The spectacle has entered our personal space and it cannot be turned off
While we believe the spectacle is something immeasurable outside ourselves, it's also sitting with us at the kitchen table
Note: As all these articles are, prior to September 2023, this is an import from my Patreon and initially the text and the audio were separate posts, so the audio reflects this. Please forgive the discrepancy!
Hey all! So this week, I'm just going to actually record last week's post because it was so long, and I'm still kind of working out some ideas around the spectacle. But in the meantime, it might be nice just to kind of have this longer piece a little bit more accessible so I'll just be reading through it and I hope you join me!
Spectacle is, by its very nature, a loud and dominating presence that takes over our attention, and our time. It’s untouchable, unaffected by who we are, how we think, or what we do. It’s meant to be. And the more over the top, the better—humans love to be dazzled, overcome, overrun. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the spectacle is attractive, wonderful, world-changing, or uplifting—horror, tragedy, folly, and oppression are also spectacle. But the defining factor is its allure; which is also its danger—what do we miss while in the throes of our overwhelm? What are we not paying attention to when we’re caught up in the magnitude of whatever is happening, when we cannot look away? At the heart of spectacle is profit and exploitation. Who wins, and who loses. I am tired of spectacle. Weary as hell. Worn out. Overwhelmed and underwhelmed. Entirely uninterested. I am ready for the anti-spectacle.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how closely glued to the news cycle, information, and politics I’ve been since an extremely young age. I was a little kid growing into the first year of my teens in the 80s, and there was a lot of violence and injustice on national news every night; the imagery from those formative years still haunts me. Growing up with my grandparents, I wasn’t a latchkey kid—playing video games, watching MTV and cartoons, hanging out with friends—I was stuck at home watching whatever the grownups watched. So I have this memory of some of our contemporary issues dating as far back as this, and it's given me the awareness they go back even further. I truly believe these experiences are what first radicalized me, and what radicalized me so early. Colonization, racism and racial violence, sexual violence and serial murderers, bombings, domestic and foreign terrorism, political scandals, political lies, inequity and oppression, labor movements, environmental issues, diminishing rain forests, and climate change—this is my memory of that far-away decade. Starting at 7 years old, I took my $5 a month and I put it towards non-profit organizations combating the early days and the early effects of global warming and volunteered to help paper drives at school. My very first job—the real first job I ever had, right before I went to work at the bakery—was a telemarketing position for Heart of America Northwest. I was 14. Sometimes I wonder what turn my life would have taken had I been able to stay in that job (I was fired lol, like I have been from the other two desk jobs I’ve had since).
I remained glued to the news well into adulthood, reading stacks of papers and magazines on my days off and scouring the internet, eventually abandoning paper to aggregate national and international publications in my Google Reader; gulping back gallons of information with my morning coffee every day and then the 2008 campaign trail blew up, social media exploded, everything felt upside down, and I began to drop out. What happened?
It was the spectacle, hitting society harder than ever before.
There was something about this collision of social media finally hitting the mainstream en masse, alongside the presidential campaign, that catapulted politics into a fervor. Not only was the campaign a spectacle just in terms of its presentation but also the news cycle around it, but so was social media and our response to it which was a much more intimate relationship to the spectacle. The spectacle had entered my personal space and could not be turned off. That was when I really noticed the polarized commentary about who we should vote for (on the left) veering off into extremely uncritical territory. You were either on one side, or the other; and if what you were saying was in any way nuanced or critical, that meant that you must be on the other side. After the election was over, I dropped out. Unread articles stacked up in my Google Reader and email inbox. I read headlines, I went on with my day. I stayed off social media. I tried to live my life and continue my work. 2012 was a little worse for wear. And by the time we got to the 2016 election, the spectacle had become a hydra—inescapable, filled with outrage, divisive among people who had more in common than not, and horrifyingly destructive in its misinformation and promotion of outrage. Criticism of Clinton was anti feminist. Only bros supported Sanders. Suggesting nuance was either bullying, or naïve, depending on who was yelling. Generational divides became chasms. 2008’s fervor paled in comparison to this frenzy. I deleted all the news apps. From that point onward, until the media sinkhole that was 2020, I would read only headlines, if that. I wish I had stayed in that space.
