As early as the late 1920s, when the imminent transformation of the society of producers into a society of consumers was in an embryonic or at best incipient stage and so was overlooked by less attentive and farsighted observers, a comment was made by Siegfried Kracauer, a thinker endowed with an uncanny capacity for gleaning the barely visible and still inchoate contours of the future-prefiguring trends lost in a formless mass of fleeting fads and foibles