WHAT IF THE WHOLE THING IS ADVERTISING?
April 28, 2019
Media theorist Jonathan Beller:
The Internet, while recognisable as an effect and a cause of
contemporary planetary production and reproduction, cannot be
considered in isolation if its historical role is to be properly
understood. To take the Internet as an autonomous force results in a
form of platform fetishism that disavows both the histories and
material conditions of its emergence which are, in short, those of
screen culture and of imperialism; which is to say, the means by
which the capitalist suppression of global democracy (which is, of
course and emphatically, economic democracy) has been
accomplished. To ban advertising on the Internet would be a good
start, but what if the whole thing is advertising?
"Advertisarial relations and aesthetics of survival," NECSUS, European
Journal of Media Studies. Vol. 2, No. 1 (2013), p.57.
