1936

the age of consumerism bites, or manifests, some time in 1936, the coalescence of a number of factors that had began coming into being in the late 20's. One of which was the penetration, the saturation, of ubiquitous mass media. Not just as event, at the movies, or passively, surrounding text, but in the home in the form of the radio. Another is the intertwining of brand and lifestyle, most easily seen in early appliance commercials aimed at housewives, but increasingly seen in other types of products.

Perhaps more telling was the flattening of culture, the introduction of national censorship boards severely narrowing the tone and messages put into film, as the last ventures under way before the imposition of the censorship regime dried up. Most of all in the political arena, where the room for independent intellectual enquiry also narrowed as philosophers and cultural critics were compelled to be drawn into the camps of fascism or socialism, which, beyond the facts of the events overtaking Spain (which in themselves would have been enough), also promised the opportunity of actualising daring philosophical positions that liberalism had not and could not since the recapitulation of romanticism into the strictures of the cultural mainstream.