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Clickbait Citizen thinks about the evolving relationship between power, propaganda, art and culture. It explores how public art and cultural practices never act neutrally.

Feb 28, 2025

Clickbait Citizen

by Chris Baldwin

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 thinks 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. We look at how dramaturgy, performance, AI, photography, deep fake, painting and other kinds of art impact upon political discourse and the outlook for democracy around the world.

Clickbait Citizen is also a place we think historically. We explore how the arts have been instruments of influence. We need stories of the past to understand the nature of the decisions we face today. And the arts have always influenced, formed, manipulated the nature of those stories.

Clickbait Citizen contains specific projects such as ‘War Frames’. If art helps us to reflect on what it is to be a social being, this includes the fact that we often act in the most inhuman, anti-human and grotesque manner. Because we can convince ourselves that war is a game of risk, jeopardy, and the route to potentially enormous ‘wins’ and advantages, it’s important we throw as much ballast into the way of such self-annihilation. But just as organised religion has often supported war to attain revenge, to ‘enact God’s will’, so too culture and the arts. Art has often played an ambivalent or validating role in war. And that is what I will try to unpick with your help in ‘War Frames’.

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. Yet artists are often deeply involved in propaganda processes - from the makers of AI videos about Gaza circulated by the US president to the painters who glorified the ‘victories’ of Napoleon. Yet artists also use their story-telling powers to reveal certain perspectives, certain truths and even facts about the world in which we live.

While there is a distinction between fact and fiction, and an obvious need to be able to distinguish between the two, we actually need both. We use certain 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.

But why are facts under such threat? Why, after centuries of effort invested in reaping the rewards of the ‘age of enlightenment’ are we now turning our back on the transformative power of facts to make our lives richer, safer and predicated on collective wellbeing? Shoshana Zuboff suggests the answer may rest in our contemporary economic arrangements, in the way our own stories and narratives are being commodified:

Sur-veil-lance Cap-i-tal-ism, n.
A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales;
A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioural modification.*

And that is why this project is called Clickbait Citizen. If she is right then we have a real fight on our hands. And we artists, our work, and the way we think about our role in the world, is part of that fight.

Chris Baldwin

I am a director of theatre and performance and an author of books, plays and essays. My work has been staged in many different countries and for many kinds of audience. Writing has always been important, a way to understand what I am really thinking, to illicit responses and conversations, to engage in calm thinking with others - with people like you.

“Mystery 0” / MYSTERIES OF TRANSITION - Elefsina 2023 (Greece) Dir: Chris Baldwin

Thinking and working with others on narrative structures for large-scale public performances, which usually contain broadcast components, I have found both daunting and yet fascinating. My work has examined some of the most complex subjects of our epoch: climate crisis, the Holocaust, the post-WW2 re-organisation of European borders, and much more. TV and broadcast audiences have often been in the millions - yet with this has come a responsibility to think carefully about both dramatic narratives, history, fiction and facts.

I was Artistic Director for the opening for Eleusis/Elefsina (European Capital of Culture 2023, Greece), Artistic Director of big events for Kaunas (European Capital of Culture 2022, Lithuania), Creative Director for Galway (European Capital of Culture 2020, Ireland) and Curator for Interdisciplinary Performance for the city of Wroclaw (European Capital of Culture 2016, Poland). I have also led festivals and theatres in the UK and Spain and taught at universities and drama schools across Europe including a period as Visiting Professor at Rose Bruford College, London. My doctoral research (Kent) was on collective and political trauma and the cultural city. My books about theatre, education and culture are used in teaching across the world. More can be found here.

“Sikilimas” - Kaunas 2022 (Lithuania) - Dir: Chris Baldwin

Why subscribe?

In this forum, I ask questions about the relationship between power, propaganda, art and culture. I invite you to join me in choosing the questions we will explore. If you subscribe, and post comments, they will come to me, and help me decide what I will address in the future.

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* Zuboff, S. (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – The Fight for Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Profile Books)