LARPing towards Bethlehem
News from the Front 25.05.25
This is a highly personal and utterly outspoken account of what it’s like to be born in the 21st century and feel for the first time the interesting but inflammatory new ways of being that we’re already beginning to take for granted.
We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum.
Joan Didion, p. 122
Everybody knows that the scene lives online now. The once parallel economy of social media promotion has become ubiquitous - absorbing all fields into its invisible cartographies of impressions and shares. The 2025 musician is an employee to TikTok, Spotify, Soundcloud, and other platforms where a song accrues a capital of ‘plays’ until it’s a product worth investing in (by an honest to god record label, if those still exist). The 2025 visual artist is a person compressed into an elevator pitch; an artistic style that needs to be narrowed down and experimental only to a certain point. Anything too strange, too diverse from art-work to art-work, caps potential. Everybody knows: a failure to stick to your aesthetics codes results in a performative dissonance that grows like a tumour, and then the music you make, the people you meet, are secondary. Empires collapse this way, you know.
There isn’t a different platform for personal expression though, is there? The likes accumulated on your personal profile are the same likes that commercial image campaigns generate traffic with. Interpersonal connections exist along the same platform market fluxes as artists trying to make it - each person hermetically sealed into their curated vibe and measured with the same value-hierarchies as everything else (likes, shares, impressions). Every user, post by post, accumulating an aesthetic, a script, a visual pastiche where their senses of selves can begin to take shape.
WHY DIDION NOW
Back in the day (in Didion’s times) everyone was equipped with a second nature to warn against selling out. With all values flattened by social media into the tightly numerical, the inverse is true - a good artist will monetize the personal. With it the relationship between interpersonal sign and referrent (words and the meaning of words) is strained. Do you wear what you wear to express or to signal an expression?
The folk-guitarist tries to please the algorithm (is there anything less folk?), either catering to strike a particular aesthetic groove that does well on the media platform or dying on the vine watching someone else do it better. The folk-guitarist is an equal measure a folk-guitarist impressionist, channeling Dylan or some other pre-set collection. Maybe not Dylan after the recent Timothée Chalamet movie - it’s too obvious an archetype now, too blunt an instrument.
Do we blame California? Timothy Leary? When Leary smuggled eastern mysticism into west-coast free love, he did it by divorcing yoga from its political and social context. Meditation contains a loose causality, practiced by cut-throat private equity types and, also, buddhist monks.
All that remains from the visual signs of the movement (Didion) is a vibe, a free-flowing energy, a fuel.
Know your angles: cities have become aesthetic backdrops for career creatives who work for global capital anyway. Digital nomads clog the rent of Barcelona, Californians occupy intramural Paris, Mexico City internationalises.
The platform-centre replaces the museum as a vestigial organ. The PHI Centre in Montreal, the Pompidou in Paris, the Van Gogh Experience, “Museums” of vacant visual signs (even their architectures are international) constructed around the online platform. Here’s some insider knowledge: the PHI Centre re-adjusts installation spaces based off cellphone photo-angles and instagram backdrops.
Alexis de Tocqueville warned against this. People eat each other because of this. Because of a conflation of what is good with what is profitable (the capital of the 21st century is attention, but it is capital; platform content is purchased with attention). Cultures did collapse this way - at least out west when we had all the momentum.
Without institutions safeguarding producers from the art market directly, and without public funding, the most successful artists are those that can best interface with capital - the rich, the well put-together, the beautiful (in aesthetics and physique).
Capital likes pretty things. The single-minded esprit-libre is the most ripe for angel-donors and top-down investors (and has been since the 3rd Republic). It cleaves labour away from art-practice, and looks good on an artist statement.
You see a lot of creatives, digi-curators, that make it generally feel that being disciplined in your aesthetic is more admirable than making actual art. Art practice is so often ugly and posting pictures of your minimalist monochrome stationary, for example, is clean clean clean.
PLATFORM REALISM
Even if you’ve never heard it before you know it to be true: the neoliberal slashing of public art programs before our generation had even been born was undercut by a spectre that promised to take its place. The internet would be the front-facing habitat for the arts. Platforms would be the equaliser. Anyone with an internet connection and a computer could find an audience for what they make.
