I Am Legend 2.0: The Last Man Against the One-Dimensional Crowd

From Matheson’s Vampires to Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man: The Invisible Apocalypse and the Death of the Moral Human

## Introduction — People Are Strange: The Last Man in a City of Millions Some people have always experienced the strange sensation of being the last man alive in a city of millions. Nothing has physically happened to the city. The cafés are full, traffic jams still clog the streets, office towers illuminate the night, television studios broadcast continuously, phones vibrate, advertisements scream, politicians speak, influencers smile, consumers buy and crowds hurry towards destinations they rarely stop to question. Yet for the person who has somehow fallen out of synchronisation with this machinery, the metropolis can suddenly resemble the abandoned New York of I Am Legend. Everyone is there, but almost nobody seems present. Bodies move while the same phrases circulate between them; faces glow in the reflected light of identical screens; opinions arrive preassembled; indignation follows schedules; desires are predicted before they are consciously experienced. The apocalypse has occurred without destroying a single building. This peculiar loneliness has long belonged to artists, outsiders, dissidents, cynics and those inconvenient individuals whom the majority alternately calls eccentric, antisocial, pessimistic, mad or simply strange. The Doors captured its emotional structure with extraordinary economy in “People Are Strange”: “Faces look ugly when you’re alone.” The stranger does not necessarily inhabit another world; the stranger discovers that the familiar world has become foreign. This is also why the title of David Oelhoffen’s Far from Men (2014), adapted from Albert Camus’s short story “The Guest,” resonates far beyond its geographical isolation. Daru is caught between communities and loyalties without fully belonging to either. The deeper existential condition is not simply solitude but estrangement: to remain among human beings while feeling oneself a guest within the moral and political order they have constructed. The stranger is simultaneously inside society and outside its consensus. He looks at what everybody else calls normal and cannot persuade himself that normality and sanity are necessarily the same thing. From Camus to Jim Morrison, from Émile Cioran to George Carlin, from John Lennon to Paddy Chayefsky’s Network, modern culture repeatedly returns to this disturbing figure: the individual who suspects that the crowd has not merely chosen another opinion but another definition of reality. Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) can be read as one of the most radical versions of precisely this nightmare. Its famous reversal appears straightforward: Robert Neville believes himself to be the last normal human surrounded by vampires, but eventually discovers that a new society has arisen and that he, the daylight hunter who enters their homes and kills them while they sleep, has become the monster of their collective imagination. “Normality” has migrated from the individual to the new majority; Neville has become an anomaly, and therefore a legend. But what if this celebrated interpretation is incomplete? What if the decisive question is not whether Neville remains biologically human while everybody else has genetically changed, but whether the vampires themselves can be understood as a metaphor for ideological, ethical and psychological transformation? What if the plague is civilisation itself at a particular stage of its development? Then Neville becomes something very different from the obsolete representative of a defeated species. He becomes the Last Moral Man: the person who continues to insist that humanity is not established by numbers, biological classification or social consensus. Herbert Marcuse’s one-dimensional man and C. S. Lewis’s “men without chests” suddenly enter Matheson’s deserted streets. The vampire becomes the perfectly functional citizen who has lost an internal dimension; the zombie becomes the person who continues working, consuming, communicating and obeying while surrendering the difficult labour of independent moral judgement. Such creatures need neither fangs nor decomposing bodies. Indeed, the most frightening adaptation of I Am Legend today might show New York exactly as it presently appears: Times Square crowded, screens blazing, trains packed, restaurants full, millions communicating continuously—and Neville walking among them with the terrifying conviction that he is alone. The second source text develops precisely this “invisible apocalypse”: a city physically filled with people yet metaphorically emptied of humanity, populated by individuals repeating media formulas and algorithmically circulated language. This possibility changes the fundamental question posed by Matheson and by every adaptation that followed him. Perhaps the majority can decide what is normal, but it cannot automatically decide what is human. Perhaps Man is not merely Homo sapiens at all, but an animal that makes an everyday effort to become something more than an animal: capable of empathy, dignity, restraint, courage, responsibility and moral choice. Humanity, from this perspective, is not inherited. It is made. And if almost everyone abandons that effort, the last person who continues making it may indeed become the strangest creature in the city. He may become the Omega Man. He may become the monster. Or he may become the last human being—and, precisely because the crowd eventually destroys him, a legend. ## Part I — From Vampire to Messiah: How Every Generation Rewrote the Last Man Every version of I Am Legend tells ostensibly the same story, yet every generation changes the monster because every generation changes what it fears. Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel appeared in a post-war America haunted by conformity, ideological suspicion, nuclear anxiety and the uncomfortable discovery that civilisation could transform with terrifying speed. Robert Neville is initially constructed as the final representative of normality: one ordinary man defending his home against a nocturnal majority that has become physically and socially alien. Yet Matheson gradually destroys the security of this opposition. Neville is not simply surviving. During daylight he enters the places where the infected sleep and systematically kills them, while at night they gather outside his fortified house and call his name. Eventually he encounters Ruth and discovers the distinction that changes everything: alongside the animalistic dead exists an organised population of living infected people capable of controlling their condition and constructing a new social order. Neville has therefore misunderstood history. He thought he was exterminating monsters after the collapse of civilisation; the emerging civilisation understands him as the monster who has been exterminating its members. The brilliance of “I am legend” lies in this reversal. Vampires had once been legends invented by human beings to embody nocturnal terror; now the human has become the legendary creature feared by vampires. The 1964 adaptation The Last Man on Earth, with Vincent Price as Robert Morgan, preserves much of this structure and even intensifies its existential loneliness. Morgan insists until the end that he is a man and that the others are freaks, but the new society hunts him through the ruins and kills him. The title itself therefore shifts the emphasis slightly. Matheson’s “legend” is a category produced by historical reversal; Vincent Price becomes explicitly the “last man,” the isolated remnant who refuses the identity assigned to him by the new majority. Already an ambiguity appears that will haunt every subsequent adaptation: does the disappearance of the old majority prove that its values have become meaningless, or can one person remain human even when the entire social definition of humanity has moved elsewhere? By 1971 the question had changed because America had changed. The Omega Man no longer confronts Matheson’s comparatively complex vampire society but “The Family,” a collectivised, anti-technological community of mutants born from biological warfare. The cultural atmosphere of Vietnam, racial conflict, counterculture, political violence and distrust of scientific-military power enters the adaptation so completely that Neville himself becomes another character. Charlton Heston’s survivor is no longer primarily Matheson’s confused ordinary man discovering that history has passed him by; he is a technologically armed defender of a civilisation under siege, and his death is transformed into unmistakable sacrificial imagery. The Last Man becomes almost a Messiah. The 2007 I Am Legend performs another historical mutation. Post-9/11 New York replaces the Cold War suburb and the countercultural battlefield: bridges are destroyed, Manhattan is quarantined, the home becomes a fortress and the threatening Other is rendered as an apparently irrational mass attacking the remaining enclave of humanity. The theatrical ending completes this transformation by allowing Will Smith’s Neville to sacrifice himself with a grenade while preserving the cure. He becomes “legend” because he saves humanity. Yet this heroic conclusion destroys Matheson’s essential irony. The alternate ending restores it: Neville understands that the male Darkseeker has come not simply to kill him but to recover the female he has captured and experimented upon. The supposedly mindless creatures reveal attachment, intention and social bonds, forcing Neville to confront the possibility that his laboratory is their chamber of horrors. The difference is enormous. In one ending Neville is Christ with a grenade; in the other he discovers that he may be Dracula. The decision to replace the latter with the theatrical sacrifice consequently represents something larger than an unsuccessful ending: it is what might be called a treason of the laws of narrative, because commercial reassurance was allowed to suppress the disturbing reversal toward which the story had been moving. The irony is that the forthcoming continuation is built from the alternate survival ending, effectively reopening the question Hollywood attempted to close. Across half a century, therefore, the Last Man moves from anomaly to martyr, from monster to Messiah and back toward ambiguity. But one possibility remains largely unexplored. What if the fundamental opposition has been misunderstood from the beginning? What if Matheson’s vampires are most interesting not as a new biological species but as an image of a new kind of society? Then the crucial question