I always thought Debord would’ve hated the internet. I wonder what he or Jean Baudrillard would think of—so help me God this is the last time I use the term—”social media” sites like facebook, twitter, tumblr or sites like ffffound or even wikipedia. Isn’t this all spectacle? Aren’t we just communicating through a simulacra of images and condensed descriptions? Things once told in books are now told in articles. Works featured in museums and galleries instead whisk through our thoughts like signs passing by a moving train. Courses taught by professors are suddenly abridged into 140 characters or less. Phone calls and letters reduced to status updates and instant messages. 24 frames a second projected on a screen, now diminished to 480x270 pixel 256-color animated gifs, or compressed jpegs. 180 gram vinyl to 128-bit mp3’s. Obfuscated profile images and avatars, a depiction of our personalities.
Like Debord himself said, “all that was once directly lived has become mere representation.”
Are we not living Plato’s Allegory of the Cave right now? (ie: The Matrix, Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, John Carpenter’s They Live, or pretty much any Phillip K. Dick movie adaptation)
Does this mean science fiction authors were “onto something” or maybe they were “on” “something”?
More importantly, if a tree falls in the woods and no one tweets or blogs about it…did it ever happen?
via nevver / guydebord.com
