Bookshelf
A curated and growing list of books, essays, thinkers, and source material that have shaped this project. This is not an exhaustive bibliography, but a living reference shelf—a place where you can dig deeper into the themes that appear throughout The Performance Age.
Some links to books may be referral (affiliate) links, which help support the project at no additional cost to you.
📚 Foundational Books
These are core works that underpin the intellectual scaffolding of the project:
Jean Baudrillard – Simulacra and Simulation
The origin of "hyperreality." How representations, signs, and simulations come to replace and eventually erase the real.
Buy on AmazonMartin Gurri – The Revolt of the Public
A keystone for understanding authority collapse in the digital age. Introduces the center vs. border dynamic.
Buy on AmazonByung-Chul Han – Psychopolitics, The Burnout Society
On how neoliberalism governs not through repression, but through self-optimization and emotional coercion.
Psychopolitics | The Burnout SocietyJonathan Haidt – The Righteous Mind, The Coddling of the American Mind, The Anxious Generation
Key for understanding moral psychology and the antifragility of individuals and systems.
The Righteous Mind | The Coddling of the American Mind | The Anxious GenerationNassim Nicholas Taleb – Antifragile, The Black Swan
Systems that survive disorder not by resisting it, but by becoming stronger from it. Relevant to both institutional resilience and personal epistemology.
Antifragile | The Black SwanNeil Postman – Amusing Ourselves to Death
A media theorist's warning about entertainment replacing information. Especially relevant in a world where signal outpaces substance.
Buy on AmazonTaylor Dotson – The Divide
A political theorist's challenge to the cult of truth as a cure-all. Argues that obsession with being "right" fuels polarization, and that productive democracy requires tolerance for disagreement, not epistemic purity.
Buy on AmazonHannah Arendt – Truth and Politics, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Arendt saw the dangers of factual collapse and defactualization before the internet made it scalable.
The Origins of TotalitarianismPeter Pomerantsev – Nothing is True and Everything is Possible
A report from inside the media simulacra machine in postmodern Russia. A real-world case of performative politics.
Buy on AmazonAlexei Yurchak – Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More
Source of "hypernormalization." Everyone knows the system is broken, yet everyone continues to act as if it's working.
Buy on AmazonNaomi Klein – The Shock Doctrine, Doppelganger
On the commodification of crisis, the rise of identity confusion, and the manufactured self.
The Shock Doctrine | DoppelgangerDavid Foster Wallace – E Unibus Pluram (essay)
A prescient critique of irony, media, and the role of sincerity in an age of performance.
Link to Essay
🧠 Supplemental Thinkers & References
Other sources, frameworks, and fragments that show up throughout the writing:
Plato – The Allegory of the Cave (from The Republic)
Foucault – On epistemes, power/knowledge, and discourse
Daniel Kahneman – Thinking, Fast and Slow
Charles Taylor – A Secular Age
David Graeber – Bullshit Jobs, The Utopia of Rules
Guy Debord – The Society of the Spectacle
Neil Gaiman – On myth, story, and symbolic worlds
Carl Jung – On the shadow, archetypes, and unconscious influence
George Orwell – Politics and the English Language, 1984
Seth Godin – Essays on signal, attention, and digital credibility