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At the time I read this I mostly understood his themes through the lens of mass production and product/lifestyle marketing, to some degree an extension of Veble
by trts 6y ago
At the time I read this I mostly understood his themes through the lens of mass production and product/lifestyle marketing, to some degree an extension of Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class and conspicuous consumption as class identity.
Lately I have begun thinking about this book again particularly in the context of Covid and the 2020 U.S. election, where the pandemic has made apparent the inability of our institutions to serve their functions (e.g. for the CDC to prepare and stockpile supplies in the event of a rare mass pandemic) or for either party to offer any authenticity behind their expressed purposes ("draining the swamp" by intensifying the culture of corruption in D.C. or helping Main Street through massive Wall Street bailouts). These institutions and parties are essentially emulating the familiar principles of the past while operating by the power structures that have captured them. We seem to take it for granted.
- claudeganon 6y agoBaudrillard’s point was beyond this - that Capitalist media technologies create a hyperreal blanket over everything such that these institutions are fully consumed by movement within its symbolic exchange that they lose what we would commonly think of as their “use value.”
- westoncb 6y agoIs it not possible to express these ideas in ordinary language? For instance, is anything lost by instead saying: Capitalist media companies powered by modern technology are incentivized by profit motive to distort their portrayal of reality. Specifically, their portrayals will paint a picture of reality more enticing than the real thing; this is self-evident since their revenue is tied directly to 'enticement'. Once this fictional portrayal has been established and enough people believe in it, later fictional events of the fictional world may become as significant as actual events. So, institutions affected by capitalist media portrayal will adjust their valuation of potential actions to take this into account. As a result, their behavior will deviate from its traditional role in the context of our real society when it can benefit more by playing a role in the fictional media-created portrayal of the world. ------- Of course the original version is shorter and sounds cooler, but it's also far more vague and will only be comprehensible to a much smaller subset of the audience here. What bothers me especially is the original expression's framing in terms of an alternate reality. What does that add? It can't just be fiction but has to be 'hyperreal'? I get it, it's a particular type of fiction so it's more specific than that. The intention is probably like the sense in which a cartoon avatar of a woman with exaggerated curves might be called 'hyperreal'. And I realize I'm revealing my own philosophical commitments here by suggesting there is a single shared reality to begin with, and I realize the author does not share this stance—but I mean... this is not a community of philosophers: why implicitly adopt a stance which won't be shared 99% of readers as the base framing if there is any legitimate interesting in communication here? I could understand if it were actually necessary to communicate the core idea, but it does not appear to be so.
- alexpetralia 6y agoThis was a breath of fresh air. Thanks.