"All dialogue is psychological warfare" works, as long as you're content to characterize a mother comforting a scared child as psychological warfare (or competition to impose a particular memeplex). If that doesn't seems a little forced, then you've probably built the equation in as an axiom, rather than as a useful analogy, with "warfare" holding independent meaning. If it does seem forced and you draw a line to say some dialogue is psychological warfare and some isn't, who could disagree?
"Warfare is dialogue"; "Warfare is chess"; "Warfare is mating ritual" . . . All good punchlines, in their place.
Sure. She's acting to achieve a goal she wants (and every action can be analyzed that way, no matter how altruistically ethical--it's built into the scope of "to want"). But why is that "warfare" in any respect. If the psychology of all social action is warfare, isn't it equally diplomacy, or gaming, or compensating, or self-deception (which seems to be where Debord was headed, in a Sartre-like way)?
More basically, the idea that all intentions are selfish (one step from your description of the mother) is a common argument, as indicated above, but this involves a willful blindness to the meaning of "selfish" in natural language, while hoping that the statement will be interesting precisely because of the affective connotations entailed in that meaning.
And thanks for taking the bite. I surprised myself when I actually hit the Post button for such a picky point. I was annoyed by the review, where I felt a string of interesting ideas were each being stretched beyond validity, so I quibbled with you instead when I thought your aphorisms were headed that way too.
It's Sunday evening, Machine Interface, and I'm afraid I'm going to bloviate.
There are thousands of words we could do away with because they are not analytically useful. But we don't, because we use language principally for living, not for analysis. When we tell a kid who snatches a toy away, "Don't be so selfish!" we're teaching a lesson about social protocol in a way that can be understood. That's the word-world we live in, and there's no escaping; if there's a we (or an "I") at all, that "we" exists in a world with conventional words baked in. That's precisely the world in which the sentence, "Every act is selfish," is interesting. When you unpack it into "degrees of long- and short-term X, Y, Z" you get binders of spreadsheets no one will read outside of a paradigm-enclosed disciplinary group: the moment it expresses its findings for an audience it will have to reintroduce the unpurified words to demonstrate interest.
Nor can we identify and quantify all the components of intentions to perfect a model for describing them, because they arrive in a protean stream of complexity, without an objective observer. I think that to say that natural language presents a layer of moral obfuscation is to deny that morality is "real." It is indeed a "construct," like everything else of interest to people, but it's intrinsic to social experience. I don't think we actually have much of a clue about what's "really going on," which is just as well, since I think in principle there's no way to describe that--its reality would always be contingent, a function of the individual/species of observer who/that observes it.
As for spreading genes, while our particular dispositions do or don't favor spreading them, I think very few things exist *to* favor spreading them. My urge to bloviate must be part of a package that is the outcome of a natural selection process (I'm here, so the lottery "wanted" me!), but I'm not bloviating in order to hook up or even, when it comes to memes, to propagate the model of online bloviation. (I'm more likely to have promoted the model of the tl;dr eyeroll two paragraphs ago.) Of course, if I were marketing a new comic series, "The Bloviating Man," I'd design an ad campaign to spread the meme, but I doubt my marketers would encourage me to make personal bloviation an element of it, despite my advanced skills.)
If there is justice in the world, this rant deserves to be refuted in a sentence or two.
In the review, you seem to be completely sidestepping the whole Marx/Hegel angle, which is very prominent in the book and conceivably necessary to deeply understand its thesis. I say "conceivably" because this is where Debord lost me. To put it mildly, his writing didn't encourage me to try to understand more of Hegel (or parts of Marx that derive from Hegel, for that matter).
The problem with post capitalism is that it is worse than capitalism. No one is stopping anyone from being post capitalist right now, nor have they for quite a while i the US. But those types of organizations generally do not thrive.
To entirely remove oneself, very hard, to mostly, quite easy. Tons of structures exist to form co-ops, hell some large power companies and other utilities in the upper Midwest are co-ops. Though of course utilities are a natural monopoly so they are a bit immune to competition.
Or you can simply go live in a shack in the woods.
Mostly you can form whatever type of utopian community and organizational structure you want (particularly if going on the anarchism rather than authoritarian axis).
No one is really stopping tons for worker owned enterprises from sprouting up.
They just tend not to work well, and provide lower wages and Stan dares of living and so people don’t find them attractive.
A lot of the large housing co-ops in my state (mostly associated with universities and set up in the 60s), have slowly collapsed due to inabilities to deal with free ridership, crime, squatting etc.
What co-ops exist in competitive areas like housing are mostly supported by charity, or huge amounts of outside technical assistance.
I mean one of the main structures non capitalists argue for is member owned or worker owned co-ops. Both of which exist and are common, but generally don’t dominate the market in their sectors.
I think the counterargument implied by the review is that we can conceive of Moloch as subject to constant selection pressures such that the remaining dysfunction is increasingly well "adapted" to resist fixing. Like, sure, it's a hell of a lot better to have "constant AI Panopticon to get you to consume and submit to the will of the state" be your immediate problem rather than "starving during the dry season" or "suppurating leg wound with no effective infection treatment," but the former is an existing problem that capitalistic impulses incentivize making even worse (much like being tethered to your phone as an email or communications medium all the time) whereas the latter are ones that have pretty obvious solutions.
Think of it like using one of those antibacterial soaps that proudly advertise "kills 99.9% of bacteria!" -- whenever I see that I can't help but think to myself "....thereby guaranteeing that only the fittest, toughest, best adapted bacteria resistant to antibacterial soap remain to reproduce..."
I Guess the TL;DR version of this as a blog post headline would be something like "Moloch as Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria."
This may be something you already know and just part of the metaphor, but those soaps don't use what we would generally call antibiotics and my impression is the bacteria that survive generally do so by not being exposed, not by being marginally resistant. The analogy I've heard is that if you dump lava on a herd of cows, one or two of the cows might get missed by the lava and survive but you're not going to evolve lava-resistant cows.
I was not actually aware of that, so the antibiotic-specific metaphor sounds like it's much more relevant than the soaps one (I'd heard that triclosan-resistance didn't seem to be much of a Thing despite its ubiquitous use in antibacterial soaps but had not / have not ever looked into the mechanism of action). The fault is mine and thank you for the clarification!
"In addition, laboratory studies have raised the possibility that triclosan contributes to making bacteria resistant to antibiotics. Some data shows this resistance may have a significant impact on the effectiveness of medical treatments, such as antibiotics."
Immune systems are doing just that: killing 99.9% (or whatever) of bacteria, thereby guaranteeing that only the toughest, fittest, best adapted bacteria resistant to immune systems remain to reproduce. And yet nobody sane would suggest that this is a bad thing, or that we'd be better of without immune systems.
This is probably correct with a caveat. Some things along some measures have simply worsened. If you care about those measures over others then society will look worse.
So choose your measure.
To my mind, the preferred yardstick in these arguments, material well-being, is clearly not enough. If suicide rates have climbed in the US for several decades, should we take this as a sure fire sign that life is worse off, and things have not improved for that time period? Or is the price of a transistor the preferred measure?
2. My guess is that controlling for well-being, different cultures now and throughout history would have varying levels of suicide.
3. If well-being is held constant but suicide is made easier culturally, technically, politically, etc suicide will increase. Now, you may claim that such a culture is inherently worse...but I don't think I buy such a claim.
We can put this a different way. What is well-being in the minds of fervent modernism apologists? It is typically things like: infant mortality, crime rates, ease of access to goods, average lifespan, and other such easy to measure qualities. There is no arguing these are good things.
But it’s easy to imagine a society where all of these factors could be increased and yet you probably wouldn’t opt to live in it. Would you choose to live in a society where everyone works remotely and lives sealed in a chamber separated from everyone else? One where all of your needs are met and you receive the best care possible? I would not, and yet deaths from injuries would be low, crime rate would be low, and all measures of access to goods could be held at arbitrary levels.
If you would not choose to live like this (and many wouldn’t) then you understand these critiques implicitly. The argument is that the tradeoff of freedom and community is the same and the difference is in magnitude. The persistent problem with this discussion is that loneliness and freedom have imprecise measures. You basically must take self-reports, which makes it easy to dismiss if you are willing, and apologists are always willing.
Then you would do well to dwell upon how suspicious it is, that from all the thousands of years and hundreds of different cultural milieu and social organizations, the one you were born into (by sheer ignorant and blind chance) is that which uniquely minimizes suffering, stupidity and immorality.
Consider that there are more societies than there are gods, your chance of being born to the right society (that which is most beautiful, merciful, rational,...) is strictly less than that of being born believing in the one true god.
That’s as bad an argument against Western exceptionalism as it is against Christianity. If you have values and metrics then there must exist a society that scores best against those metrics. And there must be (or have been) someone who lives (or lived) in that society. If that’s you, just be grateful.
The question, of course, is: Do you *really* have values and metrics ? or did you craft your values and metrics, conclusion-to-premise, to suit whatever society\religion you found yourself in ?
In software engineering you are encouraged to write tests before you write the code, because if you do it vice verca then your leftover assumptions from writing the code will muddle your tests so that they are not "testy" enough. You are also told to make sure the tests fail on trivial incorrect code, because tests that cannot fail are useless.
Are you sure your values and metrics are really independent measures of your beliefs that your society just so happens, oh very happily and coincidentally, pass ? or are they tests that cannot fail ?
>If that’s you, just be grateful.
Or be skeptical, because the odds say it shouldn't happen.
To keep it simple, let’s stick with your proposed values: “minimizes suffering, stupidity, and immorality… most beautiful, merciful, rational.” There is a society somewhere in time and space that best fits your values. It can be debated, of course, and that’s half the fun. But science, knowledge at our fingertips, Western music and art (before postmodernism), lower than ever illness and mortality rates, egalitarian Christian moral intuitions, liberalism in the rule of law, Enlightenment rationality. As with any society, you can pound on the flaws, but I still don’t know how any other society can beat peak The West in the values you proposed. That said, I do think that moment is now permanently behind us. Hopefully I’m wrong.
They were saying that the current society and structures are doing better than the past, not that they are the best possible.
And regardless you can think society has plenty of room for improvement and maximization without thinking Marxist maunderings have merit.
Ok top of that, unlike gods societies are evolving and improving and changing with the conditions.
Imagine a car salesmen telling you this is the safest car ever. You might have doubts, you might even think it is instead sole other slightly different car. What it’s not going to be is a car from 40 years ago. The quality of societies is not randomly distributed through time. You would expect the best ones (especially for current conditions), to mostly be current.
"""They were saying that the current society and structures are doing better than the past, not that they are the best possible."""
Did I imply otherwise ? the past contains "thousands of years and hundreds of different cultural milieu and social organizations".
"""you can think society has plenty of room for improvement and maximization"""
"Improvement" implies you're on the right track, that you're doing worse on a measure that you should be doing better on. But what if you're not even wrong ? not even heading remotely in the same direction you should be ? You can't "improve" a ship to fly, you have to tear it down and make it again, the sheer amount of wrong assumptions its design makes is impossible to gradually rectify.
"""without thinking Marxist maunderings have merit"""
I too sometimes don't understand marxist intellectuals or have patience for their prose. But what they are saying is irrelevant, as long as it is to the effect that something is deeply and irreversibly wrong in the way people live. You don't have to set a beautiful alarm tone to wake up, just a loud one. Marxism is and have always been just a loud alarm tone.
"""Imagine a car salesmen telling you this is the safest car ever"""
Imagine you live in a universe where community and human dignity are not quantifiable goods that get better with mass production. You live in a cramped and inferior society among countless nameless millions like farm chattel. You are controlled by monstrous alien entities called States, composed of people like animal bodies are composed of cells, caring about the welfare of people exactly as much as animals care about the welfare of their cells : not at all, unless relevant to their survival.
You were not built for this perversity, for hundreds of thousands of years your ancestors lived among people whose very flesh and blood was molded out of the same language as them. Nobody needed to craft rules on how to live with each other; or rather, nobody needed to craft rigid and easily exploitable set-in-stone (or paper or computer memory) rules. You started with the willingness to live with each other, and a natural affection only life born out of itself can hold, and the rules trickled down and evolved as needed. You look upon ants and bees, they are marvellous in their numerousy and organization, but you're not like them, your place is to live among a hundred or a thousand of your kin, governing no one but your kin, and being governed by no one but them.
The society you live in is a poor imitation of ants and bees. Everytime you complain someone points to some numbers and explains how they have gone up, how it's good that they go up, how your complaints are misguided and irrational because the only thing that matter is numbers going up, and the societies you're nostalgic for are societies where those numbers have not gone up, and thus can't be worth living in.
Can you imagine that ? Some of us don't have to, because we're living it. If you're not, count yourself lucky that you adapted to the life of ants and bees, but don't dismiss or make fun of those who long for the long lost life of humans.
When/where was this time when "human dignity" and "community" were not quantifiable goods?
As for living like chattel, not the vast majority of Americans do not live like chattel, that is just wrong. There are WAY too many people, I will agree with you there. It would be easier to setup a society of human flourishing if we cut the global population down by 90%. But in the fuck are you volunteering to start with?
>You are controlled by monstrous alien entities called States,
Not really, the state has relatively impact on my day to day life. Certainly compared to medieval village, and likely very little impact compared to whatever Marxist dystopia you are imagining.
>Caring about the welfare of people exactly as much as animals care about the welfare of their cells
Ok now you sound like you are 18 years old.
As for life being the life on ants and bees. Umm no its not really. Modern life does a TREMENDOUS job of mostly allowing people a large amount of room for personal choice and for pursuing projects that are tangential, or even directly orthogonal to what society wants or is good for it. The exact opposite of ants and bees. yes there are some sacrifices required to live in a well ordered society in a world with 8 billion humans, but um, not a ton compared to what it could be, and certainly nothing like ants of bees who cannot breed, and have zero interests outside supporting the colony.
I spend pretty much 100% of my time pursuing my own projects in a way entirely directed by me. I do need to kick back ~25% of the resources I earn to the state in exchange for the services it provides, but that seems roughly fair even if I don't approve of many things it does.
I do need to agree to not steal from my neighbors, but I also get some protection from the same. What exactly is the great sacrifice I am making here that is so terrible? That I have to listen to my boss/client? You don't think hunter gathers had to listen to people ever?
You sound so filled up with hatred for modern society, but with literally nothing but platitudes as a replacement. Which is sort of par for the course for Marxists and Marxist adjacent people.
Imagine a world where everyone can do whatever you want! (So like a world where people are stealing my stuff and I need to constantly attend to my wife/chidden to ensure they are not harmed?).
Multiple responses to this subject that I've dwelt upon for many years:
1. Do you find it suspicious that current technology is more advanced than ever before? Can you articulate the difference between technology and society with regards to "betterness"?
2. A better framing of the chances of being alive where and when is just to count (or estimate) the number of people alive in western societies vs those who have ever existed in other societies. A few estimates I've seen around around 7-8% of people who have ever lived are now alive. Guesstimating based upon population of western countries now and in the past I'd say it's at least a few percent chance. However, I think this whole endeavor doesn't work because of...
3. There's basically a zero percent chance I'd live in some other time or society since I'm a product of this time and society. Another way to say the same thing is that if my genes were instantiated in ancient Rome or somewhere and then I was magically transported to today, there's no reason to expect that I'd hold the same opinion I posted in the root comment.
All this is to say that while there is a glimmer of a point to the type of argument you're putting forth here, I *have* dwelt upon such arguments, and in this case, on balance, it doesn't weigh enough to flip me into thinking other than I do.
1- On technology : depending on how you define 'technology' and 'advanced'. There are plenty of times where technology not only didn't advance with time, but actively retrograded. Technology is not a linear path.
On technology v. society : the difference is obvious off course, it's the number of dimensions in the objects you're comparing. "Better" makes no sense unless said about single-dimensional objects : is 5 better than 4 ? yes or no, because they are single-dimensional totally-ordered quantities. But is the ordered pair (40,2) better than the ordered pair (9,11) ? any way of saying yes or no must reduce the problem of comparing ordered pairs to the problem of comparing single-dimensional quantities, or possibly several such problems.
In (some) technologies, the (cherry-picked) questions are always about single dimensional quantities : Does the airplane fly faster ? does the car drive longer ?. But can you compare a cat and a dog ? can you compare a mountain and a sun ? where would you start ?
The questions that moderns devise to compare societies are made up bullshit to make themselves feel better, "I earn more 'money' [being a sort of meaningless colored paper that people who don't give a shit about me or my labor print in abundance] than the primitive man, so hoorraay me! I won the lottery of history!"...... ??? that's about as convincing as a roman bragging that they have more emperors than any other kingdom or nation.
(2) the estimated total number of 'humans' (a fuzzy category) is 117 billion, today's 8 billions are indeed about 7% of that (~6.8% to be more percise). If you generously give 1 billion to "western societies" (a fuzzy category), then your chance is 1/117, or 0.85% percent. So not "a few percent", it's less than 1%, and that's not counting all the terrible ways of being alive in a western society.
(3) Isn't this just my point, restated differently? You think that today's society is the best possible among all past competitors because you were born in it, and so does a 1940 A.D german, and so does a 1000 A.D muslim,and so does a 100 A.D roman, and so does a 70000 B.C caveman. But all of those people are wrong : There were societies before 1940s germany that were vastly 'better' (in whatever non-arbitary metric you choose to define) than it, there were societies before 1000s islamic civilizations that were vastly better than it, there were societies before 100s roman empire that were vastly better than it. Isn't it suspicious how all societies and civilizations have betters that existed before them, except yours ?
I lost my whole comment here, so this is a shortened version:
1. It all cashes out! I can say 2022 Car Model 1 is better than 2022 Car Model 2 and both are better than 1905 Car Model 3. Cars vary across many dimensions, but I can still pick one as being better because the dimensions cash out.
Of course we can compare a cat and a dog! Everyone who owns one or the other has made that comparison!
The relevant comparison between technology and society is that both, roughly, progress and build upon that which came before.
