A LiveLeak showing how people sitting in offices design these narratives and sell them to the public would be genuinely revolutionary - especially if it also showed uncensored video of the gore and horror of the results.
IMO Baudrillard and the rest of Critical Theory are absolutely useless at this.
The language is obscure, self-indulgent, self-aggrandising, and exclusive. Instead of revealing the reality of how these thing work it has the opposite effect of making them even more obscure, arcane, and distant - except for a tiny, tiny minority of self-styled insiders who feel like they have privileged secret insight which flatters their moral and intellectual vanity.
The insight is useless and illusory unless it changes mass awareness and mass behaviour. Baudrillard, Lyotard, and the rest have made a terrible contribution to making that less, not more, likely.
Some friends of mine and I are working through Simulacra and Simulation. It takes us about 30 minutes to get through three sentences, while we parse the horrible word choice and ridiculously obfuscating sentence structure.
Luckily, once we've created our interpretation of what he's saying, it seems very smart, and we certainly couldn't have done it without him.
The blog "The Last Psychiatrist" does a lot of Baudrillard-style commentary.
IMO Baudrillard and the rest of Critical Theory are absolutely useless at this.
The language is obscure, self-indulgent, self-aggrandising, and exclusive. Instead of revealing the reality of how these thing work it has the opposite effect of making them even more obscure, arcane, and distant - except for a tiny, tiny minority of self-styled insiders who feel like they have privileged secret insight which flatters their moral and intellectual vanity.
The insight is useless and illusory unless it changes mass awareness and mass behaviour. Baudrillard, Lyotard, and the rest have made a terrible contribution to making that less, not more, likely.