prescience

In 1936 Walter Benjamin wrote the second version of what has become his most well-known essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of its Reproducibility" (some versions use "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"). In a footnote for a section considering how film alienates the actor from his own image by taking his image to another site "in front of the masses," Benjamin begins to apply this same idea to the politician. The "mode of exhibition" that film offers, he argues, affects politicians by replacing their traditional "public," the parliament, with the masses. The politician no longer knows exactly to whom he is speaking, and it could be an infinite number of people. He goes on:

This means that priority is given to presenting the politician before the recording equipment [...] Radio and film are changing not only the function of the professional actor, but, equally, the function of those who, like the politician, present themselves before the media. The direction of this change is the same for the film actor and the politician, regardless of their different tasks. It tends toward the exhibition of controllable, transferable skills under certain social conditions, just as sports first called for such exhibition under certain natural conditions. This results in a new form of selection--selection before an apparatus--from which the champion, the star, and the dictator emerge as victors.

(Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of its Reproducibility." p.128 Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. 3, 1935-1938. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002.)

Theodor Adorno, "The Schema of Mass Culture"

Though it may not seem like much, Adorno allows for some hope at the end of this essay. If one were so inclined, one might even take his conclusion as a profound faith in the agency of the individual and the individual's ability to effect real change in the world. There is, of course, a cynical skepticism there as well: people have the ability to prevent the nightmare, but they are the same people who brought about the possibility of the nightmare. Still, you take what you can get: No political systems or historical processes have made this fate inevitable; people made it and people can undo it.

"Participation in mass culture itself stands under the sign of terror. Enthusiasm not merely betrays an unconscious eagerness to read the commands from above but already reveals the fear of disobedience, of those unconventional desires from the suspicion of which the sex murderer who kills his own beloved passionately strives to cleanse himself. This anxiety, the ultimate lesson of the fascist era, is already harbored within the very medium of technological communication. Anyone who has not been wholly inured by the oppressive self-importance of big business is unnerved to receive a telegram. The mutilated language condensed to carry the maximum information combined with the urgency of delivery imparts the shock of immediate domination in the form of immediate horror. The fear of disaster which the telegram might announce is only a mantle for the fear of the omnipresent disasters that can overtake us at any time. Above all on the radio the authority of society standing behind every speaker immediately addresses its listeners unchallenged. If indeed the advances of technology largely determine the fate of society, the technicized forms of modern consciousness are also heralds of that fate. They transform culture into a total lie, but this untruth confesses the truth abut the socio-economic base with which it has now become identical. The neon signs which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death. Yet they do not come from the sky. They are controlled from earth. It depends upon human beings themselves whether they will extinguish these lights and awake from a nightmare which only threatens to become actual as long as men believe in it."