> The questions that moderns devise to compare societies are made up bullshit to make themselves feel better,
You're continuing an argument with a group of people without considering if I'm a part of that group.
2. I shouldn't have used "western societies". Most societies of the past 100 years would meet my original comment. But I won't belabor the point since as I mentioned I think the whole framing is wrong.
3. "Isn't this just my point, restated differently?" No, I don't think so.
I'm not claiming that any of those people would or would not make the same claim I do about the relative ranking of their society. Just as in today's society, many people do not agree with me, I believe each of those societies would have people who do not have the same view of their society and that the proportion of such people would vary greatly from society to society.
I more or less include a 1940 German as being part of my current society...a more loosely connected part, but a part.
My point here isn't that my preferences were shaped by the society I developed in(though they are), but that me living in some other society is a nonsensical thing. I do not exist outside of my society.
> Isn't it suspicious how all societies and civilizations have betters that existed before them, except yours ?
Yes, it's suspicious which is why I don't take it at face value. However, it would be more suspicious if societies and humans didn't evolve to better match the needs of each other.
Just because someone is a suspect doesn't mean they're guilty. We can investigate and gather evidence to determine their guilt.
The main theme here is that societies and humans (roughly) progress. I'm better able to judge older societies from my standpoint because I can examine them and I have the ability and opportunity to do so to a degree unlike people from long ago.
I also think that the further back in time you go, the more and more likely a randomly chosen society will be worse than its predecessors. Progress in society (and humans and technology and most everything) has to...build up steam and momentum.
It's also worth stating that progress in society is noisy. Society might be worse in ten years, I can make no good prediction with any confidence. I'm much more confident that it will be better than today in a few hundred years.
Additionally, over time and geography, the edges of society are fuzzy. Just like I consider the 1940 German to be part of my society, I consider someone from modern China to be so as well and I'd likely consider someone from 2060 Brazil to be also. As such, society might have been better in 1980 USA or will be in 2035 Thailand. I'd still consider that to be my society.
But, just like the stock market, past returns are no guarantee of future performance.
There seems to be an extremely common failure mode where someone thinks they're saying, "Life sucks these days because of Capitalism/technology/whatever," when what they're actually saying is, "My life sucks these days because I'm depressed/have chosen to care about stupid shit."
Maybe I'm the weird one but most of this kind of stuff just seems like whining about non-issues.
Can you elaborate? Personally I find it pretty trivial to a) not be narcissistic on social media myself, and b) not pay too much attention to people who do.
I'm pretty confident that if I bothered to make that search I'd just turn up a bunch of people making the same mistake I was complaining about in my original comment.
Then we disagree on the corrosive impact of narcissism in today's world (except for you). and it's obvious amplification by the internet. The book title, "The Society of the Spectacle", and your comment prompted my thoughts.
I mean I'm not sure people writing silly things on the internet (or elsewhere) is the kind of thing that necessitates a "big plan" in response but to the extent that it does my strategy includes:
Narcissism has always been with us. There's no obvious reason to believe that there's more of it in some sense than ever before. Yes, there are twits who obsess over their number of followers. And those same twits used to obsess over what they were wearing, or whether they got enough of an awed reception when they entered the club.
The fact that you see the most narcissistic individuals in the media (because by definition they are the ones who try very hard to be noticed) doesn't prove your claim.
Asserting "narcissism is being amplified" and that this is "being caused by social media", and that both of these are "obvious" is not a proof, it's simply a reflection of the fact that you go along with conventional wisdom. And yes, conventional wisdom is often correct. But it's ALSO often incorrect. The primary reason the social sciences have made so little progress compared to the physical sciences is that the social sciences continue to prioritize folk beliefs and conventional wisdom, something the real sciences abandoned somewhere around Galileo.
Word. I got nothing out of this. I like the *reviewer's* style more than most or all of the others, but the work itself is so uninteresting and pointless — at least, to me — that I just couldn't enjoy the review. None of the societal criticisms or examples resonated or seemed essential (rather than, say, merely a problem with what someone on an individual level has chosen to value or how they've decided to view things).
"Or you used to, at least. Before the spectacle, your models, mentors, and rivals were real people you knew in real life. Now we have an acronym for that - IRL - because reality is everywhere in retreat."
Reflects a real change. We spend more of our time on things like electronic media rather than things and people in our immediate environment. In other terms this is a _very_ old complaint:
"In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates calls into question the propriety and impropriety of writing. Throughout his discussion with a colleague, Socrates insists that writing destroys memory and weakens the mind"
Literacy is also a technology, and allows us to read words from times and places distant from our immediate experience.
There is always a tradeoff in where we direct our attention. Communications and storage technologies let us pick and choose from words and images from a vast range of times, places, writers, and artists, selecting those of the most interest to us - but when our attention is on them, it is not on our immediate surroundings and companions. C'est la vie.
But "real" people are boring. Whenever I happen to overhear some gossip about somebody's personal life or their children I always feel that I couldn't care less. Whereas the better stories are crafted in such way as to abstract away the boring parts and focus on interesting action. Of course, one might say that this is superstimulus and bad, but so what? I like what I like, superstimulus or not, and saying that I should like something else instead won't change my preferences.
Perhaps you only find them boring because you've become so desensitized.
People in the past got more fulfilment of having a real *community* around them than people do today from hearing from the "most interesting" people on TV/the internet they can find.
People got more fulfilment from cooking the same style of food every day with their extended family/village/community than people today feel from getting a cuisine from a different part of the world delivered every night.
People got more fulfilment by listening to (or actively participating in themselves) music performed by their community in relatively simple styles and without much variety than people today get by listening to the "best" music in the world.
You like things? Great. But by and large Americans today are not happy, and the loss of having a genuine, "IRL" community to living atomistic, hedonistic and materialistic lifestyles is almost assuredly a big factor.
But did they really find fulfillment in those things, or simply were doing them because they had no other choice? It's easy to romanticize the past, but I can't help but notice that revealed preferences of people seem imply that they aren't eager to live in it. As for being unhappy, well, humans simply aren't designed for happiness, hedonic treadmill is always there to ensure that no matter how much better our lives are now by any objective measure, we're always unsatisfied.
"It's easy to romanticize the past, but I can't help but notice that revealed preferences of people seem imply that they aren't eager to live in it."
Good point! Yup, people have the option to turn off the phone or TV and talk with their neighbors - and that is not the direction average behavior has been changing. "revealed preferences" are a powerful clue!
>Perhaps you only find them boring because you've become so desensitized.
Even if that's the case, they must actually be relatively more boring anyway — and what's wrong with preferring the less boring thing to the more boring one?
I'm not so sure that we can make all these claims about who got more fulfillment, either. Is there any good evidence for "more fulfillment" -- especially corrected for the ability to notice and express unfulfillment? (That is: would a medieval peasant have had time to worry about such a thing as self-actualization and personal fulfillment, or any expectation that it should be an option for everyone?)
You can see that even in the past, when e.g. people could *stop* eating the same limited diet every day, they did. When they obtained the power or wealth to go listen to different and fancier music, they did. Conversely, I am unaware of many writings about how fulfilled someone was with having no choice but to eat the same few foods or listen to the same simple music, or many examples of people with both options choosing the latter (relative, at least, to the examples of people choosing the former).
It's possible for other forces to have caused a sub-optimal equilibrium, but ordinarily we'd not expect to see people abandon more fulfilling things for lesser ones.
"You can see that even in the past, when e.g. people could *stop* eating the same limited diet every day, they did. When they obtained the power or wealth to go listen to different and fancier music, they did. Conversely, I am unaware of many writings about how fulfilled someone was with having no choice but to eat the same few foods or listen to the same simple music, or many examples of people with both options choosing the latter (relative, at least, to the examples of people choosing the former)."
I'm mostly on your side on this issue, but in this case I don't think the facts prove what you'd like them to prove. That people of the past also abandoned simpler music as soon as they could go listen to fancier music, etc., only proves that they were also susceptible to superstimulus in the same way we are, which is exactly what you'd expect from heredity being real. Also, there are plenty of writings from at least the 18th century in Europe about how rich/powerful/upper-class people's lives tend to end up weird, alienated and somehow empty in spite (because?) of their abundance, and indeed some architectural evidence – the Little Trianon's "Hamlet of the Queen" for example, a place where the queen who remains a watchword for rococo opulence went to pretend to be a peasant. So, it seems reasonable on that basis for someone to suspect that this is at least a known problem or tradeoff of abundance, one which has simply spread as abundance increased.
The oldest text about someone deliberately choosing rustic simplicity and a lack of choice and abundance due to its salutary mental-health effects is probably the Tao Te Ching.
"People in the past got more fulfilment of having a real *community* around them than people do today from hearing from the "most interesting" people on TV/the internet they can find. "
I don't think there's been a single society where the average person was "happy", depending on where you set the slider for that word.
Could you produce some statistical evidence that Americans are significantly less happy now than they are in whatever halcyon era you'd like us to return to?
Surveys appear to suggest that Americans are less happy than usual.
Let's even stipulate that that is correct (as opposed to something like people having a changing idea of what 'very happy' should mean).
We don't get from that to the cause you claim.
I can give dozens of alternative explanations:
- people are lonelier than ever before. Blame theory: rules that made people increasingly frightened to approach others to ask for a date in any circumstances because "harassment".
- people are all experiencing anomie (ie deep connections to their culture). Blame theory: technology has created so many choices that none of us can find much in common with anyone else; we watch different movies, listen to different music, read different books; we don't live in the same culture.
- people are all experiencing anomie (ie deep connections to their culture). Blame theory: identity politics has destroyed the idea of, and attempts to maintain, a common American culture, and the inevitable result in a country as large as this is that there is no longer any common culture, certainly not one that one can take pride in and feel strengthened by.
- people feel no agency in their lives.
Blame theory: it used to be possible (even as a teenager) to simply leave a bad situation, move somewhere, start a new life. The law and child support services have rendered this ever more impossible; credentialization has rendered it ever more difficult to move from a career track you hate to something different; something (social norms? government welfare tied to a known address and suspicious of random moves?) has made people a lot less willing to move from a dead-end situation to something different the way they were still doing in the 60s.
- people feel no agency in their lives.
Blame theory: Life has become so complicated (so many forms, so many things that have to be dealt with, even for what used to be private matters like eg renovating a house) that everyone feels they can be hit with some sort of random government penalty at any time. Didn't fill in your tax form correctly; Didn't fill in some paperwork related to your kids and school; You have one month to get your backflow preventer tested and submit the report on this form; ...
- people don't have enough religion and ritual in their lives.
Good point — there *is* a real difference there, and of course it isn't an unalloyed good. Like you say: there's always a trade-off. I personally feel like "boy I sure am glad I get to make this trade-off", but it seems some feel differently.
The quote re: Socrates and writing is pretty interesting as well. That's something I sort of had in mind when reading the review / writing the comment (though I didn't have such an apt reference!) — such a complaint seems hardly worth considering, now; which makes me think similar complaints, about the Internet or smartphones or whatever, are... well, similar: rather than incisive and iconoclastic critiques of modern life, they're merely a manifestation of *every* society's vague and eternal discontent.
This is true, but I don’t think it’s important. The question is do more people share your values and views or Debord’s? A lot of people find society shitty. They are not wrong. They value or desire something else from life.
Xpym and Himaldr-2 had excellent points about revealed preferences. The simple fact that a vast number of people choose to spend a lot of time online rather than talking with their neighbors implies that the former is, in practice, more attractive to them. This doesn't apply to _everyone_, but it seems to be common.
The notion of revealed preferences is a stupid one. Alcoholics have “revealed preferences” smokers have “revealed preferences”. It’s true in a simplistic sense, but we can probably recognize that people have different preferences for short term and long term action, that they can be in conflict, and that a society which makes it easier to satisfy short term over long term preferences can lead to some dismay, even if self-inflicted.
Yes, I know what a revealed preference is, but I’m not as fascinated with what people claim it to reveal. Again, take the addict as an example. It is puerile to say to an addict’s face that they have a revealed preference for abuse. It is correct in a shallow sense, but not useful. The same goes for most claims of revealed preferences. True, but not insightful or useful, certainly not in the way that people who use the term consistently want it to be.
We can only take one action in a given moment, and always take an action, and so there is some sense in which preferences must be well-ordered. So in what way is this level of analysis useless? Because we have multiple, different desires to satisfy, and the relative importance of those desires differs depending on scope of time used in decision making. For example, satisfying my sex drive or hunger are things I think of impulsively on a day to day basis, and will plan for on a weekly basis perhaps, but for my long term goals plays a small role. Ten years down the line I have career goals which I am strongly drawn towards, and yet on a day to day basis feel no “impulse” to satisfy and require discipline instead.
Succinctly: the notion of revealed preferences is factually accurate but useless for analysis because it ignores the modular nature of our desire, and the varied ways in which that desire drives our decision making at different temporal scopes.
And once they grasped that, they would desire something else, and upon attaining that they would desire something else, and so on ad infinatum. Want and longing is the engine of the human soul and the devil driving us on with the lash, and anyone who promises "your wants will be satisfied" as the path to happiness instead of "you shall master Tyrant Want and break his scepter" is either naïve or a charlatan.
Re: "Want and longing is the engine of the human soul and the devil driving us on with the lash", I would have said something like "the incentive of all action" rather than "the engine of the human soul". I'm reading what you wrote as ambivalent about wants. Is that correct or incorrect?
Re: "you shall master Tyrant Want and break his scepter"
Wants range from the trivially satisfied to the physically impossible. The former are something more like a mild itch than a tyrant, and I see it as generally rational to satisfy those wants that are trivially satisfied - but always bearing in mind that for sufficiently difficult wants "The game is not worth the candle".
I am a Buddhist. My fundamental belief is that life is characterized by the discomfort and pain caused by our ceaseless longing and attachment and that peace and serenity can only be attained by breaking the cycle of longing and attachment, instead cultivating compassion, benevolence, and a harmonious existence with our environment. So yes, I do in fact think of Want as a bad thing.
In my view, some longings and attachments are either unattainable or not worth the effort they require, and for them, modifying one's psychology to try to break the attachment is indeed sensible. On the other hand, some wants are trivially satisfied, and I don't believe there is a reason to leave them unsatisfied.
edit: For clarity, let me give an example of what I mean by a trivially satisfied want. For a typical person in a 1st world nation, getting a glass of water is a matter of getting a glass, turning on the kitchen tap, filling the glass, and drinking the water. Satisfying the want of thirst (in that context, barring unusual circumstances like imminent surgery) seems perfectly sensible to me. It doesn't even trigger a hedonic treadmill. It is driven by a specific homeostatic drive to avoid dehydration, and slaking it doesn't create a new desire for something else.
The bit about history and the notion of time needing a broader scope than just the passing of the seasons needing to be invented was interesting. Obvious in hindsight (like all good ideas) but still interesting.
<i>There seems to be an extremely common failure mode where someone thinks they're saying, "Life sucks these days because of Capitalism/technology/whatever," when what they're actually saying is, "My life sucks these days because I'm depressed/have chosen to care about stupid shit."</i>
People's mental health, and the things that they value, are both influenced by the society they live in, which in turn is influenced by its economic structures and available technology. Choosing not to care about what society tells you to do may help, but it may not -- e.g., if it's impossible to form deep friendships because everybody's been atomised by social media and economic forces force people to move every few years for the sake of finding work, then giving up social media and staying in one place isn't going to help you deepen your friendships unless other people do the same.
That may be true, but I think the Neil Gaiman quote the review links to in a footnote is relevant here. It seems to me that a lot of these people end up with a very broad sense of malaise and dissatisfaction and I'm not confident that they're doing a good job tracing it back to the actual root causes. I suspect the truth is that in every era some people have felt like this, and often blamed it on their particular society when in fact it's much broader.
That would be one example where you could directly link depression/malaise to capitalism as it is practiced. It's quite hard to give such examples because the language is broad and there's an information maelstrom to navigate.
[I'm assuming you're broadly referring to younger people, because they're more likely to my mind to say things like "Life sucks because of capitalism".]
Again, my contention is that the causation mostly runs the opposite way. That is, there's a certain kind of person who just innately feels that everything is terrible and the world is doomed, and looks around for something in the world to justify that feeling. In today's world climate change is a prime candidate.
But if you actually look at the science, climate change almost certainly won't actually doom the world, especially not from the perspective of a reasonably well off person in a first world country. This is a bit tricky to talk about because I don't want to sound like I'm saying the actual likely outcomes won't be bad- hundreds of millions of deaths in poorer countries isn't out of the question- but I do think that the kind of people I'm complaining about tend to overstate the magnitude in a way that is neither accurate nor productive.
(As an aside I'd push back on exactly how tight the connection is between capitalism and climate change- the USSR's record on environmental issues was also pretty abysmal.)
And I'm not trying to say there's no legitimate criticism of capitalism, our society, etc. There's plenty of concrete issues that are certainly very bad, including climate change as I mentioned above. I'm just saying this specific kind of overly broad and emotion driven critique doesn't seem to me to have much useful content.
[I don't think it's just young people- this book was written in the 60s, for example. But as I've alluded to, I think this is a common impulse that people will manifest differently depending on their context and the worldview they're working with. Those on the right might talk about "degeneracy" or "decadence" and so on.]
I agree. Especially the old Frankfurt School texts read like depression diaries. There is an urge to judge negatively, a search for surprising twists to the worse and even a feeling moral righteousness when breaking rules of logic is necessary to reach new depths of misery. The vagueness of this prose - all quantification is absent - allows the reader to apply it to anything around, making him feel 'understood'.
> Again, my contention is that the causation mostly runs the opposite way. That is, there's a certain kind of person who just innately feels that everything is terrible and the world is doomed, and looks around for something in the world to justify that feeling. In today's world climate change is a prime candidate.
