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 Amazon

  • Martin Gurri – The Revolt of the Public
    A keystone for understanding authority collapse in the digital age. Introduces the center vs. border dynamic.
    Buy on Amazon

  • Byung-Chul Han – Psychopolitics, The Burnout Society
    On how neoliberalism governs not through repression, but through self-optimization and emotional coercion.
    Psychopolitics | The Burnout Society

  • Jonathan 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 Generation

  • Nassim 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 Swan

  • Neil 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 Amazon

  • Taylor 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 Amazon

  • Hannah 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 Totalitarianism

  • Peter 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 Amazon

  • Alexei 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 Amazon

  • Naomi Klein – The Shock Doctrine, Doppelganger
    On the commodification of crisis, the rise of identity confusion, and the manufactured self.
    The Shock Doctrine | Doppelganger

  • David 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