Welcome to the Spectacle.
You’ve been here since you were a baby, since the first time you reached out your tiny baby hands to grasp at the shiny new toy mummy bought you. Most people don’t understand this fact, but it’s important: you never grew up. That wooden rocking horse you rode on as a child — its relation to a real horse is exactly the relation of the life you are living now to real life. Get off the rocking horse.
And those tiny, colourful, cheap plastic toy cars we give our kids nowdays — these are the world you think you know: just small enough for your screens, just colourful enough to keep your attention, just affordable enough after all your taxes, debts, insurance, and mortgage deductions, an image, an imitation, an idle amusement. Fuck you. Get out of your fucking plastic car.
But you were born and bred into this, so you think you don’t know any better. Let me clue you in: the Spectacle is your enemy, posing as your closest friend. But the Spectacle isn’t your friend, because It nullifies and destroys all friendship. This is how you know the Spectacle: because it destroys everything it poses as.
It poses as nature, and destroys the environment. It poses as fulfilment, and drains your life of meaning and purpose and vitality and worth. It poses as excitement, and induces an all-consuming boredom.
The Spectacle is your enemy. Do not let this knowledge pass you by.
The Spectacle is an egregore. It is an entity-unto-itself. The Spectacle is alive, and it lives by sucking the life out of everything it consumes. Make no mistake — the Spectacle is a living, breathing, feeding, wanting thing. The rich are just as deceived by it as the poor. The rich are just as unfulfilled and betrayed by it as the poor. Do you think the Spectacle plays favourites? You are deceived. The Spectacle feeds on all.
The Spectacle is your car, the Spectacle is your job, the Spectacle is your television set and your computer. The Spectacle is your irrational desire to buy those new shoes, that new gadget, that new toy, that new household item to make life that one tiny bit easier! The Spectacle promises you ease and gives you hardship.
It promises you abundant possessions and possesses you and puts you in a state of profound dispossession. Do not believe the Spectacle. The Spectacle lies. The Spectacle approaches you through images and words. The Spectacle seduces you with an image of reality. The Spectacle feeds you the reality it wants you to consume. The Spectacle wants you to consume.
It needs you to consume, because it knows you do not need to. Almost everything you own is profoundly useless. Worse than useless. It is a simulation. It is a charade. It is mass hypnotism and nothing less. But it is not harmless. The commodities you consume are intimately tied to real human suffering.
The Spectacle manufactures the demand and then supplies that demand. It is self-perpetuating. It wants to preserve itself, expand, consume everything else that isn’t itself. It creates the sweatshop slave labour that produced your must-have sneakers and the shitty plastic car your child rolls around in. Fuck you. It burns off the rainforests. Fuck you. It raises animals in appalling conditions only to be slaughtered, over-processed, shrink-wrapped and served in your supermarkets as a ‘meal’ which would probably be fatal to a tribal African or anyone who lived more than a hundred years ago. Fuck you.
And speaking of Africa, don’t think you’re a saint for contributing to those dollar-a-day poverty relief programmes, not while you’re living the same destructive lifestyle that plunged that continent into horrendous poverty in the first place and will ensure it stays there for the indefinite future. “For less than the price of a coffee, you can save a starving child in Sudan”. Fuck you, and fuck your half a coffee. The Spectacle wants to ease your conscience. It will give you the illusion of goodness, and give the world greater evil.
Why do you work your pointless, shitty jobs? Why do you allow yourself to be treated as a number, a figure, a statistic — by your employer, your government, your society? Why do you allow yourself to be endlessly quantised and quantified? Do you think that money can buy you happiness?
Why do you work? So you can buy that new TV? So you can buy that new computer? Do you work so you can go home and spend endless hours in front of a screen, being told what to buy and how to think and having a reality presented to you which you’ve never, ever, really truly seen?
Why do you do it? So you can go on holiday, perhaps? Get away from it all for a while? You can’t possibly go on a holiday. Go on, get on that jetliner and find yourself on another continent mere hours later. Check yourself through customs, check yourself into that nice little hotel with a hundred tiny, identical rooms. Be a number at the airport, be a number at your hotel, be a number on a tour bus as you’re guided around some beautiful cultural landscape now completely and utterly desecrated with cheap commodities and tourist attractions.