Yeah, this is a fair point. But how would we know? It's possible that these people start depressed, and look for a cause to be more depressed. It's possible that these people are pretty positive but then they spend their formative years being barraged by negative news about the world, and their actions seem small and unimpactful by comparison, and it leads to depression. On a subjective level, I have friends who work in climate emission policy, who don't believe we can avert the more catastrophic levels of temperature rise and who live perfectly happy lives. People are strange. I just don't think it's fair to say that anyone who feels depressed about the climate was depressed anyway and simply latched onto the climate. Might be true for some people, will definitely not hold true for everyone. The actual quantities of each group are difficult to ascertain, particularly as being anxious reinforces your tendencies to look for negative stimuli.
> This is a bit tricky to talk about because I don't want to sound like I'm saying the actual likely outcomes won't be bad- hundreds of millions of deaths in poorer countries isn't out of the question- but I do think that the kind of people I'm complaining about tend to overstate the magnitude in a way that is neither accurate nor productive.
Yes, I think I understand this position, I've heard it before from friends. For instance, the case of the missing soils, where a bunch of news journals reported that the UK had sixty harvests left, which turned out to be based on... not very much. I'd be interested to see what sort of sources you looked at when reaching this conclusion ("climate change almost certainly won't actually doom the world"). I don't think I broadly disagree, but I find the projected losses very difficult to stomach.
> I'm just saying this specific kind of overly broad and emotion driven critique doesn't seem to me to have much useful content.
Is this critique from newspapers? Or from writers? Or from general sentiment? Trying to determine what critique you're talking about.
> [I don't think it's just young people- this book was written in the 60s, for example. But as I've alluded to, I think this is a common impulse that people will manifest differently depending on their context and the worldview they're working with. Those on the right might talk about "degeneracy" or "decadence" and so on.]
Yes, fair enough. I was just responding to the specific quote you cited!
> It's possible that these people start depressed, and look for a cause to be more depressed. It's possible that these people are pretty positive but then they spend their formative years being barraged by negative news about the world, and their actions seem small and unimpactful by comparison, and it leads to depression.
Yeah that's certainly worth considering. But to the extent that it's true I think the kind of overly broad, poorly evidenced inchoate doomerism is probably actively making things worse, and encouraging people to take it less seriously is still the right move.
> Is this critique from newspapers? Or from writers? Or from general sentiment? Trying to determine what critique you're talking about.
Not sure I get what's being asked here. You see different forms of it in different places, mostly in essays and books like the OP but also sometimes on social media.
"climate change almost certainly won't actually doom the world, especially not from the perspective of a reasonably well off person in a first world country."
I see this kind of commentary a lot on SSC and rationalist-adjacent spaces and I can't ever help but feel that it always carries a very strong implication of "well, whatever, fuck nature, who cares about the puffins or the coral anyway?" And the answer is: I do. Beyond physical trips to see such stuff, I don't watch anthropological documentaries for enjoyments but I do watch nature documentaries. This weird anthropocentric parochialism where people seem to want to live in megacities and just spend their time surrounded by nothing but concrete and other humans makes me feel like I'm sharing a planet with people who are nominally my species but with whom I have nothing other than base physiology in common.
I agree completely. I think one valid point raised by such people is that due to the way the news cycle works, some damage from climate change is overexaggerated - see my sixty harvests point above. But the baseline rate of extinctions being 100-1000x times higher than it should be (https://ourworldindata.org/extinctions#are-we-heading-for-a-sixth-mass-extinction) cannot justify a 'so what' response.
I admit I care more about the humans than the animals but I agree that both are very bad. Regardless I don't think the relative weighting of humans vs animals (and other wildlife) matters that much to the main point. Either way it will most likely be very bad but not to the point of the world being "doomed."
Do you think that if the Amazon rainforest was 1% of its current size, you would ever finish exploring it? Do you even have any intention of beginning? If 99% of the species on Earth went extinct, would you ever see or learn about any significant fraction of the 1% that remained?
I love nature, but I don't live there. The city surrounded by concrete and humans is my home. It's why I haven't died of hunger, disease, bear attack, or the hundred other ways people used to die before modernity. As such, I'm a proud anthropocentric parochialist. If we need to cut down forests and drive animals to extinction so that billions of people are raised out of poverty and given a dignified life, then cut down the forests and kill the animals.
How many hundreds of millions are you willing to starve to save the puffins? How many billions should be relegated to extreme poverty so that you can enjoy your nature walks?
I think there is a lot of merit in your comment. I'll just add that the period of 1989–2001 was unusually optimistic and lacking a great enemy. People coming of age during this time might have unnaturally high expectations of how well the world should be run.
I didn't mention any of those examples. You can criticise the systems that capitalist market structures produce without thinking that a feudal or agrarian economy is better. I think you'd be better off steelmanning my argument rather than injecting noise into the conversation. Seeing a critique of capitalism and quickly googling the USSR's record on the same thing feels a bit reductive, no?
Those aren’t frivolous examples, they are the ONLY specific real world examples we have of non
-capitalist attempts to run a large economy. And they were no better for the environment at all.
You didn’t really present any arguments. Your main problems seem to be with markets and human nature more than capitalism. And markets are so powerful we definitely don’t want to ditch those even if they are not always best totally unfettered.
What is you suggestion for how to allocate capital and ownership in a way that magically stops climate change and still provides people with a lifestyle people will accept?
"You can criticise the systems that capitalist market structures produce without thinking that a feudal or agrarian economy is better."
I don't agree. "Obvious root causes that can be traced back pretty straightforwardly to capitalism/capitalistic tendencies" only has any meaning if all or most non-capitalistic alternatives would not trigger the root causes. If all or most non-capitalistic alternatives also create climate change, then climate change cannot be traced back to capitalistic tendencies.
> To be clear, it's not climate change causing this, its concern over climate change causing this. Subtle but different.
Sure, a good point. If you wanted to you could say in response that the current western media ecology is capitalist, and that drives the concern. I don't think we're going to get anywhere on this line of argument.
The reason I said that the 'language was broad' is because I don't think 'capitalism' is a very useful term beyond a surface analysis. I mentioned it because Paul Goodman referred to it, and I should have phrased my comment differently because various people have now turned up to do the 'capitalist versus state-capitalist versus communist' arguments and I'm not interested.
Exactly. I made a book club with some of my close friends. All for of us live in different cities, and yet most weeks we all get together and talk for an hour or more. Other friends and family I play online video games with and it lets us stay in touch and spend quality time together regularly even though we can't meet in person more than once or twice a year at most.
Critics would say that your "friendships" are not real friendships- those can only be formed in real life and organically. By seeking out deliberate companionship and becoming someone's friend for the sake of being their friend, via digital channels, you are merely performing a hideous mockery of friendship, like a changeling trying to ape the actions of real humans. You have no genuine attachment to your friends, but merely fear being alone, and thus cannot and will never be able to form a genuine connection with someone.
If this sounds cruel and sneering, let that reflect my opinion on this kind of pseudointellectual exercise.
Not sure I follow what your point is. Do you in fact believe that our friendships are fake? Or is the "pseudointellectual exercise" you're criticizing the same thing I'm complaining about in the book and the review?
My point is the kind of people who make these arguments tend to be obsessed with procedure and the RIGHT way to do something, often so that they can sneer at all the people who are living incorrectly and feel better about themselves. For some reason, this pathology is overwhelmingly present in French intellectual culture.
Because the French developed a massive inferiority complex after being the center of Europe for hundreds of years and then seeing modernism and science cause the UK, Germany, and later the US blow by them.
The data I have seen, admittedly only from Scandinavia, show that the percentage claiming to have at least one good friend has increased somewhat during the last decades. (same question across time, national surveys (level of living surveys), same sampling method).
That's cute, but we know for a fact that people have less friends than they used to. And when something affects a whole country, it's silly to act like this is an individual issue. People didn't spontaneously decide to start acting different. Something bigger is going on.
"We know for a fact that people have less friends than they used to"
That sure sounds like a normative claim on the world, so in the place of Himaldr-2 I'll be the one to ask: do you have data that reflects your claim, and can I see it?
I mean that he is claiming something about the world where we can look at the thing he's talking about as best as we can and see how close his words match reality.
<i>Is it impossible to form deep friendships, or is it easier than ever thanks to many more ways to interact with people and stay in touch?</i>
The former.
"According to a survey published online January 23, 2020 by the health insurer Cigna, more than three in five Americans are lonely, with more and more people reporting feelings of being left out, being poorly understood and lacking companionship. Since 2018 when the survey was first conducted, there has been a nearly 13% rise in loneliness...
The Cigna report found loneliness to be more common among men and heavy users of social media were more lonely as compared with light users. Feelings of isolation were prevalent across generations, with Gen Z (18–22 years old) having the highest average loneliness score while Baby Boomers (55–73 years old) had the lowest."
Oof, this is tough, but I want to play Devil's advocate on this one.
What if an online social life, while lacking in some necessary areas, is overall more attractive due to the being able to interact with those who are interested in the same things as you are?
I think it's attractive in the same way that, e.g., on-demand, high-fat and -sugar fast food is attractive -- nice in the short term, but in the long term tending to reduce your wellbeing.
As for being able to interact with those who are interested in the same things as you are, that's a real benefit, and for some people -- e.g., those with quite niche interests, or who have social anxiety, or live in isolated areas without many other people around -- having access to the internet and social media probably does improve their social life. For most people, however, I think the gain in breadth (how many people they can interact with) is outweighed by the loss in depth.
I wish I'd checked back here sooner! I might have suggested that this could reflect, rather, the culture of the U.S., rather than anything intrinsic to modern life: over the same time period, the Nordic countries and Germany showed a decrease in reported loneliness among the younger generations; the UK, no change.
These are just the examples I decided to Google real quick, not cherry-picked ones! There may indeed be an overall trend, or may be one if we look over a longer time period. Probably the latter is true, if I had to guess; but I, personally, wonder how that can be...
...though I'm unusually solitary and unusually fond of textual interaction, I admit. (As a kid, I fantasized about being alone on an isolated space station... ...I was a weird kid. But even now — as much as I love my mother and my girl, as much as I like my friends — I mostly prefer texting to speaking, even with such as they. I can organize my thoughts better; and I suppose I feel that, in a way, through text you connect with someone more purely than in person: the accidents recede into irrelevance, and only the substance — mind — remains.
But others, uh, might not share this fondness for deep, isolated silence, broken only by the clickety-clack of keypresses...)
"over the same time period, the Nordic countries and Germany showed a decrease in reported loneliness among the younger generations; the UK, no change. "
so it can't be a toxic effect of exposure to crystalline elemental silicon :-)
Broadly agree. You can live an amazing life away from the spectacle. Truly unparalleled freedom, safety, and creativity in modern times. But if 99% of society is chained to their preferred flavor of Spectacle, you can't really connect with them. We could all walk into a sports bar right now and start cheering for Tom Brady and connect with other people who think he's the GOAT. But when try to peel back what's really going on with these people, it's either empty or ugly.
I find myself wishing other people would just do some introspection and figure out what they want and who they are. But they all seem to be on autopilot stuck in a loop of working a pointless job, paying the mortgage/rent, watching the latest thing on netflix, and just generally being checked out. I know there is something human inside, but it is just so buried.
If 99% of society is chained to their preferred flavor of Spectacle, then if you are e.g. a Bay Area resident that *still* leaves you living in a metropolis larger and more diverse than Elizabethan London or Colonial New York City, in a civilization as vast and interesting as Rome at its height. But, with lots more drones to run the technologically advanced infrastructure and markets to provide enormously greater opportunities and comforts for you and all your interesting friends. Do you really need to make a deep, personal connection with everyone you meet?
Yeah, "no introspection" is a good way to put it — or a large chunk of it; I think there may also be another thing (or other things) missing.
It is hard to put into words exactly, but I truly believe — and I say this in full awareness of how I will come off — that a large portion of the population can't really think; can't reflect; can't self-motivate; can't — doesn't even feel the need to — come to an independent conclusion on any question bigger than "what do I want to eat?".
The process, I swear, goes something like "thing is trendy = thing is good" *and it really feels like just the latter part to them*.
...Yeah, yeah, I'm like the guy in the comic Scott posted recently: "pfft, they have no idea, they're all sheeple..."
Sure, it's true: sometimes we do fail to credit others with attributes we'd find they do in truth possess, if only we saw a little deeper and more clearly; sometimes we do have blind spots where our own relative strengths and skills are concerned; sometimes we *are* all more similar than we think!
...but sometimes, you really are smarter than the average bear.
Sometimes, what appears to be a duck is, in fact, a duck. Sometimes, in other words, what appears to be someone with a barren wasteland of an internal life that is empty of wonder and filled only by vague, unexamined wants and tribal urges inculcated by their surroundings, the In-Group, and stuff they saw those cool celebrities do...
...well, you know where I'm going with this (he said, cleverly avoiding having to find a way to compose a pleasing end to a sentence that really should not have been constructed in the way it was). I think some people *really don't* ever look up from their shoes, so to speak — or even know why they don't, or that it's something that might be desirable.
(And I base this off asking people about, or overhearing conversations on, topics like our place in the universe, the nature of consciousness, why we do the things we do, what is right and how do we know, etc. "Huh? I dunno, it's just normal I guess? Anyway let's take a shot!")
And hey, it doesn't mean they're *bad* or anything. If you've a good heart, I'm pleased to share a species with you whether or not you have attempted to find your place in the universe or based your values on as firm a foundation as your thought can manage.
------------
I'll share a story about the sort of "cognitive normie" that does worry me a bit.
I once said to a Christian fellow, as we prepared a response to a drug deal gone bad: "hey, don't you think Jesus would frown upon what we're about to do?"
He replied, "Do I look like Jesus to you?"
So... you believe that God Himself, an infinite being of infinite might, has — out of a love and kindness so vast He would sacrifice a part of Himself just for us, for we who are less than ants to Him — has, I say, given you a direct and untainted glimpse of the Truth and the Right, a sacred instruction such that men would have died for just a glimpse of such righteousness and surety...
...and you don't even want to, like, wonder? Don't want to maybe ponder a little bit about what it would mean for such a thing to be true? Don't want to try to imagine, for a second, what the universe would look like and what your place in it would be, if the thing you profess to believe were indeed reality?
Huh. Okay then.
-------------
I could (and will, for I am only human, and my hatred of the Out-Group cannot be stayed) draw a parallel to certain modern phenomena — of the "I never thought leopards would eat MY face!" variety; you (that is, you the normie, not you the intellectual ACX reader) want to censor things you don't like, say. Fair enough. But... this is not from any *principle*. It is not a rule you came up with and are following. It is not reasoned from a cold-blooded EV calculation, either. It is not even based on an intuition you have mapped out for yourself.
No, it is purely emotive; you are parroting the current groupthinkery. You don't think about what your angry judgment and virtuous performance are really *based* on; you don't really *try* for reality, the way you do when your life depends on it (well, sometimes not even then, really).
It isn't *principle*... even if you know that *saying* it is is the password for certain challenges that may be met. In a time where the password was "faith", well, then *that* would be what you're basing it all on, like the *good, cool* people.
I swear it can't be thought like you (now you as in VolumeWarrior, or other ACX chads) or I understand it. There is no consideration of "what if everyone thought like this? what if someone who disagreed with me wanted to censor *me?*" — because they are wrong and probably know it, see, and *I'm* right, so it's *different.*
And *even then* they do not wonder at the circumstances — how either they totally would come up with all that stuff on their own and (luckily!) ended up born into the one place and time that *just so happens* to match up perfectly with their (independent!) reasoning... or else they'd have been one of the people they now hate so much, waving a torch at the bound witches and kicking the natives, were they born 400 years earlier.
The seems like the epitome of "anecdata" which rationalists should be opposing. That some people do well under "problem of the day" doesn't mean it isn't a problem and says nothing about the broader impacts of "problem of the day". Pretty sure plenty of people were saying the same thing you are saying during monarchy, too.
There's plenty of room for concrete, specific complaints about the current state of society that I take seriously.
The thing I'm arguing against is particular these extremely broad and diffuse critiques of some general trend towards fakeness or alienation, generally itself not backed up by any hard data. In fact they seem to amount to saying, "all the data says things are great but I still feel bad about it for some reason," and then trying to explain or invent what that reason is.
I don't think it's a coincidence that this kind of take tends to be really wordy and use a lot of dense language that's jargony or otherwise highly abstract.
There's some broader stuff here, but I'll admit they lost me at the "Society is collapsing because it used to be more fun to play video games" bit. I think it's much more likely that adult responsibility has made me more aware of problems than it is that the world got worse.
Right? I'm not saying there aren't valid complaints about modern society, or even that socialist thought is wrong, necessarily (I think it is, but not arguing about it here).
But so many of the arguments are like "nobody should have to work just to have a roof over their head" and... homes aren't naturally occurring? If you think we can collectively do a better job taking care of each other, advocate for that. But never forget that life is a constant struggle against entropy we're all destined to ultimately lose. No economic reform will change that.
Yeah, I agree with this. At the same time, I do think that the spectacle idea has one interesting point: that we now have lots of close "relationships" with fictional characters. That includes fictions like James Bond, and fictional personas that people present on Instagram.
This isn't exactly new. It's exactly what religion did. But I do think it's interesting to look at how these different fictions shape our conceptual worlds.
My naive first guess is that it's better to have an amazing variety of different fictions to relate to and learn from, and in particular to have fewer fictions pretending to be reality, like religion did. So I'd lean towards thinking that this development makes the world better. But I'd like to see people trying to research this.
I completely agree that the reflexive "X has happened therefore society is doomed" just seems like a dumb way to write a book.
Hmmm. My life is awesome, I'm not depressed, I have lots of deep relationships, and do tons of cool shit. And yet, nearly everything in this essay resonated with me.
Are you under the impression that people are generally happy these days?
And if millions of people are depressed and this is a product of "caring about stupid shit", why are so many people making these mistakes? Did they all spontaneously and individually choose to care about the wrong things?
