Digital Gentrification and Ontological Insecurity

5 min readApr 6, 2020

April 5, 2020, 11:38 pm
Filed under: American, art, community, theatre | Tags: cult, digital gentrification, Escaping Nxium, ontological insecurity, performing arts, podcast, theatre, Uncovered

When it became clear to me that my big break in theatre wasn’t coming any time soon, I began to create things in the digital space. If I couldn’t book a gig in a theatre, I could at least, play a song on-line or have some words I wrote get read. While I appreciated the opportunity to share with people around the world, I also felt somewhat banished into that space. The difficulty and expense of producing things pushed me there. The many barriers to entry exiled me there. Given a choice, I would have chosen a career of only theatre. I would not have become a blogger or podcaster. But I wasn’t given a choice and so I did (and do) do those things. I love them but they’re sort of a substitute for theatre for me.

And now, due to the virus, my entire field has been sent home and all the people who have never not worked steadily in theatre are catapulting into the digital space. And I feel super weird about it.

I would like to be magnanimous and welcome everyone to my world, put up a banner and give everyone a cocktail and some snacks. But I’m not feeling quite that generous yet. Because it’s not like I’m over here holding the secrets to getting lots of views and downloads. I’m feeling a little bit encroached upon, I have to confess.

Suddenly, the internet is full of theatre folk — live-streaming, zooming, creating that digital content. Meanwhile, my work garners half the views and downloads as usual. I guess it feels a little like digital gentrification.

Like, here I am, living over in the part of town no one else wants to live in and suddenly when the lights go out on all the stages, everyone rushes to the one place the lights are still working (for the time being) and it just happens to be my neighborhood. And because all the new arrivals are sparkly and have followings, all eyes turn toward them. It just suddenly feels very crowded on the internet. Which is funny, because it is huge.

My response to all this makes me feel a little petty, like I should, for sure, have put up that magnanimous welcome banner instead of shouting “Get off my digital lawn!” (I did not do this, to be clear. But I wanted to.)

One of the things I noticed when the performing arts were shut down a couple of weeks ago was a sort of fundamental panic that seemed separate from the more obvious panics arising. The most obvious panic inducing elements were the loss of income and the loss of time and efforts invested in heartfelt projects. There were jobs lost, shows closed, rehearsals cut off in mid-process. But the fundamental panic was one of identity — the “If there is no theatre, who am I? What do I do if I don’t do what I do?”

I’ve just learned that this phenomenon is something called Ontological Insecurity and as restrictions have increased and mobility decreased, more and more people feel it. Performing Artists were, perhaps, the first people hit by this ontological crisis but many others were soon to follow. I learned about this concept while listening to a podcast about a woman escaping a cult. The concept came up because, having spent 12 years in this cult, her entire sense of self, her ontological security, of knowing her place in the world, was wrapped up in the cult. To leave the cult created intense ontological insecurity.

I’m not saying we’re all in a cult that we suddenly were compelled to leave but I think the structure applies. In my on-line podcast groups, everyone was talking about how their numbers dropped when this all started. In a matter of days, they lost half their listens. The factors are complicated and some are practical, like, commuters aren’t commuting and are therefore not listening. But I suspect that the ontological insecurity is also a factor. People, without their jobs to go to or to hang their identity on are a bit at loose ends and so they are not really up for their usual podcasts. What I’m trying to say is, it might actually be the worst time to move to my digital neighborhood.

When this is all over, I hope all the folks who moved into my digital neighborhood will return to the stage (and that there will be stages to return to). I’d like to return to the stage myself one of these days, though I don’t love my chances now that the entire field has been laid low. I mean, the theatre in which I just did a show last month is unlikely to reopen, as are many of the spaces that have historically been available to me. It’s clearly going to be a different field when we return to it. And I don’t know what will come of my little digital neighborhood once the stars return to their stages, but I hope we will all be able to recover somehow and spend many ontologically secure hours in many welcoming communities. I’ll put up the banner for that, for sure.