I think I have said this before but every once in a while I think about this great production of Shakespeare's Julius Caeser. It was a "use modern tech props" show and one of the set pieces was just this normal guy in the back ground who was working at a desk computer. Even as Rome went through a massive crisis and bloody war he just kept working. That image of the guy working at his computer and sometimes responding with frustrated hand gestures to actions on stage stuck with me.
I mean the context of Julius Caeser, which we know Shakespear knew about, was that Rome had already had a hundred years of increasing strife and instability with an increasing instability in government including multiple armies marching on Rome.
However, this play was done during the 00's and I think there was a commentary on the frustration of regular people to respond to government policy and that regular people just had to keep living in unstable times.