From the Culture Industry to the Differentiated Global Spectacle : Consumption, Images, and Necropolitics

Abstract Contemporary consumption no longer aims merely to satisfy needs : it structures identities under the combined influence of the market and the image. Drawing on the Frankfurt School (culture industry), Guy Debord (society of the spectacle), and Jean Baudrillard (hyperreality), this article shows how digital platforms transform intimacy, labor, and social relations into spectacle, reversing moral hierarchies so that visibility outweighs integrity. This initially Eurocentric diagnosis is expanded through Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics : the spectacle of the centers (influencers, stories) relies on the extraction of peripheral lives (data colonies, disposable bodies). Case studies : TikTok in Africa, racialized dating apps, surveillance capitalism, illustrate a differentiated global spectacle : seduction in metropolitan zones, material violence in the margins. The article proposes a decolonial critical theory of the present and sketches the contours of a politics of de-spectacularization. Keywords society of the spectacle, necropolitics, Achille Mbembe, consumption, digital coloniality, platforms, Frankfurt School, Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, hyperreality