Present Day, May 2026
The Victorian comparison I keep returning to is this: the salons where the wealthy consumed the performance of contact with the dead while the living poor were consuming cholera in the streets below. The performance was elaborate and expensive and socially organized and entirely disconnected from the material conditions of the city the salon sat inside.
The present feast is different in its materials but structurally similar. The Victorian wealthy consumed the performance of the supernatural: the medium, the séance, the ghost. The present feast consumes the performance of authenticity: the influencer performing their real life, the algorithm performing care, the platform performing community. The hunger being fed is the same hunger: the hunger for connection with something real, satisfied by the consumption of something performed.
What I find specific and worth noting about this moment, as distinct from other moments in which I have watched similar substitutions, is the scale. The Victorian feast was organized for a relatively small wealthy class. The present feast is available, and in some forms compulsory, for everyone with a networked device. The distribution of the performance of authenticity at this scale produces effects that I do not yet have adequate historical precedent to map with confidence. But the direction of the effects: that I recognize. The Feast of Ghosts continues. The emptiness grows with every bite. May 22.