Hyperreality and the simulation of justice: Interrogating ‘performance crime’ in New South Wales

Abstract

Digital platforms have amplified the capacity for individuals to document, perform, and circulate images of themselves engaged in criminal offending. Perpetrators can influence public perceptions of criminality through viral visibility, deliberately crafting content to provoke, attract attention, or assert presence within platform affordances. Through critical discourse analysis of parliamentary debates and media commentary, this article analyses the ‘posting and boasting’ phenomena, a new legal category in some Australian jurisdictions that treats the online visibility of certain crimes as a distinct form of offending. With a focus on the Australian jurisdiction of New South Wales, the article applies Baudrillard’s theory of simulation to interrogate the conditions under which the criminal law begins to regulate representations of crime rather than the crime itself. It argues that the New South Wales ‘performance crime’ offence of posting and boasting emerged through unreasonable legislative decision-making, and re-ordered crime and responsibility through a contested moral hierarchy. As such, the criminalisation of posting and boasting in New South Wales reflects criminal law operating as simulation, where the appearance of crime control is substituted for its practice.