Networked audience participation: the futurity of post-Brexit democracy in One Day, Maybe and Operation Black Antler

ABSTRACT

Where are we in the story of British democracy? Was the 2016 EU Referendum a rehearsal for a new political system of direct democracy that ultimately benefits the far right? Or will the Internet replace the conventional machinery of government with a radical new form of network power where people discursively experiment with new political realities through aesthetic modes of social relations? This article proffers the term ‘networked participation’ to describe a conceptual model of citizenry centred on structuring meaning through the dialogic exchange of information in aesthetic environments. The political ideals of network politics inform my analysis of the complex web of connections that participants scaffold in the performances Operation Black Antler(Blast Theory and Hydrocracker 2017) and One Day, Maybe (dreamthinkspeak 2017) between identitarian ideology in Britain and competing narratives of democracy’s meaning in South Korea, respectively. This model of audience participation is proffered to develop a theory of social relations produced through a theatrical experience of digital interconnectivity.

KEYWORDS:

• Blast Theory
• Hydrocracker
• dreamthinkspeak
• immersive theatre
• information age
• Brexit
• Right-Wing Populism
• Gwangju Uprising
• British Far Right
• Network Politics
• Investigatory Powers Act
• Surveillance State

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Jem Wall and Tristan Sharps for allowing me to interview them. Thanks to Adam Alston who gave me valuable feedback on a very early draft of the article. And thank you to everyone at CityLIS for introducing me to the world of information science.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The United Nations has concluded that Facebook played a ‘determined role’ in the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslim community in Myanmar (BBC News 2018). The Myanmar military created hundreds of troll accounts, news and celebrity pages to spread Islamophobic propaganda, including fake photos of massacres of the Buddhist majority. The military launched a deadly crackdown against the Rohingya in the summer of 2017. 10,000 Rohingya have been killed, 730,000 refugees have fled to Bangladesh and hundreds of villages have been destroyed (Mozur 2018).

2. The radical right Brexit party was created by the former leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) Nigel Farage in 2019 and later reformed as Reform UK in 2021. The Brexit party was an online organisation that operated more as a hybrid of an e-business and thinktank than a traditional political party. Instead of a manifesto, for example, the Brexit party as of 20 October 2020 had a ‘Contract with the People’ consisting of a ‘targeted set of deliverable pledges’ published on their website. It had no members in the traditional sense, only registered supporters who could donate to the party but had no say over its policies. This structure gave Farage a high level of control of the party’s entire management, including its policy platforms, spending and selection of candidates. The purpose behind these innovations was to use the Internet as a ‘disintermediation’ machine between politics and the public, thus bypassing media scrutiny (Loucaides 2019). Moreover, the Brexit party’s digital performativity allowed it to avoid restrictions on advertising and funding imposed by electoral law so that the party could pursue its radical rightwing agenda. If this is the future of democratic politics then the ‘visual imagery of spectators and performers that dominates modern conceptions of democracy is too humanistic for the digital age’ (Runciman 2019, 158).

3. Taiwan is an extant model of this kind of network politics. vTaiwan grew out of the Sunflower Student Movement, which started when protestors occupied the country’s parliament for weeks to oppose Taiwan’s trade bill with China. The civic hackers’ collective GOv saw the event as symptomatic of deep-rooted polarisation in Taiwanese society. vTaiwan is a collaborative project between the government and civic hackers in Taiwan to utilise web platforms for citizens to control what questions the government asks its citizens through referenda and elections. Civic hackers are a group who believe the Internet needs a new politics they call ‘multistakeholderism’, a process underpinned by the principle of consensus-finding (Miller 2019).

4. 2049 marks the centenary of the Chinese Communist Revolution and has become a significant year in the country’s popular imagination. The Communist Party of China (CPC) has declared that 2049 is the year when the country will achieve full modernisation. What form this will take is hotly contested, but all CPC versions of futurity model China as a country moving into a ‘futureless past’ (Pomerantsev 2019, 242–244).

5. Pro-democracy campaigners in South Korea have drawn parallels with the events of May 1980 and the Umbrella Movement following the implementation of China’s new security law in Hong Kong. Veterans of the Gwangju Uprising believe the Umbrella Movement is showing the world that citizens cannot rely on their government to defend democracy (Lee et al. 2020; also see BBC News 2020).

6. These parties include the Freedom Party (Austria); League (Italy); Party for Freedom (Netherlands); National Rally (France); Alternative for Germany (Germany); Vox (Spain); Golden Dawn (Greece); Fidesz (Hungary); Jaw and Justice (Poland); Party for Freedom (Netherlands). The fundamental issues uniting all of these groups are ‘immigration, security, corruption, and foreign power’ (Mudde 2019, 31).

7. Enoch Powell was a British Conservative MP who was expelled from the shadow cabinet in 1968 for his incendiary ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, where he claimed ‘in fifteen or twenty years’ time, the Black man will have the whip hand over the white man’. He became a popular figure on the British far right in the 1970s for his opposition to the Race Relations Act (“50 Years On: Rivers of Blood” 2018).

8. The collapse of the neo-Nazi British National Party circa-2010 saw a significant change in the tactics of the British far right. The United Kingdom Independence Party under Nigel Farage successfully repackaged their politics, which were then later adopted by the Conservative party. This shift has legitimated racist narratives on national identity and immigration. At the same time as ethno-nationalism has become normalised a new generation of far-right activists, ‘Identitarians’ who work outside the party-political system, has gained influence online. This Identitarian movement was founded by Generation Identity, a group that began as a political meme designed to migrate across platforms. Migrating to online platforms allows disparate groups to unite around anti-Muslim hatred. Message and data are more important than party organisation for Identitarians. There now exists a professional online media ecosystem that pushes conspiracies such as ‘the great replacement’ and other hate speech into public conversation (Lowles and Atkinson 2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joseph Dunne-Howrie

Dr Joseph Dunne-Howrie is a module year co-ordinator at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance. His research interests include the politics of digital culture, Internet-based dramaturgies, participatory and immersive theatre, performance documentation, archives, and performative writing. He has previously taught at the University of East London, Mountview Academy and City, University of London. He has published articles and book reviews in Performance Research, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media and Stanislavski Studies. He writes about theatre and higher education on his blog josephdunnehowrie.com and on Twitter @MemoryDetritus.