is no longer whether Neville is genetically human. It is whether the crowd that replaces him has retained the qualities that once made the word human mean anything at all. ## Part II — The Last Man with a Chest: Lewis, Marcuse and the One-Dimensional Vampire But what if the conventional interpretation has been looking at the wrong transformation? What if the decisive mutation in I Am Legend is not biological but moral, ideological and psychological? The vampire then ceases to be merely a diseased organism and becomes a metaphor for a human being who remains biologically alive while something essential to humanity has disappeared. This possibility radically changes the meaning of Neville’s solitude. He is no longer simply the last representative of an obsolete species confronted by a legitimate evolutionary successor; he may be the last representative of an increasingly obsolete conception of Man. Here C. S. Lewis’s famous image of “men without chests” meets Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. Lewis feared a civilisation capable of producing technically competent beings whose reason and appetites continued functioning after the cultivated moral centre that should mediate between them had been hollowed out. Marcuse, from a very different intellectual tradition, described advanced industrial society as capable of integrating individuals so completely into its technological, consumer and ideological structures that alternatives to the existing order become increasingly difficult even to imagine. Put these two figures beside Matheson and the vampire acquires a disturbing new face. He need not crawl from a grave, drink blood or fear sunlight. He can have a career, mortgage, television, smartphone, political opinions and an impeccable social-media profile. He can vote, purchase, communicate and reproduce. He may even be exceptionally intelligent. Yet intelligence is not morality, social functionality is not humanity, and majority agreement is not truth. The new vampire society can therefore be interpreted as the final triumph of normality over moral autonomy: a civilisation in which almost everyone agrees about what is reasonable because almost everyone has been formed by the same machinery of needs, fears, slogans and permissible choices. Matheson’s perspective reversal then becomes more dangerous than moral relativism allows. Certainly Neville can become a monster in the eyes of the majority; the novel establishes precisely this terrifying reversal. But the fact that the crowd calls someone a monster cannot prove that the crowd is morally right. Majorities once considered slavery normal, persecution necessary, censorship virtuous and war glorious. The majority possesses enormous power to establish normality; it possesses no magical faculty for transforming normality into morality. If Neville is the final “man with a chest,” his isolation is therefore not evidence against him. It may be the price of refusing to allow collective agreement to perform his moral judgement for him. This is where Neville begins to resemble another family of modern outsiders: Émile Cioran, John Lennon, George Carlin and Paddy Chayefsky’s Howard Beale. They share neither a political programme nor a coherent philosophy, but each embodies, in a radically different register, the unbearable position of the person who looks at socially organised behaviour and asks whether collective participation has merely made madness respectable. Lennon’s accusation that society could be governed by insane people pursuing insane objectives contains the essential paradox: once insanity becomes sufficiently widespread and institutionalised, the dissenter rather than the institution will appear insane. Carlin transformed the same suspicion into comedy, standing outside the rituals of respectable language and exposing euphemism, hypocrisy, advertising, political theatre and consumer obedience by refusing to speak about them in their approved vocabulary. Cioran pushed estrangement deeper, toward the existential condition of consciousness itself: the lucid individual becomes a guest in systems of meaning in which others seem comfortably at home. Chayefsky’s Network then supplies the missing institutional mechanism. Howard Beale discovers that even rebellion can be packaged, scheduled, marketed and sold back to the crowd as entertainment. Neville can be placed within this lineage. His real terror would not be that everyone around him has physically mutated but that everyone appears perfectly normal. The second source text already imagines this invisible apocalypse: Manhattan remains crowded, its screens and commercial machinery continue operating, but its inhabitants circulate recycled talking points, PR formulas and prefabricated language until biological life coexists with ideological automation. This is the one-dimensional crowd: not stupid people, not necessarily evil people, and certainly not literal zombies, but individuals whose capacity to stand outside the system that manufactures their reality has progressively diminished. Neville’s barricaded house consequently becomes a metaphor for the final territory of autonomous judgement. His loneliness becomes Camusian: like Daru in The Guest, and in the cinematic landscape of Far from Men, he belongs completely to neither camp and becomes a guest in the very society that is