“A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetise the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera's twin capacities, to subjectivise reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs as strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images.” - Susan Sontag, On Photography
Discussion
"A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying "
This person conflated consumerism with capitalism. Capitalism is about savings and investment, not consumption. Increased consumption only comes after savings and correct capital allocation, not the reverse.
hmm...I was going to say it's a conflation with materialism.
perhaps I'm missing the point of the whole thing, but did find it difficult to continue with this common conflation.