Baudrillard’s 1987 account of schizophrenia predicted the smartphone-era subject

Evidence

Jean Baudrillard’s 1987 text The Ecstasy of Communication reads like an astonishing science-fictional prophecy of our current moment. Writing nearly thirty years ago, Baudrillard invoked an era of “absolute proximity, total instaneity”, of informational schizophrenia. “The schizo”, Baudrillard writes, “is bereft of every scene, open to everything in spite of himself […] It is the end of interiority and intimacy, the overexposure and transparency of the world which traverses him without obstacle. He is now only a pure screen, a switching centre for all the networks of influence”. Baudrillard’s heightened rhetoric captures what is now a banal experience — indeed, it might be the very signature of contemporary banality. With the ubiquity of smartphones, the feeling of being overwhelmed by cyberspatial injunctions is now commonplace. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1766

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: theory-as-prophesy — mining 1980s critical theory texts to see which predicted the smartphone/attention economy and why, a ‘prophecies of the digital age’ essay.
• XREF: Baudrillard’s simulation/late-capitalist semiotics connects to Fisher’s wider accelerationist and capitalist-realism project, plus Jonathan Crary’s 24/7 attention critique. — connects to: Baudrillard equated media saturation with the schizophrenic loss of interiority — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1112

Broader Connections

• Baudrillard equated media saturation with the schizophrenic loss of interiority #corroborates (0.90) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1112