Virtue signaling, wokeness, performativity

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc / LMMiami.com

• Virtue signaling is socialspeak for hypocrisy.
• It can be more or less performative.
• For instance: liking a post on Greenpeace’s Instagram feed or retweeting Greta Thunberg feelgood memes is virtue signaling with minor effort.
• AKA slacktivism.
• Virtue signaling, however, sometimes entails planning, props and choreographed publicity stunts.
• Remember the ice bucket challenge?
• Please note that I am using “performative” in its pejorative sense: adding drama, pomp and circumstance to a statement.
• Politicians have been highly adept at enacting carefully crafted acts of virtue signaling since forever.
• And we ourselves are plenty responsible for the current epidemic of pervasive cringe-inducing performativity.
• We as in the advertising industry.
• People exposed to the hyperbolic nature of most ads out there end up imitating it.
• One example: the American tradition of proposing in increasingly elaborate ways to obtain as much histrionics as possible from the bride, passersby, friends and family.
• There’s a fine line between romanticism and vicarious embarrassment.
• The age of social media is showering us with multiple forms of performativity taken to 11: flash mobs, death defying selfies and random acts of wokeness for small screen consumption.
• The latest salvo of brilliant, performative virtue signaling was last week’s global high school walkout to protest climate change.
• LOL: I can’t think of an easiest way to garner adolescent fervor for a cause than to get thousands of pubescent students to take a Friday off.
• Not sure the idea of “Woke Weekends” might carry a lot of support.
• How about “Woke Wednesdays”?
• Bingo: let’s stage a walkout from every classroom in the world on hump day to protest something or other and demand immediate action from insensitive world leaders.
• Hell yeah.
• Right after Taco Tuesdays.
• Speaking of which, we Latinos rarely make headlines for our abilities in the fields of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) but, boy, we are masters in the high art of performative wokeness and virtue signaling.
• Enter outspoken Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-New York) and omnipresent Spanish restauranteur José Andrés.
• AOC is the virtue signaling gift that keeps on giving.
• You probably remember her pics crying, all dressed in white, looking through a chain link fence at a detention facility near the border with Mexico.
• Spontaneous.
• Just like José Andrés’s stints pouting at the Oscar ceremony or delivering meals at hurricane hit areas (selfless acts of generosity he describes in detail on long monologues he posts on his social media feeds, live from the scene).
• Andrés, we know you want to help but what experience, training or vetting do you have as a first responder?
• We fully understand that you do this with the best of intentions, but it is highly likely that your overfed body and your famished ego are getting in the way of experienced professionals in the field who are trying to do their jobs.
• In any case, if you are such a philanthropist why are your restaurants so prohibitively expensive, to the point that a vast majority of US Hispanics, let alone refugees from disaster areas, couldn’t even dream of enjoying a meal there?
• Your Robin Hoodesque business model is odd: you make overpriced gourmet meals for the rich and powerful which subsequently subsidize the free food you give away at assorted places such as furloughed government employees gatherings of natural disaster sites.
• Allow me to poke a little hole in your logic though: wouldn’t it be way more efficient and productive to stay in your fancy kitchens trying to make more affordable meals for more people instead?
• It all looks and sounds like a thinly veiled marketing maneuver for your “brand” and your upscale establishments.
• Hey, kudos to you for pulling in all this publicity but be aware that it looks like your altruism’s ulterior motive at some point if might come back to haunt you.
• The “doing well by doing good” play is a slippery slope.