Post-Liberal Competitions?

Competitions have a “liberal” quality, where the traits they measure or reward have some connection to broader moral virtues, beyond the frame of a contest, and where they have transparency surrounding their norms and metrics of evaluation. This allows competitions to serve as consensus-forming procedures, which establish differentials of value in a publicly agreeable fashion. However, competitions can also be organized for the benefit of the organizer, in order to acquire information about participants and accrue competitive advantage in some larger competition. In the age of the digital platform, competitive performance is constantly monitored, but in ways that don’t produce public results or consensus. As in randomized controlled trials, the “world” as encountered by the participant looks very different from the one seen by the observer. This produces a format of “post-liberal competition,” in which (in Goffman’s terms) the “front stage” and “back stage” are radically split from each other.