You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.
George Orwell, 1984.
In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher argues that the hyperreality produced by reality TV has a very particular way of drawing us to its threshold: it creates a feedback loop in the form of a voting mechanism that integrates us into a new form of control disguised as participation (9.17):
The slogan that the Big Brother TV show uses—“You decide”—captures perfectly the mode of control by feedback that, according to Baudrillard, has replaced old centralized forms of power. We ourselves occupy the empty seat of power, phoning and clicking in our responses. TV’s Big Brother had superseded Orwell’s Big Brother. We the audience are not subjected to a power that comes from outside; rather, we are integrated into a control circuit that has our desires and preferences as its only mandate.
Three issues we addressed previously reappear in this fragment. First, what Fisher calls 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.” (5.5), is a form of soft totalitarianism (5.4) characterized by decentralizing its control techniques and hiding them under technological advance. The figure of the celebrity so present in reality shows is essential to this form of totalitarianism, which, having decentralized itself, must transfer the locus of sovereignty from the polis to the market, thus diffusing the status of the sovereign from the political sphere (dictator, head of state) to the media sphere (celebrities). Thus, the celebrity is the hidden point of union, the hinge, between the so-called democratic and totalitarian states. (3.2).
On the other hand, being integrated into the control circuit that dominates the desires and preferences of the public, or, in other words, having incorporated it into ourselves, implies the ongoing colonization of the inner self that heralds its eventual disappearance (5.12). This process of assimilation, typified by Orwell’s epigraph, is followed by a projection of the inner into the outer represented in Michael A. Weinstein’s maxim “the mind is on its way to being exteriorized again.” (5.2). Such externalization is a variation of the collective mind of the mystery religions and early Christian communities. A return to a hive mind that presents terminal capitalism as a form of regression to the mythical.
Thirdly, as Marcuse argues (5.5), the capacity to choose that characterizes capitalist societies represents an implicit form of control that ends up being incorporated by the individual. The main result of this operation is an instrument of domination that gives the impression of producing freedom. We would do well to remember that
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
As with the options present in a given market, the illusion of choice, interactivity and participation sold by reality television are actually instruments of control without which the acquiescence of capitalist society would not be possible.
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