Post-Truth & The Commodified Individual

Adam Tooze’s book, Crashed, chronicles the world following the 2008 global financial crisis. He points to this moment as a critical pivot in our relationship to truth and reality, leading to what he dubs as the ‘post-factual’ landscape that we now inhabit. Although this is inevitably an oversimplification, the term ‘post-factual’ or post-truth cannot exist without consumer capitalism, which of course, as if tracing the pattern of a river across a Google Map, leads back to the ocean that is the global economic system. When considering the role of the 2008 global financial crisis, the drama lies in the word ‘crisis’ which almost immediately garnered a duality of meaning; it was explicitly both a crisis and not a crisis.

The suffering imposed on the poorest in society, through austerity programmes, had the air of pantomime. In the most heavily affected countries, the public was held in stasis, with a foot in two paradoxical dimensions laid on top of each other – two translucent veils. One veil in which everything changed, and another in which everything stayed as things were before the ‘crisis’ – only more so. When there is a cultural paradigm shift of substantial velocity, an intimate or technological knowledge is no less valuable than an intuitive perspective – there is a transformation in the collective consciousness of a population. In everyday life, this paradox manifested in an accusatory instruction to ‘live within your means’, coupled with a mass propaganda campaign commanding you to consume more. In a post-truth realm, nothing is ever said implicitly, only implied through a myriad of contradictory messages, as is most starkly manifested through the intentional contradictory messaging and behaviour of political parties.

With regards to patent un-truths about the ‘crisis-ness’ of the 2008 global financial crisis, it makes sense that something of its DNA or polluted waters would be syphoned into consumerism – the values of which are what many define as ‘real-life’ or ‘reality’. In 2019, we are generally more au fait with the idea of marketing and the personal brand – a wholly dystopian and abstract concept which has been normalised and compounded through social media platforms. The virtual worlds we inhabit in a (mostly unconscious) quest to elevate our sense of self through a curated array of digital totems encapsulate, literally and metaphorically, the total commodification of the individual. Surely it is what Guy Debord meant when in Society of the Spectacle, he said: “All that once was directly lived has receded into representation.”

And yet, Debord’s idea of ‘representation’ relates to the internal commodification of the individual or society more than it does to the idea of the image in photographic form. As mentioned previously, the image acts as an external totem for the inner world of the individual – a form of social capital. The image, itself, is not the cause of anything; it is instead a tool of the commodified individual and is therefore commodified by association. However, it is the explicitness and capacity for implied narrative, ripe for the manifestation of untruth that makes the image such a compelling medium. It is the reason that Instagram is the dominant social media platform. In 2015, 5.1 Trillion photographs were taken, a sharp increase from the 80 billion photographs that were taken in the year 2000. The role of the image as a language and social currency of which the individual’s sense of being is expressed is one of the most profound cultural transformations in the past 50 years – the increased commodification of the individual and the disintegration of truth are interdependent and intertwined.

The commodification of anything can be considered an obfuscation of what it actually is. Typically, its meaning, function and activities are co-opted and directed towards the mode of commercial marketing and public relations in the pursuit of financial reward. However, the ubiquity and subversive aspects of social media platforms have brought the model of a brand into the psyche of the general public under the guise of self-expression and human connection. It is ironic and depressing (from any given perspective) that this behaviour is in itself a financially pointless PR-like performance that has been conditioned into the user for the sole purpose of more effectively marketing products to said user. Still worse, is the cultural transformation in the subconscious of the individual who processes their own lives from the perspective of how a brand might assess the effectiveness of a PR campaign or product. 

Because marketing and PR are inherently dishonest pursuits, developed on a processed diet of manipulation, persuasion and general fuckery, it means that inheriting these values as a world view is unhealthy. And yet, by being born into a consumer capitalist world, on which the global financial economy is dependent on one’s consumption, means that its values are inevitably impressed upon everybody, to varying degrees. Austrian-American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, Edward Bernays, defined this layer of influence in his aptly titled book Propaganda in the following terms, ‘The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country’. 

The atomised individual whose primary aim is that of self-actualisation is, in their very essence, the commodified individual. This commodification reduces all aspects of life onto the same plane of importance – an image of a friend, a natural disaster, an election, a celebrity, or a song are first treated as objects whose primary function is their perceived value to the individual’s sense of self. A side-effect of consumer-capitalist conditioning is the inability to see anything from outside the perspective of how it relates to one’s self. Similarly, such an individual views their own experiences as perfunctory to the idea of themselves having had that experience, in their mind and in that of their peers. 

Even the fields of quantum mechanics, artificial intelligence and climate change are questioning some of our most foundational truths concerning consciousness, intelligence, the fabric of reality and the future of life on earth. Yet, the danger of a post-truth world is that it corrodes cultural and societal foundations indiscriminately, simply in pursuit of its own ends, leaving nothing constructive in its wake. A brand or PR campaign, cannot dwell on the concept of objective truth, only the most efficient means of getting it from A to B. The convenience of discarding the truth in pursuit of achieving a perceived outcome is where post-truth and the commodified individual meet. A collective cultural apathy, combined with the convenience of being able to apply PR techniques to one’s self is the primary reason that we now find ourselves in a post-truth world.