If students one year start struggling on a test, and then this worsens for years and years on end, should we assume that the students all individually decided to be lazy and stop studying enough? Or should this make us look for the existence of a broader trend driving this underperformance?
This comment gets to the heart of a problem when we discuss these kinds of issues:
"the students all individually decided to be lazy"
This sentence suggests that you're looking at this as a question of *where to assign blame*. I'm guessing you assume that if I (I kinda agree with the commenter you responded to, so I'm putting myself in that place - sorry if I'm treading on any toes!) can assign blame to the students, then I will think there is no need to further examine the problem, and no need for anyone else to do anything about it. This is the kind of dick move that people like Ben Shapiro make: If I can use figures to "prove" that X is causing their own problems (where X is almost always African Americans) then that's the end of the conversation.
But I think that there are a bunch of other possibilities that can be explored without either embracing the "secular decline" catastrophism of Debord, or the "I'm an asshole" blame mongering of right-wing microcelebs.
For example: the question are people generally happy - this is open to a lot of interpretation, and I'm not convinced the answer is no. People used to commit suicide *a lot* in the not-very-distant past. (I live in China, which was much poorer much more recently than the USA, so these contrasts are starker. Suicide by rural women in this country was sky-high as recently as 30 years ago.) I don't know how suicide stats are collected, but I wonder what proportion of the people who died in agricultural "accidents" and in war are people who kinda sorta almost deliberately fell into the woodchipper or the machine gun. I have no evidence if this is true, but it could be.
For example: the question of "caring about stupid shit" - I don't know about you, but I'm a pretty hardcore atheist, so I'm committed to the belief that for thousands of years, people have built identities, institutions, artistic sensibilities, and entire cultures on "caring about made-up shit." If sudden changes in material culture and the invention of some radical new technologies do indeed make people "care about stupid shit," I won't be surprised. And I'll be very pleased if it only takes humanity a few centuries to work through the problems caused by the invention of Twitter, because the last time something similar happened (invention of writing), we went down some weird paths for millennia.
For example: "should we assume that the students all individually decided to be lazy and stop studying enough? Or should this make us look for the existence of a broader trend driving this underperformance?" - we shouldn't assume anything, but there several different questions here. (1) Is this really a problem? Is changing scores on a made-up test a problem? Are changing happiness statistics a problem? Personally, I have worries about the ability of any government or institution to make me happy. I would like my government and institutions to keep me safe: protect my physical person, maintain an environment in which I can earn my living. Past that, I don't want much from them, and I really don't want the Chinese, British (I'm British), or American government worrying its head about my happiness. I regard that as my responsibility. (2) If the test scores (or happiness statistics) changed, what might the cause be? Does that cause imply a problem, or might it be that the test has become less suitable? and (2) Is there anything anyone can do about it? Even when you know the cause of a "problem"/phenomenon, whether or not an institution can fix it, and whether you want an institution to fix it, is a completely separate problem.
Sorry if you know all this stuff! You only made a short comment. But your comment seemed to include some assumptions and conflation of things that often pop up in media I see, so I wanted to try to write them out and disentangle them a bit.
Are you under the impression there was ever a time when people were generally happy? The world is full of perfectly valid, concrete things to be miserable over and always has been. It's the arguments that things are getting *worse* that tend to seem incoherent and driven more by the author's subjective feelings than any hard evidence. But mostly it looks like Phil H covered most of the stuff I would have.
I think there's some degree to which technology makes it *extremely* difficult to disconnect from all the stupid bullshit. Smartphones have taken over everyone's life but while they've improved mine in several discrete ways (basically Google Maps, Spotify, Audible and Facetime), being reachable (and expected to be reachable) in my pocket at any hour of the night and having lazy resort to the Internet a click away has, on net, made it much harder for myself and those around to me to be "present" and almost *impossible* to just fucking disconnect completely and do my own thing without having to worry that an important work email came in.
Concentrated, diffuse, and integrated modes of spectacle sounds remarkably like Moldbug’s two stroke and four stroke societies. Wonder if he read Debord.
I was surprised how little space you gave to the point that mass media was one-way (Lawrence Lessig called it "read-only culture", citing Sousa on gramophones displacing human singing), whereas modern social media is two-way (even if there is still a skewed distribution of the producers vs consumers that wouldn't surprise Pareto).
Boy, I hated this. Not that the review was badly written -- I like the authorial voice here just fine, perhaps even most out of all reviews so far, and the reviewer's comments were often cogent and amusing or interesting -- but the *book's* complaints make very little sense to me; the entire thing seems to me much ado about nothing. Paraphrasing an early passage in the review: "But I don't think [he was just railing against change out of some personal emotional difficulty]. Life is *different* now. You want to use your phone even when the TV is on, and don't want to lose GPS signal when in a strange place." Uh, yeah, those both seem fine to me. Where's the part that's supposed to explain why life is so bad now and we're less "real" and stuff?
There are some parts I liked a bit more, later on, but overall I feel like this sort of thing is a waste of time: pseudo-profundity through overwrought, foggy prose, for those who are unhappy and want something to blame it on.
Yes! Like, I'm open to be convinced that life is worse now because of any of the discussed stuff, but the whole thing just seems to mostly stand on asserting that it is bad or worse than before and moving on.
Rates of mental illness are higher now than they were in previous decades. It seems that, on a subjective level, a lot of people are worse off than in the past.
I don't know! Given the changing state of the art and stigmatisms around mental health over the decades it seems like something I'd definitely want to investigate before making the claim that it is or isn't worse.
Yes, we have lots of reasons to think that! It's a very well-known result with regard to physical ailments, for example: many more breast cancers were caught with increased focus on breast cancer and better diagnostic tools... but the actual rate does not appear to have much increased.
With a *lot* more focus on mental illness, mental illness being much less stigmatized (and indeed becoming perhaps the opposite of stigmatized among a certain demographic), relaxed diagnostic criteria, more (and more thinly-sliced) categories of mental illness, and more access to mental-health-care, it should be our default assumption.
Scott has written an interesting article about this (or, rather, a closely-related phenomenon, more accurately).
But also, Jonathan Haidt always makes the point that hospital admissions for self harm among teen girls are way up since the early 2010s, as are suicides. That part, at least, isn't due to relaxed diagnostic criteria.
We have reasons to believe otherwise. Suicides are also up as are certain causes of it (loneliness, for example). If causes and effects of depression are up, then it would stand to reason that the observed increase in depression is not because “we are so good at detecting it.” As an aside, one should double check conclusions that so handily lets society pat itself on the back for something negative.
I'm impressed by your openness to being convinced -- always a good sign. Interestingly, however, the reviewer was right to link Scott's piece on epistemic learned helplessness. You being convinced wouldn't really prove anything, any more than you already having been convinced that things are better now proves anything. I certainly wouldn't argue with you either way.
If anyone reading this wonders "how could anyone think that things are worse now?" and finds the line of questioning introspectively engaging, I suggest checking for the following biases:
1) Am I a kind of person who would have had poor outcomes in the version of the past I believe happened? For instance due to being physically small or weak, sickly as a child, in need of corrective lenses, midly disabled in some other way, or a member of a racial, ethnic, sexual, or gender group that is reported to have had a hard time previously?
2) Am I addicted to comfort, ease, entertainment, snack food, intoxicants, central heating/cooling, the automobile, pornography, or something else that would have been hard to obtain in times past?
I think that the two examples you've pulled out have to do with not being able to do things, with focusing on the TV or navigating on one's own as examples; the broader point is like, living in the society of the spectacle means having your thoughts controlled by e.g. what cable news is covering today, and your knowledge potentially controlled by the same. I think that people would like to possess the ability to focus and navigate and think about what they wish in order to be able to act according to their advantage more often. For example, in my experience, focusing on one form of media at a time causes me to think about it more clearly and, let's say, see the main character's flaws in myself and set out to live my life differently. The urge to resist mind control is expected to be automatically understood by a lot of people because they feel it strongly instinctively. Also, if someone is unhappy, there is probably a reason, they might as well look for it. But I agree that this is a very thought-provoking question, I think that more of us who identify with this book's complaints should try to answer it
Yeah. I also think some of the stock examples require a lot of projecting.
> It takes an act of will to put down your phone so you can focus on the TV. Low battery is an emergency. Losing signal is bereavement. Navigating without GPS is an anxiety attack.
None of these are relatable. I get some people have a problem with them, but I don’t think that these are core parts of the modern experience or whatever. I think most people are able to just take these in stride most of the time.
Could be the humor got past me because it's hard for me to find humor in alcoholism, despair or suicide. Seems making a joke of Debord's or anyone's suicide is just making a spectacle of the situation.
Not trying to be too down on humor/attempts at humor when more humor is needed. Not sure if that means less suicide/alcoholism/despair humor or just *better* suicide/alcoholism/despair humor.
It sounds to me you simply do not enjoy dark humor, and that is all fine and dandy. But as I have to remind people again and again these days, it seems: just because something does not fit your aesthetic does not make it a bad, wrong thing to enjoy.
I'm all for better suicide/alcoholism/despair (SAD) humor. And I admit I might be a suicide/alcoholism/despair (SAD) humor snob. But I have no problem with someone else enjoying something that's not top shelf.
Maybe a little for humor related to suicide and alcoholism. Dude was plenty funny all through the rest of his/her/their enlightening book review, so I was able to catch some of that.
This response is interesting to me. When I get rickrolled my response is something along the lines of "goshdarnit you got me, you silly rascal. take your upvote".
I'm quite familiar with Critical Theory and Marxism, so I'm not biased against it and I have been influenced by many authors in this area.
Yet I can't help but thinking "so what? so what? so what?" all the time while reading this review. I guess that's the difference between lower-c and capital-C critical theory.
I just never got lower-c.
Is it a bad thing that episteme > metis, that we spend more time with on-screen than IRL memes? Why or how? These basic things are just never explained.
"We hope for the best, but 2122 is shaping up to be some unholy amalgam of Gattaca, The Matrix, and Minority Report."
Is it? How do you know? The author is just assuming you agree with hyperbolic assertions all the time, without looking at the analytical content or meaning of basic terms.
What specifically about all the poems describing the modern world is bad? What is the harm done? How would you quantify it?
Oh, am I an epigone of the commodification ideology?
Or is it possible that the doom-and-gloom scenarios are really jumping out of the head of the author and make for a pleasurable experience for readers high in neuroticism and anxiety?
Peak-commodification if you will.
And then this groundless hyperbole: "If you want to actually seize power, you will need to conduct a coup - which, so I’ve heard, is top-down. It’s the only strategy that has ever really worked,"
Uhm, what?
Maybe that has helped in seizing power but what followed was almost always worse. The bourgeoisie revolution, "the only true revolution", was not a top-down coup.
So much for ... just assuming big hyperbolic things, but I am repeating myself.
> Whither Kazakhstan? Afghanistan? Who knows and who cares?
I know and I care. I know about Turkey and Syria (which no one seems to be paying attention to) and the conflicts in Mexico and Myanmar and about grain prices in East Africa. It baffles me so many people don't. It's not even like this doesn't affect them. It does! The prices you pay for gas, for bread, for electricity are all affected by it. Whether you are safe or not is affected by it.
This is my issue with all this. The "too cool for school, nothing really matters, it's all showmanship" is the kind of pose you can only take in a society that's extremely safe and free of significant material need. Where having wrong beliefs about the way the world works is buffered by externalizing costs. Material reality exists and ignoring it will ultimately doom you. The a dialectic of rocks hitting your head can't actually stop the rocks.
It reminds me of the old Buddhist story where a student says, "Master, I have become enlightened! Everything is an illusion!" The master nods sagely and says, "Then I have one more lesson for you." The student eagerly nods his head. And the master cracks him over the head with his staff so hard the student screams in pain. "Why do you cry?" The master asks. "Because it hurts!" The student wails. "Ah, but pain is an illusion. My staff is an illusion. The blow is an illusion! So why do you cry?"
The theological point (I think) is that even if the world is an illusion we still experience it. But I take it as point of the supremacy of the physical over the spiritual (at least until you become a Buddha, I guess.) Even if you come to realize you do not exist and think you exist as some kind of Hume-ian pure sensor then you are still sensing the things you sense and those are not entirely within your control or even human control. Likewise, the idea these events are ultimately meaningless epiphenomena ignores the actual cause and effect. (Which, I know, he would argue is just another spectacle/illusion/whatever.)
PS: Russian disinformation has a grand, ancient history, predating even the Soviets.
Well, the story you give is a koan, but the common interpretation is that it is one thing to intellectually grasp the concept of Śūnyatā (the idea that "material" reality is inherently vacuous) and another to actually achieve enlightenment.
Applied to this concept: Maitre Debord spoke of how all relations and events and occurrences in the modern era were vacuous and relationships were impossible, and yet he married two women and had affairs with several others. While he intellectually grasped his concepts, he did not act on them- and well he was to do so, for much like an arhat or bodhisattva, to truly live the truth of the doctrine is deepest insanity to those who live in the illusion.
Thank you for the further detail. I know my interpretation isn't the standard one. I suppose this goes back to the cattle thieves and madmen distinction.
I always thought the point of that Buddhist story was that the truly enlightened have a staff and when they use it, it's just an illusion. Others just think they are enlightened and suffer the consequences. And finally, there are those (conspicuously absent in this story) who are enlightened just enough to realize they need to stay out of range of that illusionary staff.
But why should people care about all that, when they can realistically do nothing about any of it? It seems like a recipe for permanent misery, not unlike one which the author of this book seemed to suffer from.
If you want to live in blissful ignorance that is certainly your choice. But that's not what we're talking about here. Because most people do not. The idea that people who know about these things care about them as an illusion or entertainment is false, is my point.
I feel this so much! All these "woe is the world, it sucks and it's too bad we can't do much about it—oh but please continue to still make these token efforts". Effective Altruism improves on this slightly but is fundamentally unwilling to go beyond treating symptoms.
A good example is every time I read about how the cobalt for electric vehicles is tainted by conflict and child labour. "Oh, see, the solution to burning oil is little better than the current mess. What a shame." Some of the more pro-active types then go and develop batteries that don't use cobalt, which is fair enough I suppose.
But the whole time no-one brings of the obvious solution of just trying to break up the Congo, a stupidly large country with stupid legacy borders, into something that would actually work and produce stable, responsive governments! Rwanda's Kagame, a friend of the West, is now engaged in his third (or is it fourth?) war in the Congo. It would not be difficult to stop him.
But, yes, many of us care. And many of us are frustrated that obvious solutions aren't discussed by politicians or media, in preference of more "what a shame" stories.
What is worse - those who throw up their hands and say it's all too hard, or those who say the solutions are 'obvious' and 'not difficult'? Not difficult to stop Kagame in the same way as Saddam Hussain? Ho Chi Minh? The Taliban? Any of countless examples of leaders who were 'friends' of the West at various convenient times but who also had considerable support that did not rely on the West?
1. The former, those who give up without ever trying, are far worse.
2. Because it worked the last time. From Wikipedia:
> A United Nations report found that Rwanda created and commanded the M23 rebel group.[10] Rwanda ceased its support following international pressure as well as the military defeat by the DRC and the UN in 2013.[11]
You're equating applying diplomatic pressure on covert support for a rebel group with "break[ing] up the Congo ... into something that would actually work"?
Seems to me that actively breaking up sovereign nations which don't want to be broken up is rarely 'not difficult'. Can't think of too many recent examples where external forces directly did such a thing with undisputable positive results.
The only recent example I can think of where external forces actively tried to do that was Yugoslavia and that did have indisputable positive results. Well, except for the Serbians, I'm sure they would dispute it and therein lies the problem with setting unrealistically high expectations that the sovereign country must agree to be broken up. If you do that of course it's never going to work. Military force must be an option.
My counterpoint would be all the external forces that sent military forces into countries and then *didn't* try to break them up: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan (arguably). All would benefit from not being forced to use their colonial borders.
I'm sure that Kosovars are thrilled to have germans own their mines and banks and US keep their peace, while Bosniaks can't control their currency. How convenient that the break-up benefited the major powers that funded and supported it, and I am sure that if US intervened in Afghanistan for example to break it up into smaller pieces the result would be great for the locals, and not at all predatory. [/s]
I didn't mean to equate those two things by the way, I probably should have put them in separate paragraphs. The Kagame/M23 thing was in the news lately so I wanted to mention it and get it some attention.
<i>True, our incomprehension is somewhat different in kind. In the past, it was nature itself that served as obstacle and enigma. Our knowledge amassed, and we gained hope - all the mysteries of the universe were only puzzles, certain to be solved in time. However, as the scope and scale of human endeavor expanded, our ignorance was returned to us by the very means we sought to eliminate it. Technology colonized our lives and our minds, reintroducing unfathomable complexity into realms we once had mastered. Our world becomes increasingly manmade, and as a consequence is more susceptible to human iniquities never found in the natural world. </i>
This reminds me a bit of The Abolition Of Man:
"The real picture is that of one dominant age—let us suppose the hundredth century A.D.—which resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human species. But then within this master generation (itself an infinitesimal minority of the species) the power will be exercised by a minority smaller still. Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car."
"Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car."
Lewis overstates his case, perhaps drastically. Consider electric lights. Yeah, to run them I need the power company, but it is quite reliable and predictable the vast bulk of the time. The choice of which lights to use and when to use them is mine and my wife's, *NOT* "of a few hundreds of men". Not all choices enabled by technologies are centrally controlled. Some technologies really do broaden the range of choices of ordinary people.
Until the power company decides to cut off your electricity, of course, in which case you'll quickly realise that your ability to turn the lights on does in fact depend on other people's good graces.
As I said, it (the power company) is quite reliable and predictable the vast bulk of the time. Sure, it _could_ arbitrarily turn the power off, but it actually doesn't. More crucially, _prior_ to the advances Lewis so cavalierly disparages, the average person had all sorts of vulnerabilities to other people too. A nobleman might arbitrarily extort labor or crops from the peasantry. A pope might start an idiotic crusade and get thousands of people killed.