supposed to constitute his home. “People are strange when you’re a stranger” ceases to describe mere loneliness and becomes a political and existential principle: the person who no longer shares the crowd’s reality eventually experiences the crowd as another species, while the crowd experiences him in precisely the same way. The crucial difference from a simple defence of individualism is moral. Neville matters only if there is something worth preserving beyond Neville himself. He is not human because he is alone, nor right because he is a dissident. He becomes the Last Man only if he continues performing the difficult work that the crowd has abandoned: empathy without reward, dignity without applause, judgement without instruction, responsibility without surveillance and the refusal to reduce another person to an instrument. Man, in this reading, is not born fully human. Man makes himself human every day. The moment that effort disappears, Homo sapiens may remain everywhere while humanity itself approaches extinction. ## Part III — The Invisible Apocalypse: New York Is Not Empty Anymore The most radical I Am Legend adaptation for the twenty-first century would begin by refusing to show the apocalypse. New York would not be abandoned. There would be no grass growing through Fifth Avenue, no deer running through Times Square, no rusting cars frozen on empty streets and no bridges destroyed to separate the final enclave from the infected world. Manhattan would look exactly as it does today: millions of people moving through subway stations, restaurants filled with customers photographing their meals, office towers glowing after midnight, enormous screens selling happiness, news channels manufacturing urgency twenty-four hours a day, political slogans multiplying across networks, smartphones illuminating faces that rarely look at one another. Robert Neville would walk through this enormous crowd and nevertheless experience himself as the Last Man on Earth. The apocalypse would be invisible because nothing biological had died. What had disappeared would be much harder to measure: independence of judgement, moral courage, authentic speech, the capacity for embarrassment, responsibility for one’s words, empathy toward strangers and the willingness to lose social advantage rather than repeat something one knows to be false. The infection would no longer travel through blood. It would travel through imitation. The vampire bite would become the slogan, the advertisement, the talking point, the trending phrase, the corporate euphemism, the algorithmically rewarded opinion and the socially mandatory performance of emotion. This would be Marcuse’s one-dimensional crowd updated for the age of platforms: people who appear to possess limitless choices while increasingly choosing between alternatives already prepared for them. The frightening element would be precisely their normal appearance. They would love their children, go to work, joke, travel, consume entertainment and regard themselves as autonomous individuals. Yet Neville would hear the same words passing from mouth to mouth and recognise the deeper infection: an extraordinary civilisation of quotation in which people increasingly experience prefabricated desires as their own desires and externally circulated opinions as their own thoughts. The modern vampire does not need to drink blood; he needs attention. The zombie does not stagger; he scrolls. And the crowd does not have to break down Neville’s door at night because it can isolate him much more efficiently by declaring him strange, irrelevant, offensive, obsolete or insane. The city remains full while the stranger experiences what the uploaded source calls an “invisible apocalypse”: the horrifying possibility of a metropolis crowded with biological humans but progressively emptied of autonomous humanity. This reading also offers a way to understand why I Am Legend continues to demand new adaptations. Every historical version changes the infection because every period needs a monster capable of embodying its particular fear. Matheson’s 1954 vampire could inhabit an age anxious about conformity and the emergence of a new social normality; The Last Man on Earth turned that anxiety into the bleak existential isolation of Vincent Price; The Omega Man confronted the fractured ideological landscape of the early 1970s; and the 2007 film placed Neville inside the traumatised, quarantined, militarised imagery of post-9/11 New York. A new version should therefore not merely give the Darkseekers better intelligence, a more complicated civilisation or more convincing digital bodies. It should ask what “infection” means now. The most disturbing answer may be that the infected no longer know they are infected because their condition has become normality itself. This is where Paddy Chayefsky becomes as important to a contemporary I Am Legend as Matheson. Network understood that mass media does not merely describe reality: it can manufacture the environment within which reality becomes socially recognisable, and it can even transform revolt against that environment into another commodity. Neville as the last honest broadcaster, writer, journalist, comedian, scholar or simply autonomous citizen would consequently face a more formidable enemy than Matheson’s vampires. He could not cure them because they would insist that