Titles like Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation or Debord’s Society of the Spectacle or Marx’s Capital are often called prophetic in their descriptions of the dynamics of the internet age, and justifiably so, but what’s often lost is the fact that these authors were also perfectly describing their own times, not just predicting ours. The indignities of the conditions in which we live may be getting more visible and in some senses more extreme, but they aren’t new, and to make a fetish of their supposed newness or exceptionalism only serves to render them unsolvable (or as solvable only by returning to a romanticized Before Times — a genre of solution presented just as often by liberal culture writers as it is by Donald Trump). I think we all would do well to get off of TikTok, but the purpose of a system is what it does, and so it’s also worth mentioning that phones are not an aberrant tumor that can be neatly excised while leaving the rest of the system intact; they’re just the newest and most visible manifestation of a deep, old sickness. If the Atlantic columnists were to snap their fingers and get rid of all this technology tomorrow, we’d still be a consumer population that values the cutting of costs, the maximization of profit, the alienation of human labour from value, the commodification of all being into pure product, the supremacy of the market. With those principles as our guide, we’d find our way back to iPhones and AI eventually.
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