The promise of platforms is a sort of frontier-democracy where as an artist you can ostensibly access entire swaths of the population directly by posting your art. For millennials this was a gold-rush, with it a first-generation of internet influencers outpaced a television-economy that could not, or would not, understand just how absolutely they would soon be made defunct. In the alternative art space came fax art, international communities, and radical political cells were beginning to take shape. For something more material, look at Fred Turner’s analysis in From Counterculture to Cyberculture, an account of how the California counter-culture (in Didion, called the movement) was co-opted by Stewart Brand, a deputy for Silicon Valley. Social media platforms are based on the simple sell: anyone can go online and connect, it’s never been simpler. Though the failure of our grand-parents is the failure of neoliberalism at large - market freedom does not generate personal freedom, the capacity to sell yourself is not the capacity to make yourself.
Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about.
Joan Didion, p. 97.
Friedrich Hayek imagined the market as something too large to fully grasp - like the shape of the cosmos or a school of fish that you could only barely read holistically. The Sovereign Individual, by British upper-class rascals James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Moog, is the first book to understand that self-help is the principle condition of upwards social mobility in the cyber-era. Both of these perspectives are quasi-religious, meritocratic, and mistaken.
Does anyone really know under which archaic sets of rules the algorithm works? The 2025 artist is a day-trader of personalities. The more saccharine your output the more exploitable by a data collection aggregate seeking to understand your desires and fears at a molecular level.
Successfully shaping and following aesthetic trends is just as much timing as it is about looking good. You can keep your hands clean and never be labelled ‘poser’ so long as you get in on a trend early and get out just in time. Trends have a biological clock.
Platform realism occurs when you identify too strongly with your online presence - when you turn to overbearing curator of what is and isn’t you. Of that certain kind of you. Of your lore, your plot, your aesthetic vocabulary. The algorithm, 21st century mutation of the economy, continues its digestion, unable to distinguish between the real and the ironic, the political and the memetic.
Watch it happen in the conflation of words: of work with content, songs with releases, back-room business vocabulary coming home to find purchase in the personal - to each their brand, their points of contact.
DOING POLITICS
The mot d’ordre of the humanities is “publish or perish”: which is gently romantic and less manosphere than its sister-phrase “rise and grind” - though they contain all the same ingredients.
Existence, like Foucauldian discourse (I know but give me a second), needs to be maintained, re-instated, re-asserted again and again. Marketers in the 60s understood that you’re only as good as your last photo-op, even if you’re a hippie. Your only friends are the ones you post, your only causes the ones in your bio.
Why aren’t you posting about __?
Blame english academia. The favourite past-time of the intellectual upper-class is the creation of vanguard positions that are hardest to follow. Positions that exclude. Or, should you find some new ground, you ought to plant yourself as firm as possible, seal the territory as your niche and hold on with white knuckles. Otherwise called elite capture.
Anthropocene perspectives, rhizomatic identity, and other forms of astrology like that. In this way, the intellectual class maintains and justifies their places through a language trap.
As a generation coming of age, and coming to terms with our immense amounts of privilege already (if you are in University at any level, you are insurmountably lucky), these are our inheritances. Latching onto personas grants you permission to hate those around you and keep yourself afloat. The more radical the gesture, the more divorced from material conditions. The persona, unrealizably sublime, allows the player to in-group.
In equal measure, the push towards politics as a point of identification strays art-making away from the material. Marx asks us to imagine our suffering, our alienation, as unremarkable. The liberalisation of public identity asks us to consider each component of our self-recognition as unique - neoliberalism is a function of personal merit (no handouts, no alternatives), and haven’t you earned your persona? Haven’t you earned your suffering?
I’m funny because of the trauma.
Ever heard that before?
Activism, a vague and hostile word since Didion, is a role pre-packaged with a set of visual codes and aesthetics. Slot it into your instagram bio: Mother, Artist, Activist.
In any case, living the LARP asks us to question each other’s merits, to conduct virtual firing squads to those “performatively” doing politics to maintain the strict borders of our personas. Those that don’t read theory, that don’t post, etc. To construct ourselves by means of negation.
Wait- What was that about LARP?
NEW KINDS OF PEOPLE
Live-action role playing has bled into the social consciousness like much of internet culture: first as an embarrassing niche, then as universal vocabulary. The visual identifiers of Live-Action Role-Playing, elves and steampunk outfits and other stuff like that, matter less than the actual process of the LARP - the attraction of role-play is its sincerity while lying. Is it any coincidence that LARP spaces are so popular amongst queer communities? Or that the initial theories of performative language, where language forms social realities, came from Judith Butler?
Along the way, LARPing has found ambassadors in strange places - Peter Thiel, who now has a mainline to the white house in the form of a politically reconstructed JD Vance, is an avowed dungeons and dragons player. His tech startups wrestle names from Tolkien, his philosophy is René Girard’s mimetic psycho-catholicism. Elon Musk, seemingly closer to the hot-seat, is obsessed with his space-age gamer crusader role-play, his dark MAGA tench coat, his all-American truth-seeker persona. Musk is bad at it.
