Getting Past Performance Art

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, February 13, 2026

 

This week I met V Spehar of Under the Desk News. We were on a CNN panel together. Spehar was very nice and engaging. We do not share the same politics or cultural preferences. For instance, Spehar is utterly fluent in the language of social media and the young denizens of TikTok. I don’t have a TikTok account for a bunch of reasons, starting with the fact that I don’t want Chinese Communist Party spyware on my phone. Anyway, I mention Spehar because they (Spehar’s pronoun of choice) told me that people will pay to watch a very popular TikToker write a newsletter.

 

I find this fascinating, hilarious, and just a little creepy.

 

I don’t know Spehar’s “process,” but given the success of Under the Desk News (something I will confess I had never heard of until this week, but subsequently read up on), I am sure it’s entertaining.

 

I have never been a diligent profit-maximizer, which is not to say I wouldn’t like to maximize—or at least increase—my profits. So I immediately started thinking how I might do the same thing. I spend an enormous share of my waking hours writing. If flipping on a camera would create a new income stream, why not?

 

Small digression: I have a weird fascination with the way capitalism figures out how to monetize waste. Sawmills generate a lot of sawdust. They used to just throw it away, until people figured out how to reuse it to make particle board and later, wood pellets for furnaces. Drillers used to burn off the natural gas that came with pumping oil. Now, natural gas is a major fuel source. In the 1830s, Cincinnati became known as Porkopolis because of all the meat processing done there. In 1837, two immigrant brothers-in-law went into business by buying huge amounts of excess lard and turning it into soap. William Procter and James Gamble basically invented the soap industry. People used soap (sparingly!) before that, but it was typically something you made at home.

 

So I find the idea of using a camera to capture the reflected photons of my normal work activities—which until now have just bounced against the walls of my office, car, or various cigar shops with zero profit—and selling them to interested parties really quite intriguing.

 

The only problem: I know it wouldn’t work, at least not for me. First of all, I may write entertaining things on occasion, but I do not write entertainingly. A Pundit Cam trained on me would be a bit like one of those nature cams of bald eagles rearing chicks or grizzly bears catching salmon, except with none of the features that make such things compelling. It would be more like a hidden camera in a turtle terrarium—hours of watching nothing until there’s a little uninteresting movement. “He’s lighting another cigar!” “Honey, come here! He’s getting up to get more coffee!” “He got a book off the shelf!”

 

I mean, it might be a bit more entertaining if there were a split screen with the livestream of what’s on my screen. You could watch as I procrastinate by checking Twitter or texting with friends. You could watch as I roll my eyes at a video of Candace Owens blaming the Zionists for making long division so much more difficult than it needs to be. You could see my texts in real time. “He just got a text from John Podhoretz about a video clip of ‘Match Game’! This is totally worth the $9.99 monthly subscription.” “Did you see what Steve Hayes just texted him? Unbelievable.”

 

You could also watch as I write a joke and then delete it one letter at a time because it’s too inappropriate for a family publication. “He deleted the bit about Corey Lewandowski and Kristi Noem joining the mile-high club.”

 

But for obvious reasons, I don’t think that would be a good idea.

 

The only way I could make it work is by changing how I write. Like a waiter at Chotchkie’s, I’d be required to wear more flair. I’d have to break the fourth wall and talk to the audience. “Call me Gene Roddenberry ’cause I’m going to boldly split an infinitive like no man has before.” I’d blow an airhorn and shout, “Font change time!” Maybe I’d get a morning radio shock jock sound board, with fart sounds and someone shouting, “I’d buy that for a dollar!”

 

This is all a long-winded way of making a larger point. People change their behavior when they know they are being observed. Lots of pundits will invoke the Heisenberg effect, or uncertainty principle, when making this point. That’s fine, metaphorically. Heisenberg did say that he was the only person who could make blue meth. Sorry, different Heisenberg. In physics, the Heisenberg effect states that measuring or observing a system changes it, making it impossible to know both a particle’s position and momentum. But if you’re looking for a psychological description, you might want to drop Heisenberg and refer to the Hawthorne effect. When people know they’re being observed, they change their behavior (I should say that even psychologists and other social scientists use the Heisenberg effect to describe what is essentially the Hawthorne effect. I guess Heisenberg had better marketers.)

 

I once had a pie-eyed, optimistic theory that the increasing prevalence of cameras in everyday life might compensate for the decline in God-fearingness in our increasingly secular society. Readers of Suicide of the West may recall that I think monotheistic “God-fearing” was one of the most important moral innovations in human history. If it’s true that—as John Wooden, various needlepoint pillows, and Successories-style posters tell us—character is what you do when no one is watching, then the knowledge that God is always watching is a good check on bad character.

 

Now, I should say that God-fearing was never as reliable a restraint on bad character as I would like. Lots of suicide bombers and crusaders were God-fearing. If you convince yourself that God wants you to do something terrible, you’ll be more likely, not less, to do something terrible. This isn’t a rap against God—I’m sure He’s had to straighten a lot of people out in the afterlife.

 

But back to my wrong theory. I thought that the fact that everyone has a smartphone, and millions of homes and businesses have cameras, would make people conduct themselves better for fear of being caught. Social media is the dreaded “permanent record” we were told to be mindful of in school. I’m sure it has had that effect on some people in some contexts. I mean, that’s the point of bodycams for law enforcement officers, after all.

