Seeing Anew

“The darkness of the movie theater restores to us a sense of limitless liberty and the comfort of being able to strip off our morality...as the faces of those near us to send into the shadows, all conversations can disappear.”--critic Giacomo DeBenedetti (1927)

Once a technology has scaled to the point where almost everyone on the planet has access to it on a daily basis, the ego wants to step in as producer and director. This is essentially the idea of the Selfie, when the large scale manifests at the small, allowing DIY "TV production".

Reality TV emerged when its extension (the Internet) made it possible. Media evolves through inflection points: The net was TV's new tool for celebrity manufacturing. MTV was music's tool for the same thing. Now they are all the tools of techo-authoritarianism, including new forms of media manipulable with machine learning.

Why is media a vehicle for ego projection?

Mussolini declared that the cinema constituted the regime's most powerful weapon. Now it's social media and all future technologies built around its infrastructure.

The Projection Car: a vehicle for ego projections, from the excellent book Fascist Modernities, by Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

Consider the ego's proclivity for projections (or "envisioning"), which are happening simultaneously on various screens: one which shows the film that you are making about your life, and all the separate screens that show films that other people are making of you that others are watching. Sometimes there is one person in the audience, sometimes more for the various "scenes". They are our collective "dream spaces", extrapolated into one vision or ideology, with millions watching one film or series. And we watch without seeing, suppressing cognitive dissonance.

When will it come for your truth?

In Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, a sub-chapter is titled "When They Come For My Truth", in which she explores cognitive dissonance:

“What happens to my will to will myself into the first person when the surrounding market cosmos disguises itself as my mirror, shape-shifting according to what it has decided I feel or felt or will feel: ignoring, goading, chiding, cheering, or punishing me?"