skopia
Patrick Bateman works mergers and acquisitions, agonizes over the typeface on a colleague's business card, and narrates atrocities in the voice he uses for Huey Lewis albums. Reagan's Wall Street becomes horror comedy.
Capitalism's real conquest is not the factory but the ordinary day, Lefebvre argues: the commute, the meal, the weekend. He sent a generation of radicals looking for revolution in daily routine.
Lived experience has been replaced by images of itself: in 221 numbered theses Debord argues capitalism now sells the appearance of living. Spectacle became the word critics of media reach for.
Veblen argued that the rich buy expensive things to prove they can afford waste, and that idleness is itself a display. He named it conspicuous consumption, and nobody has improved on the term.
Americans stopped building selves and started managing images, Lasch argued in 1979: competence and civic obligation traded away for therapy, celebrity, and a permanent hunger to be admired by strangers.