Media interaction: A life of dead time? Ask Guy Debord - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Susan Roberts wrote:“Live Without Dead Time:” Guy Debord’s Last Shot

Image

...To Debord’s mind, we have become enslaved to a form of life which not only dehumanises us, but lulls us into a state of comatose compliance.

Accordingly, his goal was not to further the demands of any particular interest group, but to highlight the shared emptiness of our degraded existence. Debord blamed this desolation on the fact that life had become completely colonised by capitalism. To the extent that even our relationships with each other are now reflected through the prism of the market.

Like many at the time, Debord believed that the Left had betrayed the working class in accepting the so called ‘post war consensus’, which insisted on the ‘logic of the market.’ By accepting the promise of jobs over power, the Left had failed those they were supposed to represent and condemned them to irreversible enslavement.

And not just the working class, for now all of society was caught up in a rampant consumerism from which there was no escape. Debord saw how that fatal acceptance had locked us into a global system, creating “one consensual organisation of the world through the market”: a totality we can neither escape nor change....


Guy Debord was a radical film-maker and writer who contributed many inspirational slogans and notions to students and other agitators in the late 60s.

He theorized that humans had "lost their humanity" and were trapped in a deadened life of "watching" in order to be programmed to live a certain "dead time" life.

A video called "The Society of the Spectacle" uses images and quotes from Debord's important book of the same name.



As Internet content-producers and readers-followers, are we part of the Society of the Spectacle, or are we trying to resist and ultimately destroy it?
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Why are we living in an age of media lies and screen zombiehood?

Maybe because *totalitarian control* is accomplished through the creation of a "fake reality" in which people spend more time (dead time) than they do actually living naturally.

In an article called 'Legacy,'Richard Gross wrote:“Both George Orwell and Hannah Arendt . . . situated lying squarely at the heart of the totalitarian project,” wrote Sarah Churchwell in the Nov. 21 issue of The Guardian. “Not just the Hitlerian big lie of propaganda, but a culture of pervasive lying, what Arendt called ‘lying as a way of life’ and ‘lying on principle,’ systematic dishonesty that destroys the collective space of historical-factual reality.”


What is commercial media if it isn't "lying as a way of life?"
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And even when you're falling asleep, mass media can get into your head and implant some "feelings" for you to act on.


(is mostly in English with French sub-titles)
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"Everything that was directly lived has receded into representation"
It seems as though Guy Debord predicted the whole "pictures; or it never happened" mindset that predominates the manner in which the majority of individuals go about conducting the affairs of their lives. I almost wanted to say the shallow affairs of their lives, but in some respects I have to be fair and try to acknowledge their right, concocted or convoluted as it may be, to seek or strive towards a meaningful existence in the best way they know how to.
I think of the observations of Guy Debord and I look at the formative moments of internet 'culture', and I ask myself; was the internet formed with an (nefarious) intention, or did it 'mature' in such a way so as to best appeal to the user-base? I guess my answer would be the latter, and that the product, because of the economy whereby it was born, naturally sought to make itself essential. And so, we already had the desire to be zombified by imagery within ourselves, the internet just brought it out in us in a more 'satisfying' way. Also, in a more encompassing way than perhaps could have been predicted, so that it has eroded whatever culture attempts to exist outside of itself.

QatzelOK wrote:As Internet content-producers and readers-followers, are we part of the Society of the Spectacle, or are we trying to resist and ultimately destroy it?

I have no idea in what way we could be considered as being resistant. Could you elaborate on what you believe a person could do to resist this?

I would also like to state that, as I know we live in a Society of the Spectacle (should Society even still be there-- are we not now just the Spectacle? :eek: ), what is the alternative? I must confess that I was born within the Spectacle and do not even know what the Alive Life is supposed to appear as. (And if it has an Appearance, would it not inevitably transgress back into the Spectacle?-- keep in mind your dear Hannah Arendt also said that the only time we can escape the world of appearances is when we are engaged in the act of thinking)

What would the preferred alternative to a Society of the Spectacle look like?
I will post one for amusements (another of Spectacle's decoys!) sake;
A small village with no cars, no egos, houses with unlocked doors, everybody all up in everybody's business, lush trees and once-rare exotic birds flying around everywhere. No one ever gets bored, no one ever gets angry. Everyone has flower-wreaths in their hair. The main hobbies are woodcarving, dancing in the town-square, painting rocks and lounging naked by the lake. Mediating is the most venerated of all the past-times. The most silent person (the one who projects the least influence) is usually the one who receives the greatest respect.

Or, the purest form of Anti-Spectaclism would be the moment we could confine ourselves irretrievably in the realm of Thought.
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froggo wrote:I think of the observations of Guy Debord and I look at the formative moments of internet 'culture', and I ask myself; was the internet formed with an (nefarious) intention, or did it 'mature' in such a way so as to best appeal to the user-base?

I guess my answer would be the latter...

As you suggest, under our winner-take-all organized-crime system (capitalism), all technology is ultimately aimed at social control of the masses, in order to enrich and empower a handful of psycopaths. This is how 250 cultures "disappeared" in the Americas, and it is how natural human behavior and natural landscapes continue to disappear as commerce grabs more and more control of its domesticated "civilized" cattle.

And I use the word "cattle" because The Spectacle is cattle-controlling.

I have no idea in what way we could be considered as being resistant. Could you elaborate on what you believe a person could do to resist this?

The ways of resisting the nefarious effects of The Spectacle could be divided into two categories of strategies, with infinite numbers of actions within each category.

1. Do not believe the narratives that powerful people put into your head

2. Interact as little with commercial media and commercial-minded people as is socially possible, while interacting in non-controlled environments in a spontaneous way as much as possible.



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