What matters is whether the live options the typical person has the bulk of the time are widened or narrowed by a technical advance. In point of fact, electrification widened them. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. Electricity was a win.
<i>As I said, it (the power company) is quite reliable and predictable the vast bulk of the time. Sure, it _could_ arbitrarily turn the power off, but it actually doesn't.</i>
So the people who hold power over you wield it in a reliable and predictable way. That's nice, but it doesn't mean they don't actually hold power.
<i>More crucially, _prior_ to the advances Lewis so cavalierly disparages, the average person had all sorts of vulnerabilities to other people too. A nobleman might arbitrarily extort labor or crops from the peasantry. A pope might start an idiotic crusade and get thousands of people killed.</i>
Oppressive governments and wars are still around. In fact, they're potentially even worse, because modern technology has given governments many more means of controlling their people, and made weapons far more destructive.
"So the people who hold power over you wield it in a reliable and predictable way. That's nice, but it doesn't mean they don't actually hold power."
Look, it is theoretically possible for e.g. a politician to use the concentrated control that the electric power company has over its customers to cut off electric current to his opponents. I've never heard of that happening. I've never heard of them threatening to use that particular option. Have you heard of such a case? Politicians have lots of power, but, as far as I know, they have always used other means, from murders and prisons to financial levers, to apply political power.
"Oppressive governments and wars are still around. In fact, they're potentially even worse, because modern technology has given governments many more means of controlling their people, and made weapons far more destructive."
That is true, but it is irrelevant to the point that I'm making. The fact that nerve gas makes governments more destructive does not detract from the fact that electrification lets ordinary people control the electric lights in their homes. I never claimed that _all_ technical advances widened the options for ordinary people. I claim that Lewis is badly wrong in neglecting that _some_ technical advances _do_ widen the options for ordinary people. Lewis denigrates "_Each_ advance", "_every_ victory" [emphasis added]. This is simply wrong.
I have a question for people who have read both the book and the review.
Does this review underemphasize the Marxist portions of the book? I tried reading Society of the Spectacle almost a decade ago, and vaguely remember giving up because I ran into too many concepts that I had to google separately. I don't remember Marx being name-dropped constantly, more like the author assumed you should already be well-read in Marxist economic thought to grasp the Spectacle.
Am I misremembering? And also, should I give the book another shot?
I really appreciate the way this review takes a text that sounds *dreadful* to read, and translates it so I can get some of the nifty ideas without having to fight my way through the prose. A valuable service.
This was actually my problem with the review. I would read one of the excerpts, spend a few moments trying to interpret what I think Dubord must have meant, and then read on to find that me and reviewer had come to sometimes wildly different conclusions.
That's not the reviewers fault ofcourse but it does signpost to me that this book is obtuse, "artisitc" garbage. What's the point of language if not to transmit your thoughts as clearly as you can into other people's minds.
Well, philosophy is the field I'm mostly familiar with, and some philosophers write impenetrable prose to disguise the fact that they're full of shit, but some philosophers have valuable things to say and are just bad at expressing themselves clearly, or had writing-style preferences I decidedly do not share. Our current intellectual society seems to me to put a much higher priority on clarity of writing, and to have much higher standards for what it takes for writing to count as clear, than previous generations. I view that as a good thing, but it's also the case that we've simply become less skilled readers in certain respects than our predecessors. So I try not to assume that an obtuse writing style necessarily indicates that the content is garbage.
And some philosophers have ideas that are genuinely novel. Communicating information that fits into existing categories is much easier than rearranging categories.
Walkaway by Cory Doctorow is a good example of a working, post-capitalist society. The basic idea is that advances in 3D printing (along with disregard for copyright) allow people to simply leave society and subsist on renewable power and raw materials.
It's fiction, though. The engineering and supply chains don't need to be worked out, just made vaguely plausible.
Spend some time with real 3D printers and you'll have a different view of them. I love mine, but it's a tool for making fairly precise plastic parts. And the better ones require working with moderately hazardous chemicals. Also, I'm very aware that I'm utterly dependent on industrial supply chains for everything from filament to hardware to electrical components.
>good example of a working, post-capitalist society.
Cory Doctorow writes fiction. It is a bit of stretch call it a good working example. In reality, 3D printing is difficult and limited to only select materials. More complicated the product you want to create, more capital it requires. Reducing the capital required to create and work the many materials human economy uses to a "3D printer" is a difficult problem of engineering subject to laws of physics and chemistry.
And big part of the capitalist society is not the material goods, but the interconnected services and information to discover them. SP500 top-5 valuation tickers are Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Tesla. Only Apple and Tesla make physical things (and for both brands, it is much more about selling a particular experience to certain audience than the products themselves); other three have their business built on information: Amazon about matching the products to customers and cloud services, Alphabet about information discovery and access (Google search results, Youtube videos ... and the adverts shown to people watching them), Microsoft about providing office software tool services.
Unless the magical 3D printers can one day pump out data centers that run perfect software with free electricity at request, none of their business will go away. (And even there is the question, how do you know which products you should create with your magical replicator?)
Subsistence farming is already perfectly possible for those who can afford it and don't mind the loss of modern amenities and luxuries.
Interestingly this is close to the description of hell in The Great Divorce by CS Lewis. It's been a long time since I read it, but I think in hell people can basically invent things with their minds and they slowly move further and further away from each other to live on their own estates where they aren't challenged by anything. In contrast to heaven where at first even the grass hurts your feet until you become more substantial. I'm not really sure what I think about it, but I do think about it from time to time.
You can already walk away from society. You don't need sci-fi technology. Modern agriculture has already made subsistence extremely cheap. You can already go live in a cabin in the woods or something, and eat very cheaply, either living off welfare or off the returns from a little bit of savings. People don't do that because it means you are a loser in the game of life and society, and nobody wants to be a loser. 3D printing would not change that.
That's reducing trade and interaction rather than eliminating it, though. You're not going to make your own nails, your own medicine, your own solar panels or computer chips.
Maybe a way to think of it is as a form of early retirement? That's something most people want to do if they can save up enough; the question is what counts as "enough?"
Lots of people retiring early would mean lots of people still dependent on the system, though perhaps with reduced dependency if they like to live that way. Dependency increases again as you get older, though.
Very smart rock critic Greil Marcus wrote a book about the Sex Pistols band explaining them through the lens of Situationism, which he said their manager Malcolm McClaren was exposed to in France in 1968. In reply, lead singer Johnny Rotten said he didn't know anything about Situationism. The reason, he said, that he was angry at the Queen of England on "God Save the Queen" was that he's a Catholic Irishman.
It's an interesting article, but, like many other book reviews, it is rather vague on which parts are actually in the book, and which parts are the reviewer's own musings.
This review appears to suffer a particularly acute rationalist flaw. It is entirely too rational, clean cut, and lucid. While I appreciate the attempt to neatly steelman Debord into coherency, in doing so we end up with a rationalist’s version of French philosophy. Which is neither French, nor I suspect, Debord’s. The Spectacle, like Baudrillard’s Simulcra is a totalizing critique that transcends any mere economic system. Yes, it’s superficially about how capitalism generates the spectacle, but once in existence talking about capitalism is a lot like talking about income distributions in the Matrix. Missing entirely that the World and ALL it’s relations are IN THE MATRIX. The idea that Debord would like Rage Against the Machine is (while amusing) fundamentally at odds with his point. Which is that Rage Against The Machine, a Band that sells millions of albums selling fake outrage, and composing a specific means of relating to the world is PART of the spectacle. But I digress. While the review is an interesting blog post of the authors views and very well written. I doubt it is a particularly accurate view of Debord’s often circular, poetic, totalizing and often incoherent thoughts.
Second that. The review is well written, but feels like the reviewer went over Debord with the "rationalist steamroller" which reduces everything to the already known and familiar and is abhors ambiguity (let alone the cardinal sin of incoherence!). No mention of Hegel at all, which means tearing Debord out of his intellectual context (a very "rationalist" thing to do). Debord is a poet. The emotional impression of his prose is a part of the message. Trying to reduce him to purely discursive categories is chopping off his limbs.
And Debord's poetry about the Terrible Spectacle wasn't also just part of the Spectacle? Or maybe he realized it actually was, and did himself in on account of that?
The author of the review speak a lot about "we", "the society", etc. But I thought the Chinese weatherman story was obviously false as it is was beyond what currently can be done in reality with real technology (without it being cost-prohibitive).
Maybe all of these rabbit holes, society going crazy, just maybe it isn't affecting exactly everyone?
> I thought the Chinese weatherman story was obviously false as it is was beyond what currently can be done in reality with real technology (without it being cost-prohibitive).
That's funny, because the main thing that's false about the Chinese weatherman story is that it wasn't a weatherman, but a news anchor on a financial news broadcast, as the linked Epoch Times article clearly states. (So really more of a reading failure on OP's part.)
It also states its source (announcement by National Business Daily on Dec. 20, 2021) so it was easy to find an article by NBD that fits the description http://www.nbd.com.cn/articles/2021-12-20/2047923.html (link in Chinese obviously).
I also found a link to what appears to be the broadcast mentioned in the article: http://www.nbd.com.cn/corp/AiTv/index.html It mostly seems to be a speech-to-text voice rattling off financial news. I don't know whether they also sometimes show the anchor with lip movement synchronized to the text, but that, too, would be possible with current technology. Maybe you were imagining something else?
The most interesting thing about OP being unable to find English reporting that didn't point to that one Epoch Times article is that it highlights the economics of global news dissemination. It's always easier to just take what someone else wrote and maybe paraphrase it a bit, as compared to doing original reporting. Hence English speakers copied from the Epoch Times, and the Epoch Times copied from Chinese news reporting and by the time the story reached ACX readers it had gone through multiple layers, each offering an opportunity for deliberate manipulation and the risk of accidental distortion by mistaken paraphrases.
My personal recommendation is to stop reading a news article as soon as it mentions other news media as the source; just go find the original report instead.
Straight away, the glorification of suicidal alcoholics fosters doubt about this entire review..."like all great thinkers worth their salt"?! This reads a little too aspirational for me. Just because someone took their life does not mean they were a great thinker and not every "thinker" who took their own life was great.
Edit Ok..I reacted strongly, and after reading all the way through, aptly. This felt very emotional (bravo), and I'm not as mad at the opening paragraph as I was... Just disappointed. Like the last meme, we all know how bad it is and how it's been crumbling, but where is the hope? Who is taking up for optimism? I'm over the doom and gloom. And I suspect many people will be very soon. It seems the overproduced elite are either crying or seething, but since moving to the south, I see more communing and coping. I'm going to hang out in Camp B until we figure this shit out... Or I die which ever comes first.
Probably, but I was writing about mark Fisher today and people got mad when I made a joke about his ideas being irrelevant since he unalived himself... So I'm just transferring some of their seething 🤣
My take on The Spectacle is it could be contained if we accepted that capitalism has no place in politics. Like fire, capitalism is a wonderful servant but a lousy master. Democracies should be governed by people, not by corporate interests!
In my latest science fiction novel, Clowns, I suggest that an intelligent extraterrestrial species that visited Earth would immediately see through The Spectacle and find our position untenable.
How is corporate interests running politics "capitalism"? If anything, bribery is far more common under socialism, and the merging of corporations and the state would make the problem even worse.
It sounds like The Spectacle is over. We are no longer a society sitting in cinemas staring at movie stars or even sitting at home watching TVs, but a society jabbering at each other endlessly on our keyboards.
Sounds like a key element of The Spectacle was "one-way communication". If, today, you want to say something to a movie or music star or news-reporter or government official, you can on Twitter. Have something to say about a blog post you just read? Make a comment! Don't like someone else's comment? Comment on their comment! Or make a video of yourself in response to a video by someone else.
Perhaps this new configuration is more pernicious than the previous, but it doesn't seem like a mere continuation of the old trend wherein more capital = more image power. Want to be a star? Used to be you'd have to, say, move to Hollywood, get an agent, perhaps do horrible things on a casting couch, and ultimately win over the producers who had control of the big bucks to put you in their movie. Now you can make a video in your bedroom for the cost of a mobile phone, put it on YouTube and maybe it goes viral. Or you can put your original song on YouTube instead of winning over a big record company to record and release your album. As well, you don't have to get a degree in journalism and work for a bunch of newspapers to be a journalist, you can simply start a SubStack.
More algorithm + more dopamine +/- more terms of use +/- more oversight board = more pernicious and maybe = more credibility for image power carried in our pockets and one day in our glasses or contact lenses?
Not all bad as pointed out by the good opportunities in your examples.
Builders (big and small) have new tools (and more on the way) to build either The Spectacle or the antidotes for it.
You know, funnily enough the thing that triggered the Gell Mann Amnesia realization for me here wasn't the line about all good thinkers being suicidal alcoholics (which I took as joke that was funny precisely because it's closer to the truth than not), but the paragraph about 5th Generational Warfare: "Taken together, the Comments form a precise description of Fifth Generation Warfare [11], well before the concept was invented. [12] 5GW is basically hybrid warfare without the kinetics. It is a war of information and influence..."
And, well, this was clearly written before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when Russian disinformation was still something to be feared. As Edward Luttwak put it,
"First, the military intelligence advisers both on the Russian side and the American side all belong to the same church. This church preaches “fourth-generation warfare,” hybrid warfare, postmodern information warfare—all new stuff, praised as nonkinetic. Kinetic is the term for war fought by blockheads, just people shooting people. They were drunk, both the Russians and the Americans, on this idea that you have cyber this, you have cyber that, and that the Ukrainan soldier-
Interviewer: Once he opens his iPhone, the Ukrainian soldier won’t be able to function mentally anymore, his morale will collapse, and he will lay down his weapons and surrender.
They believed this nonsense. I have gone to war games until basically I got kicked out. Why was that? Because I would go to these war games and I would see these people, even three star generals running the war games. And I would say, fellows, I don’t know where you have been, OK: And I don’t know what experience you have of war. I guess you flew by helicopter, over Iraq or Afghanistan. I’ve had a gun in my hand and I’ve shot somebody and I have his helmet in my study. I have used a bazooka. I have actually been in combat. None of you guys have been in combat, because you have only fought people who had no artillery, no armor, no air power. And you don’t know what you’re talking about. All of this stuff you’re telling me in the war games. I said, no, this is not going to happen. What will happen is that the bloke is going to pick up a gun.
Interviewer: He is not going to be persuaded to surrender via his iPhone.
The Russians believed it too. The Russians were also hybrid warfare enthusiasts in their war colleges and war games, and so on.
So now, this is absolutely not new. In August 1914, when the fighting started in Europe..."
The suicidal alcoholics line is fine, because the reviewer clearly knows it isn't true but says it anyways because it's funny and directionally true (just look at Diogenes for example). But the earnest talk of 5th Generational Warfare and warfare without kinetics has convinced me that the reviewer is like the Russian generals: they have no idea what they're actually talking about. I'm not sure if it's a problem with the book, or the reviewer's interpretation of it, but clearly something is missing from this description of reality. Russia tried to conduct a coup through information warfare, as the review proscribes ("If you want to actually seize power, you will need to conduct a coup"), a coup de main for a swift and relatively bloodless victory a la the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968. In February, they eschewed mere kinetics for focusing on how "the internet has made each of us a node in a global network", choosing not to bombard the enemy army from the air like the US did in the Gulf War and the Invasion of Iraq in favor of propaganda bombardments like the iPhone messaging trick. They did everything the reviewer prescribes as the route to power: "The subtle ubiquity of the spectacle allows a level of dominance that dictators can only dream of..."
And yet the average Ukrainian soldier picked up a gun and started shooting back when they were invaded, rather than fall like puppets before a form of war where "the brain is the terrain". Such aphorisms are nice and all, but are they actually true? 5th Generational Warfare is one of the best examples of the theory of the Spectacle in action: a war fought by mass media where "the universal victory of form over function and style over substance" finally applies to actual warfare instead of just culture wars and political battles. And yet it failed. Crashed and burned in fact, like the VDV helicopters at Hostomel Airport.
Honestly, the victory of reality over Spectacle here throws the entire idea of "the Spectacle" into doubt. This was its big chance: the Spectacle as conducted by the masters of the art, the very inventors of disinformation according to the book itself. Now it all sounds like a bunch of useless deepities about "universal victory" and "the brain is the terrain". Glittering generalities, or as TV Tropes calls it, Concepts Are Cheap. Or to put it more savagely, a bunch of delusions by a bunch of people who think they're King Cnut and can overpower reality by the power of their voice alone (in the version of the story where Cnut actually believes this rather than trying to show why it's false). Perhaps the theory of the Spectacle still works in politics and media, where words are all there is... but it certainly doesn't work elsewhere, where NLAWs and Starstreaks stubbornly continue to operate despite the assertion that this is "how power really operates". It's all looking very naïve.
Oh hey, upon reviewing this I've noticed that Luttwak was saying this exact thing: "And I don’t know what experience you have of war. I guess you flew by helicopter, over Iraq or Afghanistan. I’ve had a gun in my hand and I’ve shot somebody and I have his helmet in my study. I have used a bazooka. I have actually been in combat. None of you guys have been in combat, because you have only fought people who had no artillery, no armor, no air power. And you don’t know what you’re talking about.".
Modern day King Cnuts, thinking they can talk Afghanistan into stability with enough PowerPoint presentations, thinking their words have value even without any experience backing them up... the urge to believe that the solution is to organize another worker's council to teach everyone to parrot the right words ("The KPIs are looking up. Afghanistan is going to be okay.") is universal, it seems. Theory and practice should go hand in hand, but when theory replaces practice with praxis...
The Ukrainian soldiers won't be convinced to lay down their arms by social media propaganda, but if propaganda had been effective against citizens and decision makers in the US, the UK or France, Ukrainian soldiers would not have many arms to lay down or pick up.
