Quote of the Day

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This, from the wonderful and quixotic-in-the-good-way Joe Bageant, strikes me as deeply true, and deeply related to big business marketing, among other things:

Our faculty of ordinary encounter has been systematically broken down. In its place we now have our unique social hallucination. Never do we encounter anything directly, yet we get the illusion of encounter. This includes encounter with each other. Anyone who lives in meatspace with his or her fellow Americans could not deny 57 million of them health. In this society no one is any longer capable of recognizing anyone else. Instead, we see others as the screamers at the town hall meetings, or as communists who want to give free healthcare to illegals and establish death panels. Or as Christian fundamentalists, or as liberals or conservatives. Or as celebrities or as nobodies.

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hce
hce
11 years ago

I don’t know Joe, but he sounds like Thomas de Zengotita in “Mediated”, a terrific book on how almost all of our experience is virtual in some degree — packaged for us by others in order to give us the feeling of power!

A refinement of Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle”

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