More worrying are the LARPing tendencies of the “architects” behind the architects: David Friedman, who you might recognise as the anarcho-capitalist author of The Machinery of Freedom or, depending on your theory-of-economics literacy, as the son of Milton Friedman, roleplays a berber priest in medieval re-enactments. Is it a surprise that Artificial Intelligence image generation came for fantasy and sci-fi artists first?
Elsewhere, when they’re not in their LARPS, these technocrats negotiate with entire nation-states who agree to play the client - El Salvador, Canada, Dubai, wherever venture oligarchs get their kicks.
LARP IN THE SERVICE OF EMPIRE
Palantir - named after the orb from Lord of the Rings that absorbs the thoughts of the holder - creates Titan, an AI powered militarised vehicle that promises to “Reduce Soldier workflow burdens and cognitive load” (taken from Titan’s website). You can imagine what the cognitive load of an American soldier might entail, and what exactly Palantir means by “workflow”.
Drone Pilot stations ressemble Gaming stations. The short film Five Thousand Feet is the Best by Omer Fast explores this articulation; drone pilots are by and large first-person shooter gamers. Mediated through a second degree of pretend, scary thoughts can be better assimilated. It’s a way to process the memories of exploding cars and residential buildings collapsing under hellfire missiles.
What’s happening here? Even if you disregard these examples as the dorkish undercurrents of a new techno-feudalist caste (à la Yanis Varoufakis), the LARP is indisputable in other sectors of public consciousness. Online subculture’s virile reproduction of fringe ideologies seems undeniably performative, or persona-based in the Jungian sense, wether it be right-wing twitter pages tying themselves to neo-classical archetypes of manhood that no longer exists, maybe never existed, or communist mega-posters frankenstein-ing USSR aesthetics forward into discord chatrooms. Peter Thiel self-identifies Libertarian, as a monopolist at that, but his money flows through channels of authoritarianism and censorship. What about 4chan? About Groypers and Proud Boys and other e-deological cells? JD Vance habitually texts Curtis Yarvin, who refers to himself as a dark-enlightenment monarchist, whatever that means, indicating at the very least that in the closed chambers of power all pretences are off.
Either JD Vance is a composite of all these fringe ideologies that encircle him, which would make him an America-first libertarian dark-enlightenment republican-monarchist, or, more likely, he understands the frivolity of ideological personas and agrees with these people on something far more essential, like the arrangement of capital. Most damning is the political stance-sphere; or the semantic political ideology quizzes that come with it; as a symptom of a culture where your personal political leanings becomes as expressive of a personality trait as, say, choosing to be a wizard instead of a paladin. By very virtue of its propagation, the political spectrum gives us the thrill generated by identification. A fascination with the surface tension of political semiotics. The ‘dark-enlightenment monarch’ doesn’t ambition to indicate anything actually political by calling himself that, but rather wear a vague political-fragrance. He grabs from the aesthetic history of political regimes as if for a mood-board.
What does MAGA mean? It certainly points to no economic policy, and seems to not even tie itself to Reagan (where the term comes from). It’s a sign with a loose causality, a phrase that ressembles only itself, made up of pure simulacrum value. The enjoyment of the MAGA hat, for the MAGA hat wearer, is derived from an opposition against... well against something.
NEW KINDS OF PLACES
The Jorge Luis Borges short story Del rigor en la ciencia is about a fictional empire so obsessed with the creation of a perfect map of their territory that the map, once completed, overlaps the empire 1:1.
In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Political leanings are more and more severed from politics. Or, the political-identification sphere has grown so large that it buries political action beneath it. Baudrillard is at work here, where the signs (the USSR Comrade sans-kalashnikov) have been severed from the referents (collective action and the conditions for violent revolution). The communist aesthetic travels mimetically, so a couple of points on the scoreboard for Girard. But, then again, the same can be said for the american monarchist, the national bolshevik, or any other political flavour. These LARPs are stripped from material decision-making. They only come alive after a war, but are kept in limbo by social media platforms where they can fight amongst themselves, enmeshed into an algorithm that values only their engagement.
For Baudrillard, the de-politicising of politics is the death knell of the post-modern system of signs and referents. Every president is an imitative ape of the general “vibe” of presidential figures, hiding that there hasn't been a man in charge of America since Kennedy. Wars, fought by Palantir through thermal imaging and hellfire missiles, are not wars in any way we’d understand them anymore - they are mechanised genocides of “workflow” and “market forces”. Before this great un-truth, people cling to the LARP like a life-raft.
