The Max Headroom program I saw in the 1980s turned out to be the first version of the character produced by Channel 4 in England and broadcasted by Cinemax in North America. After three seasons in the UK, the show was taken to the US and rebranded as a cyberpunk adventure series set on a dystopian world ruled by television networks. The hero of the series was Edison Carter, a maverick reporter bent on disclosing the sordid schemes of the ruling elite and who, nonetheless, worked for the most important television network. After a motorcycle accident, Carter’s mind is uploaded to a computer where it becomes Max Headroom. The character doesn’t appear very often in the series but, being a virtual entity, it is able to travel through TV networks and access confidential information. It turns out this witty AI was not only an 80’s rebel but the coolest cultural product of our time: the media guerrilla fighter.

True to the conventions of the cyberpunk genre (corporate corruption, destruction of the middle-class, integration of all the aspects of human life to media and information, etc…), the show managed a certain prescience of our current situation. Max Headroom presents an extremely familiar scene: a hypnotized population manipulated by a caste of all-mighty media overlords. The first episode of the series, titled Blipverts, deals with a type of high-intensity, high-speed, hyper-concentrated TV commercial that overloads the nervous systems of the viewers and, ocasionally, causes them to explode.¹ We are yet to burst, but have been firmly glued to our screens. In another episode, a terrorist group starts broadcasting live footage of their bombings; it is later found out that they are selling the rights to the coverage of their attacks to finance their activities. Media itself contributes to terrorism by converting it into a form of entertainment.

These themes are expressions of a totalitarianism that in real life has been carried out in “soft” ways and, therefore, never seems to be what it actually is. Of course, this new totalitarianism is not of the political sort which the twentieth century accustomed us to, it is much more subtle but, paraphrasing Ballard, no less sinister and Kafkaesque for that (4.6). 

In this regard, says Herbert Marcuse,

contemporary industrial society, tends to be totalitarian. For “totalitarian” is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.²

By its very structure, this new type of totalitarianism effectively absorbs any attempt at opposition.

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1. Unsurprisingly, this technique has already been deployed several times by companies such as GE and Miller in their advertising campaigns. ↩︎
2. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 5. ↩︎