How did this come to pass? I despise The X Factor and all it stands for – the whole standardisation and commodification of culture, the manipulation of the masses into desiring what the culture industry can most easily manufacture; the endless parade of wannabe stars that sound exactly like all the others we've had processed for us before, as interchangeable as the products their songs will be the advertisement soundtrack to if they win; the spectacle of capitalist competition that we digest like processed meat, that we defecate only for it to be re-sold to us as we take that pipe to our mouths and start sucking while paying for the privilege.

I know all this but yet I had my fingers on the phone buttons, eyes to the TV screen, voting for replaceable singer 'X', who had moved me to believe they had a unique talent, and who I prayed would make it to the next round.

"You have reached The X Factor, your vote for X has been registered."

I can only blame myself and what I have lived through. At a certain point I gave up on the left and its critique of modern culture. The masses who formerly were believed to be the force that would rise up and shape history revealed themselves to be bovine tube-feeders. There were two choices:

1. Run off and hide in a cave or commune – trash your TV and grow vegetables in your own poo. Or...

2. Try to see the irony in it all, accept that maybe mass culture was so crap it might actually be kind of good, that maybe the masses should be listened to, and that it was elitist to always be taking a judgmental position on how alienated they were.

The latter path was called post-modernism and it was the one I took, having tried and failed at growing vegetables.

Irony was the key. I could live within the consumerist nightmare by taking a detached and humorous stance. So I laughed up my sleeve about modern culture and walked round laughing at how there was a new "Nineties retro club" in Glasgow city centre (the Nineties itself was only a reprocessing of the Sixties and Seventies).

Post-modernism was just that, this kind of smirking, told-you-so attitude. Fatalistic. Being out on the floor, dancing to Madonna's reprocessed Abba, knowing it was crap and almost weeping in this epic way about our tragic fate.

But still, I have this nauseating aftertaste of factor X. The factor I didn't factor into the equation – that consumerism would get in on the joke too. That part of the thrill of The X Factor is knowing that it's rubbish but loving it anyway. Post-modern irony only worked when it was a solitary superior posture. When the masses start laughing too then the game is over.

So I guess I should be heading off to my cave now. But I have this fear that when I'm there, I'll be drawn back in the final weeks of the show, maybe wandering round at night, spying through suburban windows trying to find out who has made it into the final three.