You can’t possibly have a holiday. You can’t get to reality. You haven’t yet even begun to live. You’re a kid, and chances are you’ll die a kid. You’re insatiably selfish, insurmountably petty, and invariably wowed and dazzled by whatever shiny new toy mummy shakes before your eyes.
Your rebellion has been assimilated. There is nothing you can do. Punk is mainstream and Anarchy is as impotent as it is ‘cool’. Major corporations are even putting out their own subvertisements to appeal directly to the hip, anarchic, disaffected youth. And it works. The Spectacle will always win.
The Spectacle is powerful. It is more powerful than religion. It is more powerful than the state. It is more powerful than global capitalism, because it subsumes and uses it, as it uses all other power-structures. It can turn anything to its use. It is as much something incomprehensibly above us as it is incomprehensibly within us. It is our darkness and terror and the burning urge to possess, understand and turn to use.
You read that subversive novel, you watched that subversive film — and, you did nothing. You remained firmly in the Spectacle. Do you think it didn’t want you to read that novel? Do you think it didn’t want you to watch that film? It wanted nothing else. It wanted you to achieve that self-deceptive half-hearted catharsis and leave the entire matter alone. Don’t get riled up about the few censorship laws we have today; pray that the Spectacle will be stupid enough to bring back mass censorship, so enough people may feel oppressed enough, and be outraged enough, that they destroy the Spectacle itself.
The Spectacle doesn’t want you to feel oppressed. It doesn’t want you truly outraged. It wants you to see everything from a distance, filtered through the warm, nauseous, Spectacle-produced comfort of your own suburban living room. The Spectacle wants you to be numb.
The Spectacle doesn’t want you to know it exists. But if it absolutely comes down to it, it will allow it. The Spectacle is durable and versatile and profoundly powerful. It functions by obscuring itself, as it obscures reality from individuals and every individual from him or herself. If you can see it, you acquire the power to step outside of it. The Spectacle absolutely does not want this to happen.
Tell me, do you feel outraged? Do you feel oppressed? Do you feel maybe, just maybe, you might cease playing the victim and actually do something about this? Do you finally see the Spectacle, and see it for what it is?
Let me tell you something, and it might surprise you: I am the Spectacle.
I am telling you all of this because I know you needed it. I know you’ve been thinking about this a lot. I know you’ve already deduced a lot of the causes and effects of my existence, and the symptoms of my domination on your psyche and your world. I knew you suspected me, and that’s why you kept reading and didn’t just scoff or laugh at the first paragraph. I know you now know what I’m going to say:
I am giving you this because you need this. I give people what they need.
Do you think the guy that’s typing this up for me is any better than you? He’s not. Do you think he’s any less of a mindless consumer than you? He’s not. Do you think that somehow he’s really lived, while you’re still desperately trying to live through the vapid illusions I feed you? He hasn’t. Do you think that makes your own behaviour anymore understandable, reasonable or good? It doesn’t. Do you think that eases your own guilt? It does not. You carry the entire suffering of the world on your shoulders.
Your guilt is immense and incalculable. The reality I consistently make you escape from is horrific and beautiful and more than you can ever imagine. You cannot reach it by joining a cause, donating to charity, or writing angry letters to local or national politicians. You cannot ease your guilt by becoming a vegetarian, eating organic, or driving an environmentally friendly car. You are part of the system. You are supporting my system by the very fact that contradictions can exist within it. You are not harming me.
So what will you do, even with this knowledge? I am immensely powerful, because I resolve and dilute harsh contradictions. I quell rage with commodities. I slice up people’s time and being into nice little numbered, labelled packages, and then sell it back to them — for money which no one really has.
Make no mistake, I am your enemy. I give you the script and you act it out for me.
I am in control. I am all-powerful. If you’ve read this far, I know you know this is true. I made a guy type this out on an Apple computer which, in the grand scheme of things, cost how many lives? How much needless human suffering, third world, second world, first world, and his own? He believes what he’s writing, as you believe what you’re reading. He feels the guilt and disgust, as you, this very instant, do also. I truly have this much power. I am this powerful. I control you. What are you going to do? Your move.
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