The Spectacle of Evolution

In the late 20th century, philosophers warned of a coming Spectacle – a world where reality would be eclipsed by images and appearances. They saw modern life turning into an immense show, a perpetual carnival of impressions. In this spectacle, everything that was directly lived began to move into representation, as one thinker famously put it. People would interact not face-to-face, but through screens and symbols; life itself would become stagecraft. Back then, this was largely a critique of mass media and advertising. Today, in the era of social media, that prophetic vision feels truer than ever. But something new has been added to the mix, something the old philosophers didn’t fully account for: our biology – the wetware of the human brain – is now deeply entangled in the spectacle. The 21st-century spectacle doesn’t just capture our eyes and minds; it hooks into our neural chemistry, tugging at the strings of our very feelings.