One way that today’s media “personalities” differ from nineteenth-century fictional characters, or from twentieth-century selves with interiority, is that media personalities today function so directly as personifications, or embodiments, of impersonal, impalpable, and unrepresentable forces. Indeed, this is not anything really new. It is what Marx already said about capitalists in his own time: that they were not real individuals, but personifications of capital.

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