“The Elon Musk Twitter of it all…” Breslin laments. This, they hope, will cause “an AI-generated mass self-cancellation white lib heterosexual suicide pact” that allows them to keep partying, free of responsibility, as the world burns around them. Knowing that terrified white libs will follow Frank Ocean’s (righteous) advice to be quiet instead of seeming racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic, they engineer a series of truth-distorting bots, modeled after composite photos of a presumed-dead, ethnically ambiguous woman on Facebook (indelibly performed by Rodríguez) to prevent pushback. The play’s neo-conservative antiheroes (Breslin and Foley resist calling them villains) aren’t so much explicitly ideological as they are 1) bored of endless discourse, and 2) hip to the ways it can be manipulated to sow chaos. Among its many targets, all of which are encapsulated in the self-surveilling narcissism its title suggests, Circle Jerk mostly ridicules the political weaponization of identity in a meme culture that flattens nuance, and a public sphere that runs on the fear of being found out.
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