Clickbait Citizen Where we think, read and talk about the evolving relationship between power, propaganda, art and culture.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.

(Hannah Arendt - The Origins of Totalitarianism)

Clickbait Citizen is a Substack article and podcast space, initiated and developed by Chris Baldwin, where he invites people to think about the evolving relationship between power, propaganda, art and culture. It explores how public art and cultural practices never act neutrally – they are always active in the real world, continually making and disrupting shared stories, narratives, meanings and understandings. What is happening in Europe, Russia, China?

'I write about how dramaturgy, performance, AI, photography, deep fake, and other kinds of art are impacting upon political discourse and the outlook for democracy around the world.

Clickbait Citizen is also a place we think historically about the 20th century and earlier. We explore how the arts have been instruments of influence for Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, the US among others.

Our world is moving at a break-neck speed. Our economies are globalised, our communication systems instantaneously confirm, question, or lie to us. Our institutions, our identities and cultures are in a seemingly permanent state of liquidity and fluidity. Our ability to talk to one another across the planet has never been easier or cheaper. Yet, whether we are aware or not, agree or not, we still depend on stable and trustworthy facts and lines of communication for our safety, health, our economies, and collective futures. What we are told we can believe still matters. Without trustworthy facts and information, we are unable to act in the real world, our personal and collective ‘agency’ diminished or extinguished. When we lose faith in our ability to identify facts, when reality is turned into a haze of confusion, our ability to make decisions about our personal and collective futures become paralysed. Without facts the future is cancelled; we enter a mode of pre-apocalyptic survivalism.

Clickbait Citizen draws a distinction between debates about ‘free-speech’ and the precarious position of ‘facts’. Calls for ‘free-speech’ in our contemporary world are often used by libertarians and the far-right to advance ideas and ideologies which dismiss the importance of facts. This is a dangerous and disingenuous path to walk. But there is something else going on too, which Hannah Arendt alludes to in the quote above. While there is a distinction between fact and fiction, and an obvious need to be able to distinguish between the two, we need both. We use stories to tell one another about what we imagine the future holds. And politics and politicians are as dependent on this as any of us.'

Follow Chris Baldwin's #ClickbaitCitizen on Substack, and you have access to weekly written and podcast reflections.

Image inspiration: “East/West” (Sofia, Bulgaria): Andrei Molodkin/Santiago Sierra