There is some discourse that points out the privilege in being able to ignore the news cycle. That's a valid criticism. But we must interrogate who has access to news, and who doesn't; where the paywalls create a barrier and who has time to read. Also what is the news but a spectacle of fear, death, inequity, oppression, and cognitive dissonance? So given the news itself is neither fully accessible nor particularly "truthful" let alone "helpful", another approach to this question is, what does it mean to ignore the news cycle? There’s abjectly pretending the world isn’t on fire, not reading anything or putting oneself in the path of information; never discussing social and political issues, oppression, or the work one can do to combat these things; or at worst, pretending nothing is really as bad as it’s made out to be. All of that leads to cognitive dissonance. We all know people are living in denial. And then there’s opting out of the relentless 24/7 onslaught of emergency, horror, death, and fear that the news cycle and social media promotes while at the same time, never flinching in the face of the material conditions, consequences, and instances in which any or all of these issues come up in our daily lives. We do the work to interfere with and stop injustice, unlearn and relearn ways of living with and treating each other and the planet better, and strive for liberation and a better future for all of us, not some of us. I don’t think that to do any of this, a steadfast devotion to the news cycle is required. In fact, and especially since the hyper-absurdity of the last three years of politics and pandemic, I honestly believe that a healthy measure of detachment is necessary.
In the last three years, I've been sucked back into the media hole, like everyone. Scrolling for hours and hours and taking screenshots of everything I was reading because the headlines and the text bodies were morphing in front of my very eyes. One refresh would reveal entirely different articles. I was riveted, hooked, and captive to the burst of online activity, to such a degree that now I can barely read physical media, my ability to focus is fractured, and my energy is increasingly sapped. I’ve noticed that it’s getting harder and harder to engage in conversation when I am online. I’m overwhelmed by the feed as well as the exchange of what we see in the feed amongst each other. My saved folder is a digital hoard of irretrievable posts, guides, slideshows, and references. And yet I can’t quit. I scroll, I like, I send, I open, I read, I react, I forward; scroll, rinse, repeat. I admit that I'm terminally online and I’m working on reclaiming my former detachment. But. I know I'm not going through this alone. We are going through together.
The spectacle has entered our personal space and cannot be turned off. How do we scale down from the superhuman to the intimately human? How do we mitigate the information overload so that we can then turn inward to take care of ourselves, and find the reserves and the energy to then reach outward towards each other? I am not going to be the one to say, "social media serves no purpose" because, as someone who has been terminally online for over 20 years, even in the wake of app-based corporate-driven platforms, I know that isn't true. While the feed is overwhelming, the genuine connections I have with friends on the back end in dms is generative and refreshing. But we must divest from magniloquence, question the seduction of performance and production, and in effect, not just opt out but wholly reject the spectacle in order to reconnect ourselves to the less monumental, the quiet, the intimate; that which provokes a sense of the tangible and that which can be affected.
And that’s it; that's it this week! I'm going to keep all of the mistakes in there, it's totally fine we'll just go with it. The transcripts can be found in the previous post.
And I hope that you're all doing well, and I hope that you all are stepping back from the spectacle that is our lives, and I would love to hear your thoughts as always in the Discord or in the comments here—either is fine and I will see you all soon!
Related movies, television series, and further reading for those interested:
Movies and TV:
Don't Look Up, Directed by Adam McKay, Screenplay by Adam McKay, Netflix, 2021
The Society of the Spectacle (a contemporary revision of Guy Debord's film of the same name), self-published by Heath Shultz, 2013
The Hunger Games film series, Directed by Gary Ross (1) and Francis Lawrence (2-5), Lionsgate Films, 2012-2023
Nope, Directed by Jordan Peele, Written by Jordan Peele, Universal Pictures, 2022
Black Mirror TV series, Netflix, 2016-present:
S1E1: The National Anthem, 2011
S1E2: Fifteen Million Merits, 2013
S2E2: White Bear, 2013
S3E1: Nosedive, 2016
Readings:
Claire Bishop, Participation and Spectacle: Where Are We Now? Lecture for Creative Time’s Living as Form, Cooper Union, New York, May 2011
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967), Princeton University Press, 1994
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), Translated by Sheila Glaser, University of Michigan Press, 1994
Tiernan Morgan & Lauren Purje, An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, Hyperallergic, 2016