nothing was wrong. He could not awaken them because the system would transform his warning into content. He could become famous precisely because nobody listened to what he was saying. His dissent could trend for twenty-four hours, acquire advertisements, provoke reactions, generate memes and disappear beneath tomorrow’s outrage. This is also why the 2007 theatrical ending was such a revealing narrative betrayal. It replaced ambiguity with reassurance, allowing Neville to become a conventional sacrificial hero rather than forcing the audience to confront the possibility that its categories of human and monster were unstable. The alternate ending recovered that discomfort, and the planned continuation from that narrative branch offers an opportunity to reopen the original question rather than simply resurrect the franchise. But I Am Legend 2.0 should go one step further. The question is no longer merely whether the Darkseekers possess intelligence and emotions. It is whether a society can possess intelligence, technology, organisation and overwhelming numerical superiority while losing the moral qualities by which civilisation once justified calling itself human. Neville would then be neither automatically right because he stands alone nor automatically wrong because history has defeated him. He would become the test. If one individual can still refuse cruelty when cruelty is profitable, refuse lies when lies are convenient, preserve empathy when empathy is weakness and retain dignity when dignity has no market value, then humanity has not completely disappeared. There is still one man left in the city. And perhaps this is the most frightening meaning of “Omega Man”: not the last survivor after everybody else has died, but the last person who notices that everybody is still alive. ## Conclusion — His Death Will Be His Legacy: I Am Legend The history of I Am Legend is therefore the history of a question that refuses to remain settled: what exactly is the last man defending? In 1954, Matheson produced his devastating answer by reversing the mythology of the vampire. Neville discovers that the old world has ended, another society has appeared, and the creature that the new majority fears is no longer the vampire but the human who hunts vampires while they sleep. He becomes legend because historical perspective has reversed the categories of normal and abnormal. The adaptations repeatedly rewrote this revelation according to the anxieties of their own societies. Vincent Price’s Last Man remained a doomed outsider confronting the new order; Charlton Heston’s Omega Man became an embattled defender and sacrificial figure amid the ideological wars of the early 1970s; Will Smith’s Neville was transformed in the 2007 theatrical ending into a heroic scientist whose death delivers salvation through a cure, while the alternate ending recovered Matheson’s more disturbing possibility that the creatures possess attachment, intention and a social world Neville has failed to understand. But I Am Legend 2.0 permits another reversal. Perhaps the deepest opposition was never human versus vampire, normal versus mutant or old species versus new species. Perhaps the vampire can also be understood as the terrifying metaphor of a person who remains biologically human after surrendering the qualities through which humanity becomes more than biology. Lewis’s men without chests, Marcuse’s one-dimensional man, Cioran’s estranged consciousness, Lennon’s individual surrounded by socially accepted insanity, Carlin’s spectator of collective absurdity and Chayefsky’s Howard Beale screaming from inside the machinery that has learned how to sell even rebellion all converge on Neville’s barricaded house. They are different figures, with profoundly different philosophies, but they share the experience of becoming strangers to a normality they cannot entirely accept. Like Camus’s Daru, they become guests in the world in which they supposedly belong. Like the stranger of The Doors, they discover that estrangement changes the appearance of everybody around them. And like Neville, they confront the terrible possibility that loneliness is sometimes not the absence of other people but the absence of a shared definition of what a person ought to be. This is why the Last Man must not simply be interpreted as the last surviving specimen of Homo sapiens. Biology sets an extraordinarily low threshold for humanity. A murderer is biologically human. A torturer is biologically human. A bureaucrat who obediently participates in an atrocity remains biologically human. A propagandist who knowingly converts lies into public reality, a media professional who sacrifices truth for ratings, an executive who transforms suffering into profitable content and a crowd that watches without empathy do not lose their chromosomes. The more difficult conception of Man begins precisely where zoological classification ends. Man is an animal capable of making an everyday effort to become something other than merely an animal. He can restrain appetite, refuse cruelty, protect the weak when there is nothing to gain, tell the truth when lying would be safer, preserve dignity when humiliation is profitable, and recognise another being as an end rather than an instrument. Humanity in this sense is neither inherited nor permanently possessed. It is an unfinished moral