The Max Headroom show may be a clever critique of modern media but it is, simultaneously, just another one of its products. In fact, the role of Edison Carter and Max Headroom is to offer the illusion of resistance in a world where genuine opposition is no longer possible. Allow me to elaborate: a society in which resistance is carried out within the boundaries of the media—that is, under the terms of society itself—is a society without true opposition. This is a basic trait of what Mark Fisher called capitalist realism,, “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”1
This unfortunate state of affairs is the result of the integration of each and every aspect of human life in the operative frame of post-industrial society and global economy, which includes the individual’s capacity to dissent. In such a state the “choices” offered by capitalism—be it alternative lifestyles or seemingly meaningful forms of rebellion—are but barren replacements that lack the seeds of true opposition.
Thus, according to Marcuse, under the rule of a repressive whole,
liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual… Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear—that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls.2
The controls Marcuse talks about are manifold, but the one that concerns us here is one of the main elements of the system, its gravitational center so to speak: the celebrity.
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