Living Dangerously - Issue 38

Debord looked to a worldwide revolution to bring about what he considered to be maximum pleasure: billions of people making photos, stories, music, tales of their creations -- individual, unmediated creations -- and freeing people's minds to do great work. Imagine how much art would be enriched when a girl in Helena, Montana could collaborate on a poem with someone in Madurai, India! More creative people would mean more creativity. And that would bring more Mozarts into the world.

But it didn't happen that way. Instead, the spectacle took over the tremendous promise of the Internet. The spectacle, driven by commercial interests, invariably makes us choose the smallest and safest experience over the most imaginative and pleasurable one. Debord complained, "Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit." The point is that we have lost our ability to appreciate the good over the bad. In the spectacle society, everything takes on a deadening evenness. Even the so-called adventure market is nothing more than Banana Republic under a new, inflated name. As Debord once said: "Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption, is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal."

The most dangerous thing about a spectacle is that when it starts, even the most creative people find less joy in creating. You have only to look at most Internet sites to see lethargy at work in what was once a very high-energy field. "The market tells us that consciousness is determined at the point of consumption, not at the point of creation -- which is where it should be," argued Debord.

The spectacle molds us to its laws. We have very little freedom within its space to be ourselves. And we become totally dependent on sustaining the story for a long time, so that we can sell more shows, more ideas, more products. When the spectacle is Monica Lewinsky, we become party to adultery and to a marketplace that's safe for easy sex. So it's no big surprise when Viagra follows on Monica's heels as the next big story. More than a year later, the spectacle is Elián González, and we fall under the spell of this little Moses -- an abandoned child washed up on shore. The spectacle makes him the savior of the United States, rather than a real little boy who has survived a crisis. A real-little-boy story doesn't encourage people to go to Latin clubs or to buy Latin music. The story may change, but the spectacle only gets bigger. Ironically, such spectacles end up making us less interested in media and more disgusted with ourselves. We all look. But the repetition, the suffocation of the spectacle, undermines us: We've seen it before.

So we begin to tell ourselves lies about what's working on the Web. In his book, Debord talks about how spectacles don't permit dialogue, suggesting that the idol of "community" is a false god, one that today's Internet companies worship at their peril. Internet communities aren't really good at dialogue. In the dotcom rush to build market share, we aren't even asking what kinds of connections we are making to one another.

But we're stuck with the Internet as a short summer romance. Or are we? Is there any way to free ourselves from the spectacle? Yes, Debord argued. His advice: Don't wait for a distant revolution -- reinvent everyday life here and now! Transform your perception of the world, and you change the structure of society. By liberating yourself, you change power relations and transform society.

Saying no to crappy products is one sign of creativity. Another is realizing your true desires. Make pleasure, not profit, the result of labor. That's how work and play can become one. Debord's followers called themselves Situationists because they believed that all individuals should construct the situations of their own lives.

Debord observed that "workers do not produce themselves." But we must do exactly that. We spend too much time producing our products, growing our companies, and forgetting ourselves.

In the area of walking the talk, Debord was a dark incarnation of the Dalai Lama. Debord resisted the spectacle with his mind and his body -- an act of a true saint. He felt the spectacle constantly waging war on him for his mind, body, soul, and wallet. And so he studied Clausewitz, Machiavelli, and Sun Tzu to learn how to fight this battle. Debord put his body on the line like a soldier. Imagine Alan Greenspan selling real estate or flipping burgers, and you have a small hint of the sacrifices that Debord made for his ideas.

"I bow to his lifestyle as a drunk and as a criminal -- a choice that he made in order to remain clear," says Carmichael.

Debord killed himself on November 30, 1994. He couldn't win with critique, so he won with martyrdom.