Alright, welcome everyone, this is Edward Holmes and I’m joined by Laura Bennett. You’re listening to CMAF 1010—today’s episode is “The Death of Reality.” So, Laura, I wanna start with something that’s been gnawing at me: this idea that just being present online, just existing, is a kind of invisible labor. Doesn’t it feel like, these days, every click or like or even just scrolling—none of it’s free. It’s all turned into value for someone else, probably a Silicon Valley boardroom somewhere.It absolutely does. And when we talk about digital labor, I think we often overlook how subtle it’s become. I mean, Marx would have been fascinated—maybe horrified!—seeing how platforms extract value from what looks like leisure. These metrics—likes, shares—they’re not just feedback; they’re commodities traded for attention, and attention is now the currency. We’re making money for someone, whether we realize it or not.Yeah, exactly. This is where I think Marx’s old circuits of capital need a digital update. We're not just laboring in factories—we’re constructing this huge loop of profit every time we hit like, follow, or drop a comment. The experience of being online is like, well, manufacturing value out of our daily traces. And what’s wild is, sometimes, it isn’t even us doing the work—there are bots involved, right? Automated accounts pumping up numbers.Right! Bots, AI, algorithmic engagement—it's all designed to keep the economy spinning even when we’re not really there. Engagement is simulated because platforms need that constant buzz. Thinking about Baudrillard here—signs with no referent, endless value cycles buzzing without real meaning. And the bigger the illusion of activity, the more attractive the whole platform looks for advertisers or investors.Mmm, and that’s a perfect segue to the infamous Microsoft Tay bot scandal, remember that? So, for anyone who maybe missed this—Microsoft launched this AI chatbot, Tay, onto Twitter, hoping it would learn human social skills. Well... in less than a day, Tay started spewing the worst stuff you could imagine because it just parrots what it sees. But the kicker is, all the engagement, even the toxic stuff, generated a firestorm of attention, which, in the perverse logic of platforms, means data—and, ultimately, money. It’s simulation run amok for profit.Exactly, it’s a system that rewards just staying in motion. No real need for meaning, just activity. Drives home how human presence, or the appearance of it, becomes the most valuable product.And that constant hum of engagement—real or not—shapes how we even see ourselves online. The pressure to perform, to stay “on brand,” it never stops. With algorithms favoring whatever’s immediate, we're left living in this kind of flat “present-mindedness.” There’s barely room for continuity—it’s just next post, next story, next trend.I feel that, Laura. You always need to be optimizing, don’t you? I always trip over Baudrillard’s hyperreality theory for this stuff. It’s not just that the world out there is blurry, it’s that our selves are part of the blur—there’s no backstage left, just performance. And McLuhan, with his line about the medium becoming our skin—what a phrase, right? We aren’t just seeing the spectacle, we’re literally living through it, crafting ourselves for the feed.That resonates, and it’s something I’ve seen a lot in my research on TikTok creators, for instance. The relentless self-curation… they’ll delete videos that get the “wrong” kind of attention or just don’t fit the vibe anymore. It's almost like identity’s a feed to manage, not this stable self. There’s no past, just the latest version of you for public consumption. If a post doesn’t perform, you erase it and start over.I mean, that’s so different from how identity worked even a decade ago. We’d leave a trail, warts and all. Now, it’s like history itself is inconvenient—it gets curated out of existence. I have to say, there’s something a bit unsettling, a bit exhausting, about always feeling the need to perform, never letting the mask slip.It is exhausting. That’s the heart of Baudrillard’s hyperreality—not just that what’s real and what’s fake blur, but that we lose access to stability, to a grounded sense of self. The “medium is the skin” part? It’s that we don’t only consume images—we become them. The spectacle isn’t just what we look at; it’s who we are.You know, when everything’s a simulation and a performance, there’s a big question about authenticity and even empathy itself. If every moment of caring gets filtered through the logic of the platform—emojis, hashtags, cycles of likes—what does real empathy even look like now?I’m not sure, honestly. Empathy online often feels like a formatted thing. Baudrillard would say even compassion gets simulated. There’s genuine feeling, but it’s forced into slots that drive engagement. We rally around hashtags, send hearts, but those signals are data for the algorithm as much as they’re expressions of solidarity.Yeah, and it’s all performance—solidarity becomes a loop’ like: engage, repeat. And then you get this battle over what any of it means. Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding comes to mind. He argued that meaning isn’t passed down from on high; it’s negotiated every step of the way. But when we're all turned into metrics, whose interpretation gets to matter?That’s the real battleground, isn’t it? It’s not enough to just receive messages. Now, fandoms dissect every frame, activists fight for control over the meaning of a movement, and even corporations jump into the conversation to frame narratives their way. Meaning becomes a thing to fight over, a commodity as much as attention or identity.Exactly. And in this landscape, agency gets slippery. There’s still room for resistance—fans push back, activists outmaneuver algorithms—but it’s never total. We’re all negotiating the terms in this flattened world, just hoping for a little authenticity to survive the grind.Well put, Edward. I guess that’s a good note to leave things for now—meaning is up for grabs, but so is our potential to reclaim it, however briefly. Shall we wrap it up?Let’s do it. Thanks for the conversation, Laura. And thanks to everyone for listening to this episode of CMAF 1010. We’ll be back soon, diving deeper into the wild world where media, identity, and meaning keep colliding.Take care, Edward! Always thought-provoking chatting with you. And to our listeners, stay curious. Goodbye for now.

Episodes

The Death of Reality