“Media stars are spectacular representations of human beings, distilling the essence of the spectacle’s banality into images of possible roles. Stardom is a diversification in the semblance of life – the object of an identification with mere appearance which is intended to compensate for the crumbling of directly experienced diversification of productive activity. Celebrities figure various styles of life and various views of society which anyone is supposedly free to embrace and pursue in a global manner. Themselves incarnations of the inaccessible results of social labour, they mimic by-products of that labour, and project these above labour so that they appear as its goal. The by-products in question are power and leisure – the power to decide and the leisure to consume which are the alpha and omega of a process never questioned. In the former case, government power assumes the personified form of the pseudo-star; in the second, stars of consumption canvass for votes as pseudo-power of life lived. But, just as none of these celestial activities are truly global, neither do they offer any real choices.”
–Guy Debord