 

But the reverse phenomenon is so much more obvious. When God is replaced by the gods and demons of the attention economy, you get “accidentally” leaked sex tapes, Candace Owens, epidemics of “selfie deaths,” OnlyFans, GoPro bros falling to their death, an endless loop of Jeremiahs ranting into a camera from the front seat of their cars, and Pam Bondi testifying before Congress with all the decorum of a monkey flinging feces at tourists.

 

Speaking of Bondi, on that aforementioned CNN panel, I commented (around the six-minute mark) that the whole gross spectacle was further proof that introducing cameras to Congress was a mistake. Audie Cornish, the host, and Spehar disagreed. We continued to argue about it during the commercial break.

 

I’ll cut to the chase: I’m right. I have no doubt that Bondi would have still been obnoxious if only print reporters were present, but I am pretty confident she would have been less of a poo-flinger. Everyone agrees that she was performing for the benefit of Trump. The cameras were indispensable in that mission.

 

But I don’t want to relitigate Bondi’s performance in isolation. The Democrats who grandstanded would still have grandstanded without cameras, and the Republicans who ran interference for Bondi would still have run interference. But the dynamic would have been different. Why? Because every member has an incentive to mug for the cameras. Some do it in the hope of getting a soundbite on TV or a viral clip on social media. But all of them want a short video they can put on their websites or in a fundraising email. This is why in some hearings you’ll have senators or representatives take turns basically making the same statement over and over again. You can’t fundraise off of someone else fretting about fascism or railing against corruption, you need to be on tape doing it yourself. And since most people don’t watch these hearings, your bespoke target audience thinks you were the only one to heroically speak truth to power.

 

In a camera-free room, the incentive to seek information is stronger and the incentive to preen is weaker. My job, or a big part of it, is to write stuff: columns, books, “news”letters, epic bathroom-stall poems about the Tokugawa Shogunate in iambic pentameter, etc. If you put a camera on me—particularly in the bathroom stall—it changes the process. Suddenly, I have two jobs: Write stuff and entertain viewers. I can do both things, but trying to do both at the same time makes me worse at both. Members of Congress are there to do specific things, but doing it on camera makes them worse at it.

 

The People Are Revolting

 

Oh, and by the way, the problem isn’t just performative politicians, but a performative public as well. Journalists and politicians love polls and focus groups. Both definitely have their utility, particularly when done well (which is not always the case). But just as the Hawthorne effect applies to politicians, there are all manner of ways in which asking people for their opinions yields “unreal” results.

 

Let me throw a bunch of terms at you: attitude construction, demand characteristics, mere-measurement effect, attitude crystallization, social-desirability bias, self-perception theory, and cognitive dissonance effects.

 

These all have different meanings and contexts, but the gist is this: When you ask people for their opinions, you don’t necessarily get their authentic opinions—often because people don’t have them. Instead, you often get what people think you want to hear or what they think they’re supposed to say, or what they think will make them sound smarter or more informed than they really are. And sometimes the mere act of stating an opinion they don’t actually hold very strongly makes them commit to what they said because they said it.

 

Politicians and journalists look at focus groups and polls and think they’re getting real intel about what “the people” think. Sometimes they might be, depending on the questions and topic, but not necessarily. But at least polls and focus groups have some social-scientific rigor to them. We now live in an age where a huge number of politicians think that they’re getting the real skinny on what “the people” think by scrolling through social media.

 

There’s a centuries-old debate in democratic societies between champions of the trustee model of representation and the delegate model of representation. The delegate model says that elected politicians should simply be the instrument of their voters’ will. You might remember my favorite quote from William Jennings Bryan: “The people of Nebraska are for free silver, and I am for free silver. I will look up the arguments later.” That’s the delegate model. The trustee model, as delineated by Edmund Burke in his letter to the electors of Bristol, is screw that noise. “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."

 

There’s a third way—the “politico model”—that says it’s a little of both, and that’s fine with me. There are plenty of minor issues that politicians can and probably should simply defer to their voters on. But there are situations in which doing the right thing is more important than doing the savvy thing. As Donald Trump’s acquittal in his second impeachment made abundantly clear, there aren’t a lot of Republicans left in Congress who agree with that. But that’s a topic for another time.

 

I sometimes like to think about what our politics would be like if there were no polls, no focus groups, and no social media. Politicians would still try to take the temperature of their constituents. But they’d have to do it by talking not just to a random sampling of voters. They’d have to talk to small-r republican leaders of communities and institutions. They’d ask the head of the Elks Lodge, “What are your people saying?” They’d have to ask an elementary school principal, “What’s the mood among the parents at your school?” They would read op-eds and editorials in local newspapers more because they would matter more. And they’d show up at town halls not just to get footage for ads. In short, they’d have to wade into the thickest segments of civil society and make real arguments and have authentic conversations, rather than read the thin and unreliable surface-skim of polls and viral posts. You know, the way it’s supposed to work.

 

Which brings me back to the Heisenberg effect. In physics, the Heisenberg effect is about systems. And in our system, the way we measure popular attitudes changes the system, and not for the better.