Living Dangerously - Issue 38

Feeling a little cheated you child of the Internet generation? Thought Big Digital Momma would always be there for you? It's not that your shares are underwater -- it's that the thrill of the Internet is gone. "Would you like to get that dotcom feeling?" an ad in the Harvard Business Review asked six months ago. Did the advertisers borrow that line from Escorts and Lonely Hearts Inc.? Funny thing, I haven't seen that ad since. Whether or not the markets rebound, the thrill may be gone for good. In the old days, when the markets went south, Warren Buffett would usually follow. He'd go to the beach until trading became fun again. So what is there to do now that the juice is gone from the Internet? Hold on to the dream at the end of those soggy shares? Look for the next new thing? Or stay the course, come what may? How can you decide whether it's time for a little Coppertone -- or, more desperately, a few lit matches?

I hear a lot of blame attributed to the fact that the Internet is filled with awful, boring, generic content. And aren't the implications of that more profound than whether the merger of Time Warner and AOL is approved? How long can we go on believing that these are really just the early days of television? What if this is the short summer of the Internet? There may not be much to hang around for.

The problem is not about money or about the pipes not being fat yet. The problem is about billboards taking over. The commercial world has killed creativity and imagination. Can this crisis be fixed?

One of the best answers comes from a little-known but cherished prophet of the Internet who came to fame in the 1960s and then died in 1994, just as the Internet was becoming a social phenomenon -- Guy Debord. If he were alive today, Debord might give us a warning: Don't get your hopes up that the Internet will ever be great.

Debord was a radical and a filmmaker with keen insight into how the information culture would take control of our lives. His book The Society of the Spectacle (Buchet-Chastel, 1967) makes The Cluetrain Manifesto look like cheap kitsch and watered-down pap. Debord foresaw the weakness of the information economy even before the Internet was born, as he peered into the soulless center of the information culture.

Debord's 221 theses reveal what the "spectacular market" will forbid and what it will permit. The spectacular market is spectacular. It's a gigantic growth engine based on "spectacles" -- huge, mind-dulling stories that eventually kill off their audience. Thesis 59 reads, in part: "Behind the glitter of the spectacle's distractions, modern society lies in thrall to the global domination of a banalizing trend that also dominates it."

If Debord was such a guru, then why haven't you heard of him? Few people have. But among the green berets of the Internet avant-garde -- La Cosa Nostra of the Web, or the "Interneta Nostra" -- Debord is an iconic figure. The Interneta Nostra is a loose alliance that is made up not of geeks or of VCs, but of a potentially more powerful force: academics, big mouths, historians, and media junkies who try to suss out the next moves of our rapidly changing information culture. Followers of the Interneta Nostra have their own heroes -- Debord is the latest -- and they find his ideas to be truer than those of the quick-hit journalists who write about the Net.

Psychologist Douglass Carmichael, 62, a partner at BigMindMedia LLC, near Seattle, is part of the Interneta Nostra. After attending a recent conference held by the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, Carmichael's respect for Debord has only increased. "He took a position years ago on matters that we confront today," Carmichael says of Debord.

"We live in the very present pressure of the spectacle, in every nook and cranny of our bodies," Carmichael continues. "We are not just besieged by ads. Rather, we now feel that we are in a nonstop ad -- with all of the soaps and razors and silk and rayon and cotton and cars and colors. It's inescapable. We are colonized by producers. The spectacle is owned -- that's the real rub -- and owners are not that socially minded."

Debord was a member of the Situationists, a group of avant-garde artists and intellectuals who were influenced by movements such as Dadaism and Surrealism. Debord and his friends had a motto: "To hell with work, to hell with boredom!" They wanted to create and construct an eternal festival. Debord became a key intellectual in the 1968 student revolution in France. His writing struck the match that fired up that movement -- which, in turn, lit up the world, inspiring the uprising of the 1960s for freedom in the United States and eventually leading to perestroika in the Soviet Union. According to historian Peter Marshall, Debord's influence has since extended to feminist circles and has even inspired the style and the content of punk-rock music.