Total alienation arises when wonder-limiting scarcity barriers are removed.

Evidence

Habermas was in agreement both with conservative culture critics and with those at Frankfurt in his critique of compensatory consumption and in suggesting that the explanation for the disastrous development towards a state of all-embracing alienation lay in the removal of all the channels through which the availability of products had been limited by an element of wonder. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 569

Categorization

• DEFINE: Habermas’s causal diagnosis of alienation via the disappearance of ‘wonder’ at the point of access to goods.
• QUESTION: What exactly counts as an ‘element of wonder’, and is its removal really the cause rather than a symptom of alienation?
• XREF: connects to: The possibility of alienation depends on the feeling of lost necessity. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1116; Collective alienation arises when individually rational actions sum to negative outcomes. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 497; Alienation presupposes an earlier unalienated human relationship to distort (+2 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: The possibility of alienation depends on the feeling of lost necessity. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1116; Collective alienation arises when individually rational actions sum to negative outcomes. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 497; Alienation presupposes an earlier unalienated human relationship to distort (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Scarcity has shifted from production of goods to consumption of attention. #complicates (0.76) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 41
• Collective alienation arises when individually rational actions sum to negative outcomes. #complicates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 497