"star" system

"The public is conditioned to look for spokespeople."

The development of social media has, to a certain extent, cemented the 'star' system. People are eager to categorise themselves into a group and then swiftly rally behind a spokesperson. ​

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Taking the well-known story of “Alice in Wonderland” as the starting point, Iskra Geshoska terms the "labyrinth with no way out" as a metaphor for the confrontational relationship between an increasingly self-serving and individualized neoliberal system and the declining collective community. Facing the difficulties of contemporary social life and productions, Geshoska’s challenging yet unapologetic text calls upon us to re-examine and learn a lesson from the crucial thoughts behind Democratic Socialism, in order to seek possible resolutions for our dilemma. ​

Eric Hobsbawm noted: “Never was the word ‘community’ used more indiscriminately and emptily than in the decades when communities in the sociological sense became hard to find in real life.” He proceeds to say that people look for groups to belong to, temporarily or permanently, in a world in which everything else moves and shifts and nothing else is certain. And at the very moment when the community collapses, identity is invented. The community is a home that, for the majority of people, is just a fairy tale rather than the reality of their personal experience. ​ ​ The Collective Alice, or, on Fear, Death, Multitudes, and Pain [Iskra Geshoska] ​