J.G. Ballard on the role of celebrities as soft dictators:
Consumerism is the door to the future… People accumulate emotional capital, as well as cash in the bank, and they need to invest those emotions in a leader figure. They don’t want a jack-booted fanatic ranting from a balcony. They want a TV host sitting with a studio panel, talking quietly about what matters in their lives. It’s a new kind of democracy, where we vote at the cash register, not the ballot box. Consumerism is the greatest device anyone has invented for controlling people. New fantasies, new dreams and dislikes, new souls to heal. For some peculiar reason they call it shopping. But it’s really the purest kind of politics… shopping. Pero es realmente el tipo más puro de la política […]1
Consumerism, with its celebrity and star system, is politics divested of its traditional moorings and transferred to the market. It is a politics for objects that has been stripped of the mask of sociability.
- J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come, 166.↩︎
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