A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anaesthesize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give job to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serves these needs and strengthens them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle(for masses) and as an object of surveillance(for rulers).

– Susan Sontag, The Image World, 1973