Everyone’s reaching back. Not just now, before the future was cancelled too. Every soldier is imitating their favourite war-movie hero. Wars themselves are living and throbbing things that exist only through the aesthetic codes of a “warfare vibe” (check out the new A24 movie Warfare). Aerial perspectives, operational images, photographs of rubble: this is how war is merchandised.
Everyone in France channels Rimbaud, to the point where no one really knows what Rimbaud stands for anymore. Whatever his work once meant, the LARP has overrun him into some kind of twink-deity. What’s left for us to pick from? Dried-out bolshevik vinaigrette and arma christi medievalist-core seaweed? How do you reckon those? Have you ever felt this whole personality business is zero sum? Ain’t you want to be real? Even the cook has got something to prove; imitating Anthony Bourdain or wherever else cooks get their kicks.
What are the right purchases I need to make to play this “nyc line cook” character? It’s in vogue right now and I really want to get in on the ground floor. Do I have the right facial structure to pull it off?
What kind of future do you want. Where does that future come from? What will it look like? The space between form and function will only grow. The price of bread has never gone down in human history.
Personally identifying strongly with a particular political leaning, especially when niche, is indicative only of a society where neoliberalism has atomized each of us into our own skin-tight political party. Peter Thiel is not just a capitalist, he’s a national-conservative-libertarian, and I would imagine a Warlock in his free-time, but the speculative signs of his persona have nothing to do whatsoever with the flux of his capital that only seeks, like flood-water, the point of least resistance.
That is, Stewart Brand began to migrate from one intellectual community to another and, in the process, to knit together formerly separate intellectual and social networks. In the Whole Earth Catalog era, these networks spanned the worlds of scientific research, hippie homesteading, ecology, and mainstream consumer culture. By the 1990s they would include representatives of the Defense Department, the U.S. Congress, global corporations such as Shell Oil, and makers of all sorts of digital software and equipment.
NEO-MARXISM AND THE SMALL PURCHASE
Here’s the Marxist analysis. The need to express identification, since the 1920s but increasingly so with each generation, remains the only entrance-point to personhood within a society where the worker is alienated absolutely from his labour. Since dignity is a universal want, platforms need to create new dignities that cost less. Prove who you are through what you consume. What does wearing a cashmere cardigan mean? What do you want it to mean? What has it been imbued with, which persona do you put on? Are you a clean-girl? Are you opium-core? Are you indie sleaze? Are you more... vintage? Inscribe yourself into a lineage: Swiftie red baret or 70s english modder. The sprawl at the bottom of every online purchase (because we are the generation of the online purchase): these items commonly bought together.
Because poor people exist, and must exist under capitalism, aesthetics are specifically catered to the poor. Sure, you might not be able to afford the clean-girl LARP, but you have options. Culture is superfluous, and increasingly so is politics, but money changing hands is real.
NOSTALGIA
The most prescient desire fed by social media platforms is the desire to exist outside of them, in much the same way that all anti-capitalist sentiment is re-absorbed into capitalism.
The aesthetic nostalgia codes in this post (driveway in the suburbs?) is a tuning key for a time when actions weren’t separated from their direct and tangible meaning.
The memories evoked by AI imager synthesis do not refer to a historical past of documented events but to what literary theorist Frederic Jameson called “pastness”- a pseudo-historical plausibility based on aesthetic styles and loosely associated with a particular historic period.
The “past” of AI imagery is vibe-based.
This is not only reminiscent of a postmodern aesthetic of pastiche but can also be seen as a continuation of established commercial image practices such as “mood boarding,” used by commercial artists to convey the visual moods sought in a particular design or advertising campaign. In platform realism, history dissolves into a series of aesthetic “vibes”.
The quoted passage is taken from Roland Meyer’s article in Transbordeur.
Think of language as a process to point at meaning. Because AI image generation strings together loose signs, separated from their historical or political realities, its language is one that points only to itself.
Platform-realism gives us hopecore, cottagecore, clean-girl, dark academia, etc.
Look at it this way… you can go to a movie theatre and get a martini later tonight, but with so many decades of hyperawareness and aesthetic market inflation you can’t have it not be performative, not with all those decades of martinis mediated by a pastiche of movie scenes, cultural legacies, and fetish. In Paris, jazz bars are most often a gimmick tourist attraction where the process of going to the jazz bar is the end in itself (as a result, most jazz bars you’ll find play something comfortably dinky, evocative of jazz as an idea and, because it’s Paris, referencing La La Land). When it comes to saving movie ticket stubs, our generation is the most obsessive. I saw a girl on the street yesterday pick up a dirty business card off the ground because it had Louis Vuitton printed on it.