construction—a self-made species created again every morning by individual acts that biology does not require. This is why the one-dimensional crowd is more frightening than the traditional zombie horde. The zombie announces that humanity has disappeared. The one-dimensional person can continue speaking its language, wearing its clothes, occupying its institutions and proclaiming its values long after their substance has vanished. New York does not have to become empty. The final apocalypse may arrive when the city is fuller than ever. Millions may walk beside Neville while he experiences himself as Omega Man because fewer and fewer people remain willing to perform the difficult labour of being human. His death would therefore not prove that the crowd was right. Nor would his defeat establish the moral superiority of the society that replaced him. The majority can kill the last man; it cannot retroactively determine what his life meant. That is the final power contained in Matheson’s magnificent title. Neville cannot preserve himself, but he can preserve a possibility. His death becomes his legacy because the story survives the body. Somewhere in the future, perhaps even among the descendants of those who destroyed him, another strange individual may begin to doubt the new normal, discover the forgotten story of the Last Man and ask why one solitary creature refused to become like everyone else. At that instant Neville returns. Not as a survivor. Not as a saviour. Not even as a monster. As a question. What is Man? And as long as somebody is still capable of asking that question against the certainty of the crowd, the Last Man has not completely died. I am legend. legend(n.) early 14c., "narrative dealing with a happening or an event," from Old French legende (12c., Modern French légende) and directly from Medieval Latin legenda "legend, story," especially lives of saints, which were formerly read at matins and in refectories of religious houses, literally "(things) to be read," on certain days in church, etc., from Latin legendus, neuter plural gerundive of legere "to read; to gather, pluck, select," from PIE root *leg- (1) "to collect, gather," with derivatives meaning "to speak (to 'pick out words')." Extended sense of "nonhistorical or mythical story," with or without saints, wonders, and miracles is first recorded late 14c. Meaning "writing or inscription" (especially on a coin or medal) is from 1610s; on a map, illustration, etc., from 1903. To be a legend in (one's) own time is from 1958. ## References Camus, A. (1957) ‘The Guest’ [‘L’Hôte’], in Exile and the Kingdom. Paris: Gallimard. Chayefsky, P. (1976) Network. Screenplay. Directed by Sidney Lumet. Los Angeles: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/United Artists. Cioran, E.M. (1949) A Short History of Decay. Paris: Gallimard. The Doors (1967) ‘People Are Strange’, Strange Days. Los Angeles: Elektra Records. Lawrence, F. (dir.) (2007) I Am Legend. Screenplay by Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures. Lewis, C.S. (1943) The Abolition of Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marcuse, H. (1964) One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Matheson, R. (1954) I Am Legend. New York: Gold Medal Books. Oelhoffen, D. (dir.) (2014) Far from Men [Loin des hommes]. France: One World Films/Pathé. Ragona, U. and Salkow, S. (dirs.) (1964) The Last Man on Earth. Screenplay by William F. Leicester, Furio M. Monetti and Richard Matheson. Rome: Produzioni La Regina/Associated Producers. Sagal, B. (dir.) (1971) The Omega Man. Screenplay by John William Corrington and Joyce Hooper Corrington, based on the novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. ## Film and Cultural Sources I Am Legend (2007) Alternate Ending. Directed by Francis Lawrence. Warner Bros. Pictures. The alternate conclusion reverses the theatrical film’s heroic-sacrifice interpretation by revealing the Darkseekers’ attachment to the captured female and Neville’s recognition of his own position as their persecutor. Lumet, S. (dir.) (1976) Network. Written by Paddy Chayefsky. Los Angeles: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/United Artists. Matheson, R. (1954) I Am Legend. New York: Gold Medal Books. The novel provides the article’s central narrative problem: Neville’s transformation from the last representative of human normality into the legendary monster of the emerging vampire society. ## Conceptual References Lewis, C.S. (1943) The Abolition of Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press. See particularly the discussion of ‘Men Without Chests’ and the relationship between reason, appetite, cultivated emotion and moral judgement. Marcuse, H. (1964) One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. See especially ‘The New Forms of Control’, ‘The Closing of the Political Universe’ and ‘The Closing of the Universe of Discourse’. Camus, A. (1957) ‘The Guest’, in Exile and the Kingdom. Paris: Gallimard. Used in relation to the existential condition of the individual who remains physically within society while becoming morally and politically estranged from competing communities. Chayefsky, P. (1976) Network. Screenplay. Directed by Sidney Lumet. Used as a parallel critique of the transformation of information, dissent, outrage and even rebellion into commodities within the mass-media system.