Lust, Gluttony, Fake News! The consumption of the abject objects of desire

Abstract

Lying seem to have ancient roots and are deeply rooted in human inclinations to deceit for immoral or illicit advantages. Throughout history, malicious human productions have been reproduced in a limited way in niches of the private sphere. From the end of the 20th century, technological accumulations in terms of content production and consumer segmentation of the “information society” also generated conditions for the creation of the “disinformation society” through the potentialization of distorted communicative processes linked to commercial interests. It is argued in the text that, more relevant than the credibility of content and its conveyors in the context of technological potential for the production and distribution of fake news, the consumption of lies has expanded due to unconfessable human needs. Using the theoretical framework of Guy Debord's “society of the spectacle”, Christoph Türcke's Philosophy of Sensation and Shoshana Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism, the new directions of contemporary capitalism are discussed.

We describe the emergence of a new form of market that exploits the lust of excitement by social intolerance and panic in the context of biocalamities such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In the new modes of production, huge profits are generated by the society that has become the spectacle itself - now driven by the lust/greed of sensation in the excitement trade. Gluttony for excessive consumption of content that reaffirms social bonds generates more screen time on devices, although also implicated in the genealogy of xenophobia. The text discusses how the mechanisms of exploitation of lies, gossip and defamation confidences are transformed into commodities. The communicative action to overcome ideologies and emancipation of the human being has been reduced to the alienated reproduction of memes and particles of sensational information. In the context of this new “Media Age”, discourses without dialogue and conviction without interlocutions proliferate. Just as the excessive supply of sugars has led to obesity, the lust for the sensation articulated with gluttony for its consumption has led to infobesity and infodemic corruptions of communication.