If you listened to the last episode of Citations Needed, you heard that the CIA funneled money into into cultural institutions like the Iowa Writers Workshop and the Paris Review to win the cultural war against communism. Much of this led to the emphasis on first-person writing and a focus on individual experience.
I don't know about you comrades, but I got Ds throughout secondary (high school) in English. I fucking hated 20th century lit. Are there any pretentious and overly individualistic writers that you blame on the CIA?
Debord
No actually I don't know who that is
https://hyperallergic.com/313435/an-illustrated-guide-to-guy-debords-the-society-of-the-spectacle/
Debord is one of the theorists everyone should read because he's doing what Citations Needed does but in a cohesive referential text. The 20th century saw the developments of psychoanalysis and mass/social media. Consumerism, especially with the 1960s onward, became a form of offloading hyper-alienation through commodity fetishism. Authenticity was replaced by imagery and imagery is controlled by its producers. When you've got a decent grasp of spectacle, how power structures use imagery to manipulate reality for their own ends, it's a lot easier to process what you're being sold and why.
His idea about concentrated, diffuse, and integrated spectacle really make a lot of sense.
Concentrated: Great Man, a charismatic leader, a direct and obvious propaganda department that tells you what it is (easy to ignore, not particularly effective)
Diffuse: Old American Advertising, pervasive and inescapable marketing saturating all of society with indirect imagery meant to manipulate thought patterns and enforce capitalist cultural norms.
Integrated: Modern American Advertising, Steve Jobs, Musk, Bezos etc. The combination of diffuse marketing with concentrated great man propaganda. Much more effective than either. He also predicted this before the complete adoption of it in the mid 90's/early 00's
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