Yes, but the fact that such efforts failed and #SlavaUkraini started off strong, and has kept going strong, is evidence that the theory "the Spectacle is everything, and the masters of the Spectacle rule everything" is just false. The Spectacle certainly seems to be everything in the likes of politics and culture wars, but in actual war it's fallen quite flat. It seems in fact that mastery of the Spectacle just makes you good at looking good, not at doing a good job.
Your argument seems to be "Russia lost, therefore 5GW refuted", and it just does not logically follow. You can really only get there by assuming only Russians dabble in disinformation, while everyone else can only tremble in fear before the weapon's tremendous powers. (Which is obviously not what the Western military/intelligence thinks, while also obviously being precisely what they want you to think.)
From where I stand, it looks like Russia losing because the other side was better. The US has conducted its own propaganda campaign for months before the actual invasion. The Ukraine is being ran by a literal performer. If a military invasion by itself was enough for an Ukrainian soldier to pick up a gun, he'd have already done so in 2014.
(This is not to somehow deny that, ultimately, reality is what matters. Debord must know that too, if he's a Marxist, base > superstructure and all. To assume otherwise is to argue with a strawman.)
"1. The review said that 5th Generational Warfare should do well, describing the following as gold amongst dross: "If the enemy uses a broader definition of war than you, any attack on that portion of the spectrum where you are defenseless may inflict a decisive defeat." (in Footnote 11).
2. Russia used 5th Generational Warfare, striking not at their enemy's ability to fight but their will to fight, trying to capture or destroy symbols like Kiev and Zelensky while hijacking media networks like the cell phone network to broadcast their own symbols. Their own actions showed that they believed that, like in politics, "the deliberate manipulation of an observer’s context to achieve a desired outcome." would lead to victory. In other words, control the input, and you control the output. Through mastery of the Spectacle, war would be the continuation of politics by the same means. In fact, you wouldn't have to openly declare war at all, since that might create the very hostility and resistance it was seeking to fight. Better to pick "the most subtle and least violent way to conduct such a war" and call it a "Special Operation", because looks are everything.
3. Yeah, those opening days were a spectacle, but not in the way the Russians had planned.
4. The dismissal of mere "kinetics" was the reason they failed, and to fix that they've been returning to a WW1-esque style of warfare dominated by artillery and trenches. Their own actions show that they believe they overweighted the propaganda war over the actual war. Information warfare still has a part to play of course (e.g. electronic warfare, drone reconnaissance, OSINT), but as an equal rather than a replacement.
5. The book, or review, or both make the same mistake of dismissing the importance of the merely physical.
6. What else about the book review's conclusions are suspect? I can only really speak about the military science it tangentially touched on, but it does not fill me with confidence, especially given the confidence the review itself had about its understanding of military science. If it had been less confident, I would be more confident about trusting it.
7. None of this is ironclad, but it is probabilistic, and I don't like gambling on the book review getting things right with these odds."
So in short, Russia was losing because the other side was better *at kinetics*, and now it is winning because it is better *at kinetics*. The propaganda matters, but only in-so-much as it helps or hinders the kinetics: Zelensky managed to get the US and EU to provide arms and supplies, so he helped; but he also mismanaged things on the ground by insisting on "Not one step back!" policies in Severodonetsk and other cities in the East until recently, throwing away perfectly good soldiers in meatgrinder battles against superior artillery they couldn't win, only retreat from. Likewise on the Russian side, their Internet bot farms initially distracted them from the importance of having an army that is also high-tech and well funded, so initially it hindered; but slowly but surely they've been having some success in beating the drum of gas price inflation in the US, energy shortages in the EU, and food shortages in the "Third World" to convince voters to lift sanctions and allow Russia to gain the foreign currency it needs to keep its war machine running. You see this pattern throughout history as well: Mussolini's Italy for example was surprisingly bad at war when trying to carve out its African colonial empire, despite its militarist trappings and fascist pride - because it turns out Mussolini was an effective politician, not necessarily an effective general, and the nature of fascism itself lead to a preference for flashy propaganda over effective governance and administration.
As to why the review says that the Spectacle is everything, contrary to the Marxian base > superstructure belief... my best guess is that it comes from the book review, not the book. The reviewer said they're a post-capitalist, not necessarily a Marxist. I also suppose it might come from Debord himself, many Marxists would agree that many Marxists do not fully understand Marx's arguments - they just disagree over who has the true version of Marxism. In fact, the reviewer themselves don't seem to be the source of the belief that the Spectacle dominates everything, saying "The spectacle undoubtedly exists, to a greater or a lesser extent. It is an important lens, a necessary perspective on where humanity is and where it is headed. But it is only one way of viewing the world among many. It is not the end-all, be-all for sociopolitical analysis.".
But yet the belief still seems to be in the book *and* the book review, with quotes like:
"the spectacle represents the dominant model of life.";
"Pre-spectacular society has already passed beyond living memory. Soon we will hit another inflection point - where no one alive even knew someone who lived before the spectacle. All of human history is now before and after...";
"The all-pervasive nature of mass media has led to the universal victory of form over function and style over substance"; and
"The subtle ubiquity of the spectacle allows a level of dominance that dictators can only dream of."
These aren't the words of someone who believes that reality is equally important to the Spectacle, they're the words of someone who's describing how the Spectacle has taken over and is now running the show. I don't know when the book review is just paraphrasing Debord and when the book review is making its own stand clear, but clearly someone believes the strawman position earnestly enough to make concrete predictions, like "Behold the future of international politics: [Spiderman pointing meme]" and "You can’t identify a forgery if you don’t have The Real to compare it to.". Those are concrete predictions that have been proven wrong, by a war that reminds us that the future of international politics can be *actual wars* that can only be understood through military science instead of media analysis studies, and by an embarrassment of an army that revealed itself as a forgery through its own performance (things like getting shot down, resorting to "cope cages", and constantly running out of fuel) rather than a comparison to The Real. I just don't think it's a strawman when the words and the counterexamples are that concrete.
I still don't see that it is refuted that Russia lost the hybrid warfare. Sure, weapons and flesh and all makes a difference - but weapons provided by USA and Europe based on a successful media campaign. I don't think the campaign is ran by Ukraine - but by weapon manufacturers, US govt (hawkish part that profits from it, or that wants to hinder Russia and EU by getting them in a protracted conflict) etc... A medieval war was decidedly more flesh and arms than this one, and this one is decidedly more about Spectacle - or so it seems to me?
Funnily enough, things are almost the exact opposite of this in military history when you start digging a bit. The battlefield was ruled by the power of the small-s spectacle, with battles being won and lost by morale and getting your opponent to retreat rather than by firepower and killing them all (or a majority).
Napoleon for example said "The moral is to the physical as three is to one.". In the study of Hoplite warfare, one of the most well-supported models is a "pulse model" which is similar to what we can observe of rioters clashing against each other in riots today (two lines close, fight for a short while until their morale runs dry/they feel like they've proven their bravery enough that they're allowed to retreat, and fall back to take a breather so they can repeat the process), while the Rome: Total War-esque model (of formations clashing until almost everyone dies) is... less well supported by historical documents and modern examples of melee combat.
Continued: Pre-WW1 or thereabouts, the majority of casualties in combat were sustained on the retreat as your fleeing footsoldiers were pursued and cut down by the enemy cavalry, or pursued and forced to surrender, or pursued and convinced to desert from their side; the American Civil War had an anomalously high fatality rate for its time because with the relative lack of quality cavalry on both sides compared to the European norm, forcing them to instead win through killing the enemy soldiers instead of driving them to surrender. (If I remember correctly, European military observers of the time chalked this one up as an Americanness they would avoid, not realizing that WW1 lay only fifty years in the future).
Continued: This implies that the best way to minimize casualties is to maximize morale and minimize retreats, and the best way to maximize enemy casualties is to maximize your damage to their morale and their urge to retreat, with the actual casualties taken in battle not mattering so much compared to the casualties afterwards. This is why martial cultures like the Japanese samurai emphasized never retreating so much - they weren't just suicidal, and in fact their suicidal determination was a great way to *survive* battle, since if you never retreated and the enemy broke before you did, you'd be the one inflicting rather than taking all those retreat casualties.
Continued: It also means that bayonets are incredible even once guns have been refined to the point that everyone is using one, because while guns kill, bayonets convince entire formations to retreat; military manuals of the pre-WW1 era emphasize "shock"/charging with cold steel so much because it really was more effective. Paradoxically, this effectiveness caused them to show up very rarely in the casualty figures (because most people ran before they got bayoneted), and it's easy to underestimate their importance unless you've read about how Napoleon used them to turn his army of conscripts into the terror of Europe.
Continued: What makes WW1, and modern combat in general, different from everything that came before is that this is no longer true. Battles are won by "fire", not shock; killing the enemy, not damaging their morale. The simplest explanation why is that the firepower weapons (guns and artillery) kept improving while still staying firepower weapons (more fire damage than shock), while the shock weapons (bayonets, melee weapons) stayed the same (same power, same focus on shock damage over fire), so there eventually came a crossing-over point that cleanly divides military history into two.
In short, see https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/w8ybx2/comment/ihsgj19/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3. On the battlefield, modern war is decidedly more flesh and arms than anything that came before. On the operational/campaign level and strategic level, of course, war is still a matter of internal politics/small-s spectacle/morale, but in actual battle people die quite a lot. And no matter how much hope people pin on cyberwarfare, media warfare, grey warfare, 5th Generational warfare, psychological warfare, non-kinetic warfare, information warfare, perceptual warfare, conceptual/memetic warfare, etc. et cetera... there is still no substitute for actually winning battles.
It all reminds me of the overhyped promises of strategic bombing in the Interwar era, a.k.a. terror bombing, really. Conventional military units would be obsolete as bombers would simply fly over them to attack the civilians they were protecting. The civilians would be terrified into surrendering through the use of cutting-edge technologies like chemical weapons. Defence was impossible, since you couldn't possibly build enough gas masks and bomb shelters for everyone. Not only would the bomber always get through, the thinking went, it would win the war by itself. The sight of being attacked would drive people to surrender, no, *demand* surrender. And this way we could avoid having to grind down and kill them all, a la WW1.
All that was false of course, to varying degrees. Land units just equipped themselves with AA guns. Cities were equipped with AA guns, gas masks, and bomb shelters. And most importantly, being attacked did not drive the civilians to surrender - if anything, it strengthened their will to resist, judging by British morale during the Blitz for example, and how the Allies had to grind down Germany and Japan despite bombing their cities far more savagely than the Blitz. Strategic bombing only saw success when it turned its focus from terror bombing to industrial bombing; terror bombing only caught up with the development of nuclear weapons...
... and even then it was because the "kinetics" of a nuclear weapon struck and terrorized everyone in the hit city (often literally shaking them), not because of the mere spectacle of it - the Japanese high command were famously unwilling to surrender even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they hadn't been personally hit so they just brushed off the spectacle and discussed how to keep fighting. (The Emperor of course ordered them to surrender because he *was* affected by the spectacle, but he was the only one in the room. If anyone else had been the one guy broken by the mere sight of it, the Japanese would have kept fighting). The spectacular impact was a matter of its kinetics, not its spectacle.
So in short, kinetics wins wars in a way spectacle doesn't; wars are better understood through the lens of military science rather than media analysis; and I just find it awfully presumptuous that people think they understand military science because they understand media analysis. As an amateur student of the field, I can tell you that military science is a lot of hard work, filled with lots of unintuitive things like everything I've just outlined (medieval battles were dominated by morale rather than flesh and blood, modern battles are much the opposite despite the advent of Shock and Awe, bayonets were arguably more powerful than guns/small arms in Napoleon's time).
Media analysis helps of course when understanding the grand-strategic level of warfare instead of the strategic, operational, and tactical, but I wish other people were as careful about this as I am being here. Politics is not warfare, and anyone who thinks they have mastered war because they have mastered politics and can paraphrase Clausewitz ("War is the continuation of politics.") is in for a rude awakening ("War is the continuation of politics *by other means*."). Just look at the US's failures with South Vietnam and Afghanistan, or how Ukraine has been struggling in the Donbas, or how in the Nagorno-Karabakh War Armenia had a dominant position in Western social media right up until the moment it announced it had lost, or how ISIS surged forwards on social media and the ground only to lose because it lost on the ground... we are not yet at the stage where "The all-pervasive nature of mass media has led to the universal victory of form over function and style over substance". Russia can still win despite losing the propaganda war, and Ukraine can still lose if it loses the kinetic war.
Endnote: Funnily enough, Clausewitz never actually said the famous thing ("War is the continuation of politics by other means.") either. He said "War is the continuation of politics *with* other means.", clarifying afterwards "We deliberately use the phrase ‘with the addition of other means’ because we also want to make it clear that war in itself does not suspend political intercourse...". He would approve of approaching war from the perspective of the Spectacle and 5th Generational Warfare, as long as it was just an approach, but I don't think he would approve of its track record of failing to understand the psychology of the enemy and how resistant they can actually be.
In fact, I think he might just outright argue against it. He would emphasize the true unknowability of anyone else's psychology, a la his emphasis on the unknowability of warfare (the famed Fog of War). The idea that war can be made bloodless would exasperate him as something he had already put down ("Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat the enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: War is such a dangerous business that mistakes that come from kindness are the very worst."). And the idea that war can understood as a cold-blooded calculation (run by weapon manufacturers for example, or fought by psychologists), rather than a clusterfuck collision of those calculations, raw emotions, and people just being lucky and unlucky, would drive him to despondency as he realized people had completely misunderstood him. I think, overall, he would view 5th Generational Warfare as simply his ideas ("War is the continuation of politics with other means.") but worse.
There's this thing we see on the internet very frequently where someone hallucinates that someone else holds a very stupid and often nonsensical opinion and then carefully refutes his own hallucination. Here, you've done a masterful job refuting some hallucinatory version of Debord's point (which may have been obfuscated a bit by the reviewer, I'll admit).
A cynic might smile at your mention of Luttwak and ask how he found himself volunteering in Israel in 1967 of all years, and if perhaps he had not been utterly defeated by information warfare before he left London. Such a cynic also might smile at the idea of mocking a bunch of sad dupes like generals, who appear to actually believe the nonsense they claim to be fighting for a far higher percentage of the time than the politicians do.
Egypt had it coming, the terrorists hate our freedoms, and Ukraine is beautiful and heroic. How naive would anyone have to be to suppose otherwise?
This feels a lot like moving the goalposts. Whenever information warfare fails to be a useful replacement for conventional military science instead of just a supplement, the argument shifts to saying that information warfare won somewhere else, so overall its students must still operate on a higher and more important plane of knowledge than mere students of military science.
It's reminiscent of discussing things with a conspiracy theorist (especially because information warfare theory often boils down to arguing that wars are fought by conspiracies manipulating the public into false consciousness). Point out to a vaccine skeptic that their knowledge of mRNA biology didn't exist yesterday and is probably poorly informed relative to that of an expert, and they will denigrate the very concept of expertise unless it is expertise in conspiracy-finding, because all other expertise has been duped by the experts in conspiracy-generation. That's internally consistent of course, but I find it unlikely and a poor fit for observed behavior in reality.
To pull out Clausewitz again, war is not a calculated affair. It is the continuation of politics with other means, of course, and politics *is* a calculated affair overall, but alloying it with the elements of war results in something quite different from the base constituents. Clausewitz diagnosed these constituents as "a fascinating trinity—composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; the play of chance and probability, within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to pure reason.". Or more vulgarly put, war is a clusterfuck collision of genuine emotion, sheer chance, and calculated manipulation, and this collision results in the famed "fog of war" where nothing turns out as calculated and improvisation rules the day. Hence Clausewitz's prognosis of accepting the limits of planning and handing over some power to your subordinates so they can use their initiative - what would go on to become the famed "Auftragstaktik", which in English is generally translated as "Mission-type Tactics". Those who ignore his advice have overall historically performed poorly, with examples ranging from the Western Front of WW1 to Iraq's performance in the Iran-Iraq war and First Gulf War to the opening days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those who have heeded his advice have overall historically performed well, with examples ranging from the Nazi conquest of France, to Communist China's performance in the Korean War, to the UK's performance in the Falklands War. (If you want, I can elaborate on the Nazi conquest of France example because of its interesting relationship to information warfare by way of the radio, but in a follow-up comment because this comment has gone on long enough.)
Accordingly, based off the empirical evidence, I have to agree with Clausewitz that we should stick to a more moderate position than "War is a calculated affair that can be won before the fighting even starts by using calculation to predict and control the other aspects of war, such as raging emotions and the element of luck.". That is a position only held by people who have never been to war or studied it, who imagine that militaries and governments are far more competent than they really are. Those who have seen the sausage get made meanwhile believe in something more like "War is made up of three equally important parts, which combine to result in an unpredictable mess that limits any one person's ability to control things.".
In other words, the warfare of the Spectacle is simply the belief that calculation alone can dominate the other aspects of war via methods like information warfare, using theoretical analyses from fields that have little familiarity with military science like media analysis, and as you might expect it don't seem to be doing so well empirically. In a community like this, I think that's enough to come to a conclusion: it's simply not true.
(Further note: The warfare of the Spectacle seems to me to be the latest in a long line of "wunderwaffe" drawn up by people desperate to imagine how their expertise in one field [e.g. rocketry, jet engines, giant tanks] can not just substitute for but *dominate* the expertise of other fields [e.g. logistics, industrial engineering, cost-benefit analysis]. Sometimes it's actually true, as with the development of nuclear weapons, and sometimes it's sort-of true, as with the development of chemical weapons, but mostly it's just not true.)
(Further note: Your post feels rather unkind, and I'd argue untrue and unnecessary as well. You haven't actually provided any evidence that your claims are true [Luttwak is a puppet and just doesn't know it; I'm an idiot who's fighting shadows; and nobody in the know actually believes in anything or fighting for anything, and those who do must obviously not be in the know]. And without that, it's just a Bulverism [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism]. It's as if you were speaking at a university about your studies when someone stood up and began shouting "COMMIE COMMIE COMMIE YOU FUCKING COMMIE DON'T BELIEVE THE COMMIE!". It's just rude, saying someone is stupid, nonsensical, hallucinating, duped, and otherwise a fool who believes rubbish like "The terrorists hate our freedom!!!!!". And if one has to be rude, it's still better to substantiate the allegations and make sure they are necessary instead of excessive.)
