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Dans son livre La Société de consommation, publié en 1970, Jean Baudrillard notait déjà combien « le bonheur, inscrit en lettres de feu derrière la moindre publicité pour les Canaries ou les sels de bain, c’est la référence absolue de la société de consommation : c’est proprement l’équivalent du Salut. » Il soulignait ainsi que depuis que « Dieu es

Paul MONTJOTIN • À la recherche du temps libéré: Propositions pour une révolution écologique et culturelle (French Edition)

This imbalance induces a state of passivity: We consume what the feeds recommend to us without engaging too deeply with the material. We also adapt the way we present ourselves online to its incentives.

Kyle Chayka • Filterworld

Here are the first two sentences of Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle: “In post-industrial societies where mass production and media predominate, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly experienced has been replaced with its representation in the form of images.” He wrote that in 1967! Imagine wh... See more

Haley Nahman • #100: New idea trending

Like reality TV and video art installations, McMansions are inherently postmodern. Postmodernism, to paraphrase the philosopher Frederic Jameson in an essay on the subject, involves the commodification of culture, art, and, ultimately, of one’s lifestyle. Postmodernism removes context from subjects, weakens or eliminates historicity, and effaces th... See more

Kate Wagner • McMansion, USA

The fantasy of plenitude, the superabundance of online shit, may allow us to experience our social poverty as affluence, as in the fantasy that the internet and the social industry are ‘post-scarcity’.

Richard Seymour • The Twittering Machine

51% of viewers cannot recall a single item of news a few minutes after viewing a news program on television, and we can only retain 20% of the information in a fictional televised news story. 21% can’t remember any items within one hour of broadcast.

Neil Postman • Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“We too are products,” he went on, “cultural products. We too will become obsolete. The functioning of the system is identical—with the difference that, in general, there is no obvious technical or functional improvement; all that remains is the demand for novelty in its pure state.

Michel Houellebecq • The Map and the Territory (Vintage International)

The sense of individual ingenuity provides the temporary conviction that one is on the winning side of the system, somehow coming out ahead; but in the end there is a generalized leveling of all users into interchangeable objects of the same mass dispossession of time and praxis.