“In alliance with the authoritarian regime, the [Russian] mass media has made the country a real ‘society of the spectacle,’”, says Ilya Budraitskis, a political and social theorist previously based in Moscow. Currently he is a Visiting Scholar with the Program in Critical Theory, UC Berkeley in the US.
Mass media has held a great deal of power over us since its inception. Its full development is more recent in Russia and its exploitation more ruthless in some ways, but television has been shaping our realities since well before my childhood filled with American TV. It’s difficult to believe that all the cop shows didn’t constitute an important part of a system of positive feedback that contributed to developing the police violence problem that exists in America today for example. Not to mention the anti-drug messages covertly inserted into TV sitcoms by actual government propagandists, or the transformation of the TV news into pure entertainment after the demise of the fairness doctrine and the various shenanigans made possible by that.
Given how powerful all that was (and still is) it’s difficult to imagine what it’s like when the state puts some serious effort into taking control of such a system and relying on it to convince people of things that make even less sense than did late 20th-century America. But given the adaptability of the Spectacle, seeing mass media “completely deprived of power” seems further off than is hinted at in the final paragraph there.