“The Society of the Spectacle will make no sense if the reader feels there is nothing fundamentally wrong with contemporary society.”
I guess that describes me, because I got almost nothing out of reading this review. No offense intended to the reviewer: I strongly doubt I would have found much of value in the book itself.
These arguments about how modernism is destroying people's lives seem rooted in an utter lack of perspective. Pre-modern life was, for the vast majority of people, incredibly miserable. Most people were peasants who had to spend the bulk of their time doing arduous manual labor, eating barely enough food to survive, with little or no hope of upward mobility. Quality of life was abysmal by modern standards, constant discomfort and hunger and exhaustion and sickness were the norm. Ideas like "the 40 hour work week" and "retirement" were completely unheard of. Nobles got to enjoy more luxuries (though still fewer than even a moderately poor first-worlder today), but also had to deal with constant competition that could and often did turn deadly. Women and children had almost no agency whatsoever, they were very frequently subject to physical and emotional abuse, and rape was commonplace. People with deformities, disabilities, and mental illnesses were shunned at best and often treated as subhuman, or simply killed outright. Queer people were similarly maligned. And everyone had to live under the constant threat of banditry, conquest, war, despotism, famine, and disease. No one had anywhere close to the level of security and stability that even people in poorer countries enjoy today. And that's assuming you're not one of the one-in-three people who simply died in infancy or early childhood. Or a slave whose lot in life was to be literally worked to death in the mines.
But even beyond all of the obvious horrors, people in pre-modern times lacked so many wonderful things that we take for granted. Everyone with a smartphone has access to nearly all of the world's collective knowledge right at their fingertips! We have forms of visual and interactive media that would've been inconceivable to people from previous centuries, and a sheer abundance of art and entertainment options (spanning a truly enormous variety of mediums, formats, genres, and flavors) that former generations could only have dreamed of. Advances in communications and transportation technology have allowed us to build connections with people across the world, bridging cultural divides.
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences were the best thing to ever happen to the human race, to the point where I would describe it as almost miraculous.
It also tends to ignore the methods of social control that predated the spectacle, at least in the context of the European tradition, which were basically obligatory obedience to an explicit theology that bound you to your born social role on pain of horrible death in this life and eternal torment in the next. If you think social media is bad, you should try serfdom.
The more general class of primitive utopianism is a popular idea that seems unable to account for the fact that, when presented with a choice, nearly everyone prefers the modern spectacle to whatever they were doing before. Every utopian community fails for exactly the same reason: modern capitalism is much closer to utopia than whatever wholesome down-home smalltown bullshit these people cook up for the rest of us.
Material abundance doesn't automatically entail flourishing, even for animals (look up John B. Calhoun's mouse utopia experiment for an illustration). There's no reason to expect humans to be any different.
Nor, come to think of it, is there any reason to expect the hedonic treadmill not to apply at the societal level as well as the individual.
People whose happiness comes from relative abundance arguing it comes from absolute abundance. Name a better duo.
If this kind of apologism for modernism was rooted in reality humanity would not have survived the Paleolithic as depression would have been rampant and our ancestors would have dove off a cliff collectively. Not to mention the suicide rates that should be plaguing chimpanzees.
There are good things about the modern condition, material well-being, the best it has to offer, is ironically not one of them. Consistent material *improvement* maybe… And that in critical areas (housing, education, healthcare) material improvement has flagged is an important way to understand why griping about the modern condition is now so common.
Obviously, not everyone in the past was miserable, just as not everyone today is happy. But the evidence points to modern people being happier overall.
>As an example: how much of your daily environment, as a percentage, do you truly understand? Look around the room and reflect on how “even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable.” Your kitchen and your medicine cabinet are filled with mystical objects. Hell, just look at what’s on your person. The phone in your hand, the cash in your wallet, the clothes on your back, the food in your belly - how many lifetimes would it take to truly grok the building blocks of everyday existence?
On the contrary, I think that the world around us is more comprehensible than ever (even accounting for how much more complicated it is). I don't know all those building blocks off the top of my head, but I know a surprising amount, and if I need to go deeper I know where to look.
I recently replaced the switch in a ceiling fan by following directions I got off of Youtube. 50 years ago, the wiring of the fan would have been a black box - I wouldn't have known if the switch was replaceable, unless I actually personally took a screwdriver to it to see for myself and hoped that I could put it back together when I was done, and doing so might turn out to be a big waste of time. Instead, I got my answers in about an hour of searching and correctly estimated that I could do the whole thing on a Sunday afternoon.
The universe has *always* been mind-bogglingly vast and incomprehensible, the only thing that modern society has done is allow us to *notice* this fact. We can now grasp enough of the universe that we actually have some vague idea of how little it is we know. But by the same token, when we *need* to grasp something it's now within our power to do so. I think it's wrong to say that the Spectacle has *replaced* some previous deeper understanding that we once had - we never had such an understanding to begin with, and even if the Spectacle has paved over the nuances of far-off lands it's also revealed dizzying depths to anyone who's willing to look.
Dang. I'd been feeling underwhelmed by the book reviews to date. This is the first one that really wowed me. I feel like I understand the concepts of this book better than I would have had I forced myself through its... turgidity, and the critiques of it were reasonable, insightful, and gloriously concise.
I feel like every other assertion in this review was false, and likely it’s subject had about as high a hit rate.
Journalism was hardly ever “pure”, before the modern age, during it, or after.
People still have large parts of their life mediated by the real. Less than before, but still huge portions.
I haven’t forgotten any of those elements of the past, and I had a computer and good internet since age 10 in ~1991. But I still remember and cherish navigating without a device, often read paper books, and think fondly of times when not everyone was reachable.
IDK this seems like a the maunderings of a mopey college student determined to take the negative view of things. Sure there are some insights sprinkled among the dross, but that is no great feat for any intelligent person when throwing out so many ideas.
So far as I can tell, this was a solid review, though that's weird to say when Debord as presented doesn't make any sense to me.
I guess my base confusion is: What were Debord's values/what did he think "better" would even mean? Lack of clarity in how to *reach* socialist utopia I don't begrudge, but I'm not clear about what would make it Utopian. What would make it distinct from the present world such that I would want to live there?
Normally my complaint about Utopians is "building/sustaining their utopia would require humans to behave utterly differently than they have for all of history", but here it's "I'm not even sure what he wants".
Edit to clarify: I don't accept "end capitalism" as an answer here, because 1) it's rarely clear in practice what that would even mean and more importantly 2) saying "X is bad" is not a substitute for specifying "Y is good"
Yes, and such complaints have loomed large in popular culture. Consider Charlie Chaplin's film Modern Times (1936). Or George Eliot's novel Silas Marner (1861). Non-Marxist artists and intellectuals have complained about changes wrought by new technology since the Industrial Revolution began.
And Ecclesiastes was telling us “all is vanity” back in the 10th century BCE. I suspect the “alienation” of Marxism is something endemic in humanity since at least that long ago, and social and technological change just aggravate what’s already there.
I think the problem is that Debord has a worthwhile insight, but also has such a broken/European worldview that it comes across a bunch of twaddle about how "people create time."
The clear statement would be something like:
"Mass media has become a huge part of how people learn about the world. It's also become the main forum in which politics happen, and warps other events in the real world (e.g. protests take place for the benefit of the cameras, businesses factor media coverage into their decision-making). However, it doesn't depict the world accurately. This is partly due to inherent factors in the nature of film/television (it's only showing a single 2-dimensional viewpoint in literal terms, it has to be cut and decide what to show, it can't widely communicate anything requiring more than generalist knowledge, it has space limitations etc). It's also due to mass media being a product in a capitalist economy, and being subject to a host of perverse incentives (pleasing owners with ulterior motives, pleasing advertisers, flattering the prejudices of whatever class creates it or consumes it, keeping in line with regulators/people who can influence regulators etc).
The biggest of these perverse incentives is having to compete in a marketplace, where having the most interesting/entertaining/intuitive depiction of the world is more effective than having the most accurate depiction of the world. This is a problem in news, but is a much bigger problem in fiction - films depict gangsters, astronauts, scientists, politicians or 18th Century debutantes in a way that bares no resemblance to reality, but makes the film more enjoyable. This then forms people's mental picture of all these things.
However, news is ultimately also an entertainment product, and is somewhat fungible with fiction (I could read an Atlantic article about Russian bots, or I could watch Don't Look Up). Because they're competing, they start to slowly muscle in on each other's turf (films pretend they're in some way informative, the news writes articles that read like little biographies of someone discovering something).
Given mass media is essentially people's sole source of information, this is a big problem. It's completely warped everyone's understanding of how the world functions, and subsumed politics into a branch of the entertainment industry. Politics is the only tool we'd have to break out of this trap, but is now part of the trap itself and is almost wholly ineffectual - politicians incentive is to seem like they're radicals who can change things on TV, but not to actually change things, and these two things are slightly anti-correlated (cf. Trump).
Therefore, we need workers councils to bring about a socialist revolution."
I don't think it's a good argument for what he's arguing for - most of his points aren't really about capitalism, they're about the nature of mass media. I also can't see why he'd be a socialist and not an anarchist based on taking these arguments as a radical (presumably in reality, it's because an anarchist society wouldn't have sinecures for twits like him, who are clearly part of "the Spectacle" if you take him to his logical conclusion). There's a case for stodgifying/limiting media here that's broadly compatible with doddery old-school socialism (eg. don't allow fiction or opinion, limit it to one channel for a couple of hours a day, don't let the media report on politics etc), but that's incompatible with his kind of radical posturing). There's an even stronger case for accepting the revealed wisdom of the Qu'ran and banning all images, but I don't think he'd like that either.
The comment is "I think Debord kind of has a decent insight here but it is too mangled to be understood correctly".
"He is a cleaned up statement of what he should have said X, though I still don't think it shows what he thinks it shows"
Me: "yeah that is a much more coherent statement, too bad he didn't say that".
As for what exact points I thought were wrong?
>Mass media has become a huge part of how people learn about the world. It's also become the main forum in which politics happen, and warps other events in the real world (e.g. protests take place for the benefit of the cameras, businesses factor media coverage into their decision-making).
Not sure either of these things is as unique to mass media as you might think. mass media has perhaps made them worse, but they have existed for centuries.
>However, it doesn't depict the world accurately. This is partly due to inherent factors in the nature of film/television (it's only showing a single 2-dimensional viewpoint in literal terms, it has to be cut and decide what to show, it can't widely communicate anything requiring more than generalist knowledge, it has space limitations etc). It's also due to mass media being a product in a capitalist economy, and being subject to a host of perverse incentives (pleasing owners with ulterior motives, pleasing advertisers, flattering the prejudices of whatever class creates it or consumes it, keeping in line with regulators/people who can influence regulators etc).
Once again opposed to what? Non mass media? it has these same failings. The media of the middle ages and ancient time? Lots of failing of mass media presented that are jsut failings of media generally.
>The biggest of these perverse incentives is having to compete in a marketplace, where having the most interesting/entertaining/intuitive depiction of the world is more effective than having the most accurate depiction of the world. This is a problem in news, but is a much bigger problem in fiction - films depict gangsters, astronauts, scientists, politicians or 18th Century debutantes in a way that bares no resemblance to reality, but makes the film more enjoyable. This then forms people's mental picture of all these things.
There was a marketplace of ideas before there was the capitalistic marketplace. The above isn't true of Homer?
>However, news is ultimately also an entertainment product, and is somewhat fungible with fiction (I could read an Atlantic article about Russian bots, or I could watch Don't Look Up). Because they're competing, they start to slowly muscle in on each other's turf (films pretend they're in some way informative, the news writes articles that read like little biographies of someone discovering something).
I think really there was a pretty brief golden age of the media being really focused on impartiality and journalistic ethics, but it was mostly jsut from the ~1960s-early 2000s.
>Given mass media is essentially people's sole source of information, this is a big problem.
It is still probably better information than they had previously, say 200 years ago.
>It's completely warped everyone's understanding of how the world functions, and subsumed politics into a branch of the entertainment industry.
Also not new.
>Politics is the only tool we'd have to break out of this trap, but is now part of the trap itself and is almost wholly ineffectual - politicians incentive is to seem like they're radicals who can change things on TV, but not to actually change things, and these two things are slightly anti-correlated (cf. Trump).
I agree society could be improved by some politically driven reform and restructure of the media sector.
>Therefore, we need workers councils to bring about a socialist revolution.
Doesn't follow (and the person making the comment seemed to agree it doesn't follow).
I thought about the Amish shortly after reading this, and I think they make a few things a bit awkward.
They seem to be doing a lot of core things Debord wants. They don’t have the Spectacle and their society seems built to resist developing it. They value personal relationships a lot, and that seems to be the opposite of the fake and phonie relationships you have via the media and technology. They are decentralized: they organize in congregations that can share overlapping territory. I don’t think you can put a label on their economics. Personal relationships seem to be the basis for those kinds of interactions at least as much as formal, sterile rules. That seems to cover a lot of what The Real is getting at. At least as much as I understand The Real and The Amish.
It seems like spending a period of time living with the Amish would work as a litmus test for his ideas. I doubt they are exactly what he wants, but he probably could have refined his ideas a lot had he tried it. Has he ever considered any embedded society like that?
Skimming a second time, I think the part about a movement being decentralized vs centralized and working within the system vs remaining outside of it. It notices there is a contradiction. I think that contradiction comes from the requirement that this movement be a singular movement. It centralizes one thing: either we all do it all at one, or none of do. If you get rid of that requirement, the contradiction goes away. And we know that can work since the Amish already exist.
The Amish also have a shitload of carveouts of convenience to let them take most of the benefits of modern society without giving up their penchant for weird clothes and woodworking.
One of the things that Marxists like to point out is that technological progress is not this inhuman, deterministic process that always spits out the best possible technology for the place and time it finds itself in. So, in the lens of the spectacular society, it becomes very interesting indeed that technologies which impact on the real are often much more heavily restricted and shackled than technologies which impact on the unreal (i.e. that sustain and entrench the spectacle).
Want to genetically engineer a new crop plant which could feed millions? Then you will spend millions of dollars and decades worth of time after the fact on field trials to make sure that *this* version of corn doesn't randomly give us all cancer and/or become a super-weed. Want to create a new medicine to cure malaria? Well then get ready to spend millions of dollars and another decade getting it through trials after the lab work is done. Want to create a new source of grid-scale power or self-driving vehicle? I hope you like wading through about a billion cross-cutting regulations and permit procedures with a dozen government agencies.
On the other hand: want to release a new model of phone that sends every bit of data from its cameras, microphone, GPS antenna, inertial sensor etc. to an unsecured data centre? You can do it tomorrow. Want to develop an AI able to reliably fake the likeness of anyone on the planet using a few clips of video as a primer? Then it will be published in an open access journal and the code made open source.
The result is that, while we live in a world where the end of hunger and sickness are just as likely as the creation of the first non-human sapience or the linking of neurons to silicon, we're a lot closer to fully realistic, procedurally generated pornography (the pornucopia) and perfectly realistic CGI than we are to underwater cities, uplifted animals or cybernetic limbs.
I would object to calling Covid or the war in Ukraine "pseudoevents". Maybe the US has the luxury of thinking about Ukraine that way, but I can assure you it's very real in Europe. Instead I'd say that one of the pathologies of the spectacle is that people lose the ability to distinguish pseudoevents from real events, and hence lose the ability to act in the face of real danger. Covid is a great example; it was just another pandemic scare story like the dozens before it, until YOU land in the hospital and realize that sometimes, newspaper headlines actually jump off the page and bite.
"$CURRENT_THING" disguises itself as an intelligent comment on the fashion of politics but, in every single case I have observed, actually boiled down to "the procession of events occurring one after the other without regard to my desire for the cosmos to kneel before some simple narrative view is a sinister plot by my enemies". See insinuations that COVID and the War in Ukraine (both notable historical events that impact the lives of high double-digit percentages of the world population) is being used to "distract" from (insert personal hobby-horse here), or that it beggars belief that TWO historical events might occur at the same time.
The concept of the Current Thing is not just that some news event is being reported on, or that something is being used to distract from something else. It's more a commentary on the type of person who defines their focus, area of expertise, and even their identity based on what is in the current news cycle. This is best exemplified by the archetypal person who puts a Ukrainian flag in their Twitter name, even if a few weeks earlier they couldn't identify Ukraine on a map.
Identifying something as the Current Thing is not to imply that it's not important or not actually happening, but that there's a certain type of person who suddenly finds it fashionable to center their identity around that thing, even if the thing was happening before but one did not gain status by talking about it.
The thing that best exemplifies this is Yemen. It does seem like there are some pretty terrible atrocities happening there, but it is not the Current Thing, and a lot of Very Online People who appeared to really care about and/or have expertise in the extremely disparate areas of epidemiology, police brutality, vaccinology, international relations, and constitutional law do not seem to give a shit about Yemen, because it is not yet fashionable.
But if/when the media finds a way to exploit Yemen as a domestic political wedge, you can be sure that those people will suddenly start caring a lot about Yemen.
Well I see a lot of those popping up - generally on the far left or in diverse religions (see, for example, the Benedict option for a Catholic version). Even the bay area rationalist community has some of this spirit going on (in a much more techno-optimist way).
But the whole point is that it's hard to leave the spectacle - after all, the spectacle is optimised for attention grabbing...
I agree with "it's hard to leave the spectacle". I'm not sure about "lot of those".
Opting out of the spectacle can be a rational, non-extreme decision, especially if the main themes of this essay resonate. It's possible to do so from the comfort of your home, but it's hard when socially immersed in the spectacle. An anti-spectaclite community would help.
