Society of the Spectacle

This summer I have had the pleasure of becoming unplugged to a large extent. Working for extended periods in areas where electricity does not flow and cell phone towers do no reach has become an odd luxury in my life. Up in the mountains the screaming spectacle of modernity seems far below and beyond understanding. It is in this setting that I find myself reading a book that has helped answer many questions concerning this strange society that spawned me.

The book is Society of the Spectacle and was written by Guy Debord in 1967. Despite being almost 50 years old, the book is prescient and prophetic. Written more in the style of Tao Te Ching, it presents of theory of modern capitalism that I find more convincing and articulate than any other I've read or heard. I really recommend it to anyone who is genuinely seeking a better understanding of this world of ours. Here are the opening lines-

"In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation."

Nothing too revolutionary yet, just an update of Marx's observations about alienation and the fetishization of products. This next section was the one that really started to get me pondering-

"The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images."

This line blew my mind. All my childhood people had been staring at televisions, preoccupied by their next purchase, lost in a wilderness of desire of semi-conscious consumerism. It dawned on me that a lot of the people I had grown up around had substituted the spectacle for a life of actual experience. It was the realization of the old religion dream- be able to transcend the painful suffering for a better existence without pain and loss. The muted mindless madness of this society of the spectacle does seem to dull the pain, and the people seem to be standing in line for the opportunity join the show.

I think its safe to say that in the years since computers started conquering human consciousness this has become even more true. The internet is perhaps the ultimate manifestation of the spectacle. An entire reality conjured up to replace the harsh and savage truth of what sort of a civilization we got going here. By using images on a machine's screen for communication and information we have entered a world in which the majority of people we interact with exist not as living breathing hominids, but rather a series of spectacles. Even our military has enthusiastically used this advance to rain death and destruction without even needing to send some fate-fucked proles to do the deed. Now it can be a middle class consumer in Nevada who commutes to work, plops down at a computer and proceeds to carry out the Empires prerogatives whilst siting in a cubicle within a air conditioned room in the desert. If that isn't the incarnation of everything this society is working towards I don't know what is.