Everyone wants to exist outside the LARP, but to even become aware of this desire is to come to terms with your existence through a thick patina of that very performativity.
I saw a trend a few years ago where people were designing and printing out their own tickets for concerts they had gone to, creating objects with simulated nostalgia and zero placement in an actual time/space.
Any digital artist will tell you that the real money is in furry-persona portraits.
QUEER LARP
The infantilising of Queer spaces is symptomatic only of a generation with no future to grow into. Everyone born post-2000 is keenly aware that global capitalism has subsumed any potential for new politics, so we reach back to a time when at least there was truth. Queer events LARP as Stonewall, leftists LARP as guerrillas, alive artists LARP as dead artists.
But what of the political? What of the euphoria gained from seeing oneself represented according not to personal gender identifications, but political identifications? Or political-dysphoria?
How many American teenagers have enlisted in the US army after a childhood spent gunning each other down in Call of Duty lobbies. Maybe very little, yet the prevalence of video-game semiotic-codes like rock-and-roll music and lusty gunplay in recruitment advertising would lead us to believe that the visuals of war-games are re-attachable. Soldiers, otherwise, more-or-less understand the LARP in its most distilled form. Soldiers reduce their aesthetic references to a tight fiction, army nicknames seem to be given out on a basis of gender euphoria. I once met an alpine ranger with the nickname Iceman stationed in Grenoble. Klaus Theweleit (Male Fantasies) is our recourse for this particular history - his dissection of the Freikorps is psycho-analyical, feminist. The Nazis wore uniforms designed by American fashion houses. Yet the LARP, in the US military, is generally avowed.
In contemporary political circles, a tacit understanding is shared that a limited framing for personas aids in growing the movement. French communist youth-groups call each other comrade - in part due to a performative drunkness and aesthetic identification with the stray cultural signs of a mediated form of communism - but it also makes organizing easier. Though that doesn’t make it un-performative. The political aspect is more complicated. You can mood-board your instagram along party lines.
None of this has to do with what is and what isn’t - and what’s for sale is an entirely speculative way-of-life. Fashion designers understand this: Rick Owens’ LARP annexes a set of visual signs with mythological precision. Fashion designers most of all need to be precise, and have the best timing.
HAUNTOLOGY
If the future is cancelled (it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism), the only LARPs available to us are remnant signs from previous generations. Nostalgia only feeds in one direction. The market will continue its uncaring digestion, all ideologies too small to matter. Global capitalism proved too un-relenting, too big, for any other ideological framework to exist elsewhere. Anyways, any leftist country with half a chance had been sabotaged somewhere between its cradle and its first steps. In hauntological terms we are overrun by the phantom signs of all the generations that came before us and all the futures they imagined that never came to pass. Because of this there are certain compulsive and placated unawarenesses that have become deeply integrated into our collective pysche.
Being unable to imagine an alternative to capitalism meshes with fears of not possessing enough. Fake it in the LARP. Things are easier to process through a phone screen.
WHY BURROUGHS NOW
Burroughs was the wise and blind homosexual oracle of the Beat generation, though he outlived all the children he helped raise. While the Beat generation gives us all kinds of potential LARPS (vagabond writer, runaway drug user, activist poet), Burroughs passes us by. He’s too ugly. Too un-romantic.
The Revised Youth Futurist Front is an e-guerrilla LARP vehicle that takes its name from Burroughs’ Revised Boy Scout Manual (An Electronic Revolution).
Burroughs figured that with an audio-splicing set-up and enough intention you could take down a government. Performances are like weapons; you can make your own at home and break them over someone’s head if they come on too strong. It’s predicated on an understanding of language as severed from meaning, but we don’t have to be so mopey about it. The Revised Youth Futurist Front as a LARP vehicle is an avowal of the LARP as inescapable - though politics can be re-injected. Take a set of floating visual signs, tighten yourself to a poverty of meaning, and say something ugly. Or pick a prettier poison.
Elliot Mann is a writer and researcher based in Paris. Reach him at elliot.l.mann@proton.me
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READING LIST
▪ Slouching Towards Bethlehem - Didion
▪ Simulacrum and Simulations - Baudrillard
▪ The Revised Boyscout Manual - Burroughs
▪ From Counterculture to Cyberculture - Turner
▪ Capitalist Realism - Fischer
▪ Useful Work versus Useless Toil - Morris