ABSTRACT
We humans are the first species with the ability to perform directed genetic engineering on our ecology and ourselves. We create our own evolutionary successors while making a simple act of consumption. Corporations compete to patent plant, animal and human genomes. And with every new technology, there is an accompanying storyline (and ideology) to legitimate its production, distribution and consumption. This storyline is part of spectacle, the industry of media culture (film, television and radio as well as the theatrics of Disneyland and Las Vegas). Spectacles such as the utopian dreams of Tomorrowland (in Disney theme parks) and Paris, Paris (a Las Vegas casino and resort hotel) are totalizing selfportraits of power that mask the fragmentation and the human conditions of production as well as the ecological consequences of over-consumption. An apocalyptic example of spectacles of production, consumption, and distribution is the movie The Matrix where only a few awoke from the dream of virtual consumption and cyber-image to gaze the face of economic power and the ecosocietal disaster. Do we already inhabit the Matrix with our images, heroes, work and consumption habits patterned by corporate-media we no longer control?
