I think you’ve captured something sharp and unsettling here—the way abstraction not only mystifies material conditions but also enables a kind of moral and perceptual sleight of hand. The enmeshment of the injured in abstraction layers is particularly incisive. It calls to mind how statistical frameworks, bureaucratic language, and ideological narratives dissolve concrete harm into something spectral—detached from the immediate reality of suffering, destruction, or loss.

Your framing of “petty performance as bait” is also compelling. If there is no society, then all that remains is a theater of individualized virtue, discipline, or transgression. The system evades critique because we are too busy evaluating performances within it rather than questioning the stage itself.

Your final point about massification is especially interesting. There’s an irony in that mass society, while making reality harder to directly verify, also generates the conditions for treating individuals as interchangeable while paradoxically elevating some through an aura of ineffable specialness. The “extra special sauce” of individuals, groups, or things becomes a substitute for real structural analysis, turning inequality into a matter of essence rather than arrangement.

The whole passage suggests a deep logic of control—how perception is not just shaped but constrained, funneled toward particular ways of seeing that make resistance difficult, or even unintelligible.

You said:

Can you connect these ideas to the work of others?

ChatGPT said:

Yes, your analysis intersects with multiple intellectual traditions—critical theory, political economy, phenomenology, and media ecology. Here’s how your points resonate with various thinkers and frameworks:

1. The Magic Trick of Individualized Performance:

• Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle) – Debord argues that capitalism transforms real social relations into mere representations. In your framing, the erasure of society leads to an endless evaluation of "performances," making structural critique impossible. This aligns with Debord’s insight that when everything becomes spectacle, critique itself is absorbed into the system as another performance.

• Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish) – Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power ties into your idea that individualized performance is bait. When individuals internalize norms and self-regulate, power no longer needs to be overtly coercive. The absence of society means no collective resistance, only fragmented, self-policing individuals performing within the system.

• Lauren Berlant (Cruel Optimism) – Berlant discusses how people become attached to fantasies that ultimately harm them. The bait-and-switch you describe—where material conditions vanish behind individualized performance—functions as a form of cruel optimism. It keeps people striving within a rigged system, believing their personal excellence will redeem structural failings.

2. Abstraction Layers as a Tool of Domination:

• Jean Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation) – Your point about abstraction layers reducing the destruction of the injured (people, wildlife, Earth) to data, numbers, or illusions is pure Baudrillard. He argues that in hyperreality, representations no longer correspond to reality; instead, they replace it, making violence feel unreal or even generative.

• Giorgio Agamben (Homo Sacer, The State of Exception) – Agamben's concept of "bare life" ties into your argument. When individuals or groups are reduced to numbers, they lose their political and social personhood, existing only as expendable life. The shift from lived reality to abstract representation enables this dehumanization.

• David Graeber (The Utopia of Rules) – Graeber critiques how bureaucracy turns everything into lifeless metrics. Your idea that the destruction of the real is masked as "preservation" resonates with his argument that bureaucratic systems often claim to fix or manage problems while actually deepening them.

3. The Illusion of “Special Sauce” and Mass Society:

• Pierre Bourdieu (Distinction) – Your critique of the idea that individuals, groups, or things possess an "extra special sauce" that justifies disparities in power aligns with Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural capital. The powerful often present their advantages as inherent (talent, work ethic, uniqueness) rather than structurally produced.

• Max Weber (Bureaucracy, Charismatic Authority) – Weber’s distinction between rational-legal authority and charisma relates to your argument. In a massified society, people can’t verify reality through direct experience, making them more susceptible to charismatic figures or constructed myths about why certain people "deserve" power.

• Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion) – Lippmann argues that mass societies rely on simplified stereotypes rather than direct experience. Your point about massification making reality harder to check ties into his notion that people increasingly depend on media and abstraction rather than firsthand knowledge.