Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

This might sound strange, but I think we can judge the health of a public culture by what I call the Actor Index. This measures the proportion of featured interviews in the newspapers that are devoted to actors. The higher the proportion, the greater the trouble we’re in
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Now I have nothing against actors. But, by definition, we value them for their ability to adopt someone else’s persona and speak someone else’s words. Fetishising actors reveals an obsession with images, rather than with the realities they obscure.

Guy Debord argued that “the spectacle” (the domination of social relationships by images) is used to justify the “dictatorship of modern economic production”. It disguises and supplants the realities of capitalism, changing our perceptions until we become “consumers of illusion”.

I don’t have the stats to support my impression (hello media students). But it seems to me that the proportion of featured interviews devoted to actors, rather than to people whose skill is to speak their own words and do their own deeds, has been rising steadily for decades.

It has now reached the point of absurdity. I'd guess that roughly 60% of big featured interviews are now with actors, rather than with fascinating people in thousands of other walks of life. Something strange is happening, and it astonishes me that so few people seem to notice.

Of course I don’t mistake the media for society. I know that most media organisations have an interest in avoiding what is true and troubling, and directing our minds to the spectacle, disguising the realities of capitalism.

But there’s clearly a market for this obsession, so I think it’s fair to see this apparent phenomenon as reflecting public culture, while recognising that this culture is shaped to a large extent by the private interests of the press.

Debord’s book Society of the Spectacle, published over 50 years ago, was remarkably prescient. I think it describes to a frightening degree the world in which we now live, but which was only beginning to take shape when the book was written.

But how do we know how far we have progressed towards his frightening vision? I would like to propose the Actor Index as a measure of the extent to which we have succumbed to the spectacle, and have become consumers of illusion. In other words, as a measure of our sickness.