Seeing a New Type of Economic Inequality Discourse: Inequality as Spectacle in the “Billionaire Space Race”

Abstract

When we study political communication about economic inequality, where do we look? Political communication research has mainly focused on “inequality as a debate”: discussion of the distribution of resources over the population, observed via legacy news media, dominated by elites. We argue for greater attention to other types of discourse characterized by emerging media logics like personalization, polycentrism, and hybridity. We analyze the billionaire space race—a 2021 media event in which 3 hyper-wealthy men traveled to space amid a pandemic—using mixed methods on Twitter and news media data. We demonstrate that economic inequality was a salient topic even though the term was hardly mentioned; inequality was problematized through affective evaluations of the super-rich rather than debate about levels. We conceptualize our case as an example of an identifiable type: “economic inequality as spectacle.” We argue that “inequality as spectacle” is critical to contemporary inequality discourse, given interrelated trends driving ambivalent attention to the lives of the super-rich, including the formation of reactive social media publics, extreme wealth concentration, and a broader anti-elitist moment.