Living in a Society of Spectacle: How disinformation and the attention economy undermine our future
By Julian Scaff
In the mid-twentieth century, theorists such as Guy Debord, Marshall McLuhan, and Noam Chomsky warned of a future in which images, information, and communication technologies would no longer simply reflect reality but actively reshape and control it. That future has arrived. In today’s churn of disinformation, misinformation, and manufactured spectacle, people are not just misinformed; they are emotionally manipulated, distracted, and divided in ways that erode individual well-being and undermine collective democratic life.
Debord’s Society of the Spectacle foresaw modern capitalism evolving from selling commodities to selling lived experience itself, mediated through images that separate people from genuine life. In this spectacle, appearances become more real than reality. McLuhan’s Understanding Media argued that the medium, the structure, and form of communication, reshape human consciousness more profoundly than content ever could. His dictum, “the medium is the message,” captures how technologies restructure thought, perception, and relationships. Both recognized that mass media were never neutral tools but powerful extensions of authority.
Chomsky and Herman deepened this critique in Manufacturing Consent, showing how media systems, even in democracies, manufacture public opinion to serve elite interests. Their analysis demonstrated that systemic bias, rather than conspiracy, leads to media filtering information, narrow debate, and pacification of dissent.
In the twenty-first century, these insights have gained urgent relevance. Writers such as Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism), Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now), Jonathan Haidt (The Anxious Generation), Zeynep Tufekci (Twitter and Tear Gas), and Tim Wu (The Attention Merchants) show how digital platforms have perfected the dynamics Debord, McLuhan, and Chomsky first diagnosed. Biased algorithms now operate at machine speed, selectively amplifying extremist views, conspiracies, and emotionally charged falsehoods.
The consequences are visible across popular culture. Reality television glorifies conflict, superficiality, and emotional volatility, rewarding the loudest and most aggressive with fame. It normalizes cruelty and narcissism, presenting them as legitimate paths to success. Social media, operating on the same logic of attention extraction, extends this harm more broadly. Studies consistently link heavy use to anxiety, depression, loneliness, and body image issues among adolescents, who are uniquely vulnerable to comparison, scrutiny, and content engineered to provoke extremes. Together, these media environments cultivate a culture that undermines empathy, critical thought, and resilience.
This is the logic of the attention economy: the commodification of human focus. It thrives not by fostering truth or community, but by maximizing outrage, fear, and tribalism. Content that provokes anger or anxiety spreads fastest, keeping users hooked. Truth becomes less profitable than spectacle; reasoned debate less captivating than performative outrage.
Journalistic outlets such as The New York Times and CNN, partisan channels like Fox News and The Huffington Post, and unregulated platforms like Facebook and Instagram all operate within this economy. Competing for clicks and shares, they rely on sensational headlines, outrage cycles, and emotional baiting to drive engagement. Audiences are drawn into a loop: provoked by manufactured emotion, funneled toward ads, encouraged to spread viral content regardless of truth, and recycled back into the churn. The result is a media ecosystem that prioritizes monetizing confusion, division, and distraction over public understanding.
Designers and media-makers have been complicit in constructing these exploitative systems. The ethos of “human-centered design,” once committed to meeting genuine needs, has been eclipsed by a corporate mandate to extract profit. Dark UX patterns, hidden fees, endless scrolls, deceptive notifications, and emotional triggers manipulate users into choices they would not otherwise make. In this framework, people are no longer treated as autonomous human beings but rather as raw material to be harvested.
The social costs are severe. Constant exposure to alarming content heightens anxiety, depression, and fragmentation. As Haidt documents, young people are particularly at risk, their development warped by environments that corrode resilience and trust. At the societal level, shared reality fractures, undermining the foundations of civil public discourse.
Meanwhile, political and corporate elites reap enormous rewards. As Tristan Harris and others argue, the architecture of the digital world is designed for behavioral manipulation, not human flourishing. By weaponizing outrage and alienation, elites consolidate power and wealth, locking citizens into cycles of distraction and disempowerment.
The modern spectacle is thus not merely a diversion; it is a system of control. Americans live not only amid bad information but within a manufactured reality calibrated to fragment attention, inflame emotion, and pacify resistance. Recognizing and reclaiming agency from this system is among the defining challenges of our time.
Designers, writers, and media-makers bear a profound responsibility. Creative work must no longer exploit attention for profit but instead cultivate clarity, empathy, and resilience. The task is not simply to make products or content but to foster cultures of truth, care, and sustainable flourishing. In an era of ecological and social crisis, design must be reclaimed as a force for planetary renewal and human thriving.
References
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. New York: Penguin Press, 2024.
Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2018.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
Tufekci, Zeynep. Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.
Wu, Tim. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.
