut nations, sanction famines, siphon aid money, then step before cameras looking as composed as a Bollywood star fresh from a 20-day Ayurvedic cleanse. The trick isn’t hiding the blood—it’s styling it as a statement piece.

Drone-strike a wedding at noon, host a climate summit by dusk. The real scandal isn’t the bombing. It’s forgetting to say, "Our hearts are with the families."

What if decency is just a fog machine in a cheap disco—blurring the ugliness, masking the sweat? Democracy’s theatrics demand it.

Slavoj Žižek recently reflected on this shift in political aesthetics. He pointed out how, in earlier times, power had a certain dignity, while rebellion was crass and obscene. But today, it is those in power who are the most vulgar, the most shameless.

“When I was young, we were this old-style leftist. We thought those in power had dignity, but we, you know, all obscene gestures, we spoke, used dirty words... and we got the answer, which is that those in power are now more obscene than we even imagined to be.”

Žižek argued that the Democrats still don’t understand this. They believe exposing Trump’s lies and vulgarities will hurt him. But instead, it only strengthens him. His supporters admire him precisely for his shamelessness. When Trump is caught lying, they love him even more. When he says something vulgar, it deepens their identification with him. The outrage machine only fuels his brand.

It appears that shamelessness is no longer a flaw in behavior. Like it or not, it has somehow become the mandatory aesthetic of our times. In this performance-obsessed world, second thoughts do not exist. Only the first impulse matters—the instinct to perform shamelessly, to be uploaded in raw, unfiltered form. But this is also a truth that our politicians are as candid in front of the camera as an Instagrammer pretending to stare at the sunset, captioning the photo Candid moment caught on camera.

Because remember that in this world of performance even non performance is a performance and even silence, is nothing but a dramatic pause.

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