The dearth of such communities (not counting legacy communities like the Amish, etc) suggests that there are much fewer anti-spectaclites than one might hope for.
Or that the trade-off just isn't worth it. You'd have to aim for something pretty close to self-sufficiency, which with at most a few hundred people would put you a long way down the tech tree.
Communal living also sounds fairly awful, but doesn't seem to really be necessary when you think about it. Something like a secular Amish community (everyone has their own small farms, within a larger community that avoids engagement with the outside world) seems inherently doable.
I don't see why there would be a need for self-sufficiency.
I think that various communities could/would define/structure "communal living" very differently. Also, they would approach the "opt out" in a variety of ways and levels.
Our preconceptions of such communities are formed by a narrow range of religious communities and hippy experiments.
When you refer to "it", isn't "it" a relatively small sample by a small subset of a population at a very different time - socially and technologically?
"It has been tried before" suggests, intentionally or not, that "it all has been tried before". But perhaps only 1% of viable community structures has been tried, or .01%. And perhaps in 60s and 70s, structures that are possible today were not even options.
So, I'm not sure your "Bayesian?" priors of crash & burn portray an accurate landscape of potential.
Yes, but that small subset tried some obvious features of communal living and made a frightful mess of it. At the very least it gives you a starting point as well as a cautionary tale.
Counterculture communities shifted away from drugs and free love once enough women had babies that the men found diapers and formula unwelcome interruptions to their fantasy life.
>But this artificial substitute has been about as successful as vegan chicken nuggets.
Okay, look, I'm not smart or well-read enough to directly challenge any of the other copius claims made in this review (or by Debord of Directors). But this is just patently false. Take it from a grocer with access to sales data: these are one of our most popular products *of all time*, we sell dozens of cases every week. As or more popular than every variety of "real" chicken nugget we sell, combined. And they taste great! Almost indistinguishable from the Real McCoy in every way, as long as they're cooked (but then who'd ever eat a raw nugget anyway). Which, yes, we A-B test all the time because there's literally a McDonald's right nextdoor to purchase Control Group McNuggets at. If you wanna talk about the Territory biting a poor Map in the ass, then boy, have I got news for you.
(Yeah, I know it's just a throwaway joke, like many of the other kind-of-mean, kind-of-sneering ones peppered throughout. [Did Freddie deBoer write this as a satire? I'd laugh.] But a book review of a book criticizing spectacle shouldn't be making spectacular claims itself, I think.)
More substantively, I don't really think it's fair to put that giant cop-out disclaimer at the top; "you can only disagree with this book [and implicitly the review] if you hold this absurd Pollyanna strawman view". That just tells me ahead of time that I'm gonna get very little in the way of content or epistemic humility from what follows, so I'll be reading extra-critically and potentially defensively. And, sorry to say, my suspicions aren't exactly refuted: what follows is a *technically* well-written, highly literate review of some truly wacky Kool-aid level ideas. But there's just so little there, there. Every invocation of "we", every example given of Totally Relatable Thing, every ahistorical nihilist doomer griple...I am just like, what are you talking about, man? Maybe I'm just one of those mythical pre-spectacular people whose soul got sent through SERN's time machine or something, but this so strikes me as just a more analog version of today's Very Online armchair criticism. Protip: the Spectacle is not the Territory. Claiming "we" are all hopelessly lost in it is to grant it far more power than it actually has. "The Devil's greatest trick is convincing us that He does not, in fact, exist"
I mean, shit, it even linked to Meditations on Moloch. Does it not strike anyone as weird that the review strives mightily to project the appearance of raging valiantly against the dying of the light, without first checking to see if said light is actually dying? Instead I mostly get the sense of liking or appreciating this doorstopper of Critical Theory[1] doomscrolling, the sort of sad shaking of head, "gosh, Debord is so right...we're screwed, we're screwed, we're really, really screwed. Sad!" It's a post-hoc rationalization, taking an arbitrarily Old Text from <year> and pattern-matching it onto The Present Discontents, and then declaring it as Wisdom of the Ancients. Many other reviews tried this same shoehorn, but at least those shoes fit better. This one is a stretch.
There's this entire part of the review reminding us that we pine for an imagined 1960s (Your Era May Vary), but then this actual contemporary text says the 1960s were Not All That, things were already Going To Shit back then. No, the *true* golden age was an even *earlier* era, the pre-Spectacle Society of <year - n>...do you know what we'd probably be able to find if we went and looked at contemporary art from <year - n>? People saying that the True Golden Age of the Triforce was even further back than that. I notice that this is an infinitely regressable pattern, almost as if disaffectedness with modernity leads one to conjure up an imagined Eden of yesteryear. At no point does actual objective reality step over and tap one on the shoulder, whisper "it's not so bad, mate, look how far infant mortality has fallen!" or such. Not if one is determined not to hear.
So I will go ahead and define terms, even if Debord didn't: The Spectacle is Social Reality. It's bullshit, Debord's book looks like a stone one wouldn't even want to squeeze blood from if they needed a transfusion, and at best I can say this review is a world-class attempt at putting lipstick on a highly Situational pig. It is the very thing it critiques, a triumph of style over substance. E for Effort though.
[1] Which, to be clear, I do think has some valuable ideas amidst all the ennui and je ne sais quois. The emphasis on materialist analysis seems like a Super Valuable Thing these days, a clear repudiation of fudging Maps to hide inconvenient Territory: https://www.slowboring.com/i/33907831/the-good-and-the-bad
Well, you do have to keep in mind that Debord committed suicide. The reviewer is fascinated by these ideas generated by a guy who was trying to find a reason to stay alive, and ultimately failed. I would like to see what sort of review the reviewer would write on Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I try not to read stuff written by people who killed themselves. They are bad role models. Better to read stuff written by people who stayed alive as long as they possibly could. There is a difference in the thought processes there.
That's entirely fair, I admit to not considering such a distinction myself until you pointed it out. I know some of the artists I "enjoy" did end up offing themselves...I guess there's two categories though. Ones who died "in service of" their art, and thus end up with Depressing Ideas like Debord. And ones who died "incidentally or tangentially", e.g. not due to trying to make Art of out the Abyss, but unrelatedly from bad marriage or lack of commercial success, etc. The reference to Rene Girard's mimetic desire seems relevant here; one of the enduring results of sociological research is the contagiousness of suicide. I'd never condone "banning" art just because it might contain eldritch temptations along those lines, but they probably are best understood by those with a predisposition towards such a mindset. So I'd probably have liked this review/book a lot more decades ago, back when I, too, was Really Depressed and Despaired At The World's Failings.
Although now I'm surprised there were no references to Edward Teach and Lacan. The tone is remarkably similar in many ways. "Epistemic Learned Helplessness and You: A Primer for Promising Young Sheep". In a way, it's not true helplessness if one finds value in wrapping the lack of metis meaning itself in an epistolary episteme. (Or maybe it's *extra* helpless, if one needs to be told first they're helpless. Hmm. Chickens and eggs.)
(I really enjoy Kevin Gilbert's music, which is clearly the product of a deranged mind, but he died from autoerotic asphyxiation. Art-related suicide? Maybe!)
If you're worried about catching bad thought processes you don't actually want to have from books, that's fair, but presumably there are ever any circumstances under which people should commit suicide, and if you avoid documents by people who committed suicide you probably won't get information about that, so it is a tradeoff.
I grew up in a household of addicts and crazy people, in a state with the highest suicide rate in the country. I worked as a therapist for almost 20 years, but after both my parents died, (of natural causes, years after I helped them not kill themselves several times, and not kill each other once), I just stopped feeling such a deep need to understand and empathize with those troubled impulses, when I didn’t have them myself. So, I switched careers, and now prefer to consume thoughts of people who have the impulse to live, rather than the impulse to die ahead of time, rather than in the natural course of events. Didn’t mean to sound judgemental or avoidant. I agree, there are probably times when making a conscious choice to die, is a reasonable choice. I just do have quite a bit of information about good and bad reasons to make that choice, and it is not an existential question for me at this point. Thanks for the comment. You can see why I had to stop being a therapist. Just because I do not grapple with this issue, doesn’t mean it’s ok to be overly dismissive of it.
Sorry not to engage with the more substantive part of your comment at the moment but I felt compelled to note that I found your grocer's take on the popularity of vegan chicken nuggets really informative (and, from an animal welfare perspective, actually really good cause for optimism!). Thanks!
You're welcome, haha. Not every plant based alternative has done well, so far...my company tends to be mighty stubborn about selling obviously-externally-branded products, so we've had several "house brand" attempts at meat substitutes that...are...bad. Like, just unequivocally bad. You know a plant-based meat is bad when even the vegan and vegetarians who stop there tell you it's awful!
But the Impossible Nuggets are Legit. We've also got a pretty mean Soy Chorizo and Meatless Bulgogi Beef that I'd kill to know who the real manufacturers are, those were sleeper hits. Impossible's ground beef is fairly popular as well, although it's got astronomical sodium/fat content and thus funges against other health concerns. Cannot compare to Beyond's burger patties though, those are phenomenal. As good or better than beef, they even smell and "bleed" the proper way. It's not yet possible to mimic a true steak or whatever, but for what's available now, I find it quite promising and exciting.
(And I'm an admitted carnist who isn't that invested in animal welfare beyond feeling guilty - I just think they're reliably tasty products at a good price. There really are advantages to shelf-stable frozen plant-based meats; nothing makes me sadder than having to compost spoiled meat. I know just how many resources went into making that unwanted, unloved chunk of cow. Much Of Value Was Lost.)
It's not a fallacy because the writer's argument is not simply that things are bad today, but that they're *uniquely* bad in a way they weren't before. So pointing out "hey, actually things in the past were also bad in very similar ways, just much much much worse" is a valid response.
My argument is not "things in the modern world are 100% perfect, can't be improved any further, and should never change." For that matter, that's not what Pinker was arguing either, which his critics would realize if they actually bothered reading his books and essays instead of just making judgments off the general vibe they get from him. It's just a flimsy strawman that reactionaries and other anti-modernists love to build up and tear down, typically to distract people from the fact that their own argument is a motte-and-bailey (wherein the motte is something like "modern society has flaws, just like every other society that ever existed," and the bailey is "modern society is a uniquely terrible dystopia that makes even the barbarism of past societies look good by comparison, and it needs to be completely destroyed").
How about "modern society is a uniquely terrible/wonderful distopía, which is much richer in GDP and social justice than many past societies, but also carries newfound abilities/potential to destroy itself and the environment at unprecedented scale, and is also undergoing a social/technological transformation at breakneck speed, which may make us into superior beings or dehumanize us into walking collections of memes and tweets."
We don't know the cost of our "progress". There's no data on it. History is not going to repeat itself. Something new will happen. One can try to model it or to understand it as it is happening — optimistically or otherwise. But the current, and the future, are neither motte nor bailey. They are complexity. And to compare a philosophy of the present to a history of the past, using a variety of nominal metrics, may be missing the point big time.
Yes, in the words of the great philosopher George W. Bush, "The past is over." That much is tautologically obvious. But while history doesn't literally repeat itself, looking to the past can be useful for observing recurrent patterns which are likely to continue recurring in the present, since the fundamental neurological and psychological underpinnings of human behavior remain constant. As such, any useful philosophy of the present needs to incorporate an understanding of the past, for the same reason that any scientific theory must take past observations into account when determining the implications of a new experiment's results.
The future is unpredictable, of course - perhaps a big space rock will slam into the Earth tomorrow and kill us all, at which point all of our predictions about the future will turn out to have been completely and totally wrong. But that was the case for the past too, back when it was the present and people didn't have the benefit of hindsight: If a giant space rock had crashed into the Earth back in 1776, then the predictions of all those early liberal philosophers would have been wrong, but that doesn't mean their logic would have been any less sound! I am less convinced that the modern age is qualitatively unique in a way that goes beyond quantitative metrics like GDP and life expectancy, except in the sense that every time period is unique: Things like the Fall of the Roman Empire, the Mongol Conquests, and the Protestant Reformation must have seemed like Sui Generis world-shattering events to the people living through those time periods, but looking back we can see that those events fit into a larger context. And I'm reasonably certain that, barring some totally unpredictable non-anthropogenic cataclysm (like the aforementioned space rock), future generations won't see our time as some wholly unique Sui Generis turning point either, but rather as merely another phase in the slow, tumultuous development of humanity.
I think the argument depends on the "in very similar ways" part, and it's not being argued well, certainly not well enough to justify summary dismissal of the criticism of modernity.
I mean, I understand the sentiment, I honestly do, I'd often have a lot of trouble grasping arguments that use comparisons with the past to demonstrate that some changes were directionally bad. I continue to think it's bad form to contrast the present with the past with loaded terms like The Real vs. Spectacle. (Did Derrida ever work his magic on this pair? He should have.)
But that's a problem with communication, not with the underlying insights. When someone produces a book that appears exceptionally prescient several decades later, my first assumption is that he was on to something. And it's not hard to access that something, simply don't treat discussion of specific aspects of modernity as an indictment of modernity as a whole. (Yes, it's uniquely bad, because everything is unique. This doesn't mean going back is possible and/or preferable, and Debord doesn't seem like one of the people who do argue it is. But it does mean some specific issues have gotten worse, and it makes perfect sense to worry about those exact issues instead of things that aren't that worrisome. It also makes perfect sense to worry we're stuck climbing a crappy local optimum and should aim for a larger leap in the search space, and it's not the same as wanting the whole society completely destroyed. )
Hey I eat vegan chicken nuggets every now and then and they're totally great. I mean, junk food will remain junk food but they're just as tasty as the non-vegan stuff!
> For that matter, why are we up in arms about Ukraine and not, say, Yemen? There are clear reasons why - they just have nothing to do with democracy, sovereignty, war crimes, or human rights. I don't mean to say that nobody cares about those things. We all do, at least in a vague and abstract way. But that collective concern only becomes acute when the spectacle brings it into focus.
It is not so bad. Difference is that in Ukraine
- there are clearly actionable things, including doable by regular people
- there is a decent chance of success or at least reducing damage
- there is a clear evil and nonevil side, quite close to optimal as possible in wars
So spectacle started here for quite good reasons (and plenty of not so good reasons, like special interests, politics, Europeans not really so much about people dying in Middle-East and caring more about own indirect security threat than full-scale genocides far away)...
But here reasons for spectacle were quite clear and valid ones.
I disagree, I think the West is focusing so much on Ukraine almost exclusively because of anti-Trumpism. If Russiagate had not happened, I believe the magnitude of the response from the West would have been vastly smaller.
In the US, we tend to only care about things happening in the rest of the world if we can use them as domestic political cudgels or if we can map our domestic politics onto the situation. Yemen is too "other" for Americans to relate to our own politics, but we just spent 6 years talking about Russia non-stop, and Putin is a perfect symbol for the left to map Trump onto - when they fight Putin, they can LARP as if they were fighting Trump. Do Republicans really, truly care about the Uyghurs? No, they are using them to make Democrats seem soft on China and to drive a wedge between the leftist-Muslim coalition.
> I think the West is focusing so much on Ukraine almost exclusively because of anti-Trumpism.
I assure you that actions of Poland (gave 230+ tanks, plenty of other weaponry, accepted about 1 500 000 to 2 200 000 refugees - now about 4% of population of Poland) or Estonia, Lithuania and UK and so on had nothing whatsoever related to Trump.
Sure, Eastern and continental Europe has a specific history with Russia that would explain the degree of their involvement. I'm mostly referring to the Anglosphere.
I've been thinking about some of the issues raised in this review recently, so the timing of this is quite fortuitous.
I think we're actually at a pretty important inflection point with all of this.
It used to be the case that capitalism offered us a somewhat fair deal. Yes we were required to transform into automatons 9-5, 5 days a week, but in exchange for selling 70-80% of your life to capitalism, you would be able to buy a house and each year you would get a bit richer and be able to afford nicer things.
Now, because of issues like global warming, we are told to keep working as before (or even harder!) but to expect a reduced standard of living in exchange. Don't go on foreign holidays. Don't heat your homes so much or use AC. Ride the bus instead of driving an SUV. Repair clothes instead of buying new. Drink out of a pathetic paper straw instead of a plastic one. And so on.
Is this sustainable for society? I'm not so sure.
I have to confess that I used to be one of these Ben Shapiro-esque free-market bedtime fondlers, but now I think there needs to be a new social contract if we are to accept a lower standard of living in order to save the planet.
I'm interested in communities like the travellers, Amish, Hasidic Jews and the communist kibbutzim. People in these communities don't participate in 21st capitalism like the rest of us, and they seem perfectly happy with a less commodified life.
Maybe people who feel cheated by the system we live in now would be happy to trade in their smart phones and foreign holidays for a new way of life along the lines of these communities?
Religion or extreme political ideology tends to be the glue that helps keep the above-mentioned communities together, but I'm a right-wing, vegetarian atheist so I don't think simply applying to join the Amish is the way forward.
So maybe it's time to look at creating a new start -up community (or commune, for my Marxist comrades out there) along the lines of these existing communities but not with any religious or ideological foundation.
If a rich benefactor like Peter Thiel would donate money to a start-up community like this, I could see it being truly transformative in a way that seasteading or charter cities probably never will be.
We don't need a sovereign state to give up their territory so that it can be run like the Rapture of Bioshock. A start-up community could exist within the confines of an existing state, but we'd just do our own thing away from the rest of society, and if people wanted to join us after noticing we're happier, they'd be free to do so.
I'm just putting this out there to see what other people think. Are the above the ramblings of a mad man, or am I on to something? Let me know!
I'm sure a lot of communities, and US states, were founded by rich benefactors. There needs to be some seed capital to start things off. But it wouldn't need funding in perpetuity. Crowd funding would be an alternative option but I'm just not keen on that model personally.
In my state, the capitalist/philanthropist Robert Owen founded a utopian Harmonite community in 1825. It's still quite pretty there, but the Harmonites gave their project up in 1827, and now its a haven for tourists. Pythagoras founded one of the earliest