The early Twentieth Century satirist, Karl Kraus, set himself the goal of exposing all journalistic language and advertising for what they are: essential links in the social reproduction of the imperialist epoch. Charlie Brooker, creator of the television program Black Mirror and the documentary series How TV Ruined your Life, is virtually the only contemporary critic who takes up the task of Kraus’s destructive judgment against the impoverishment of language and experience. Taking its formal and analytic cue from Walter Benjamin’s (...) famous essay on Kraus, this essay traces the affinity and difference between the form and content of Kraus’s and Brooker’s social criticism and art. In presenting, for example, their respective methods of quotation, as well as the relationship between the “entertainment” of the twenty-four hour “news” stream and the false promise of participation in the bourgeois public sphere, the present form of domination comes to the fore in a new light. In order to grasp this form, that is, the completed or perfected illusion of the present composition of capital, Guy Debord’s conception of the “spectacle economy” is thought alongside T.W. Adorno’s conception of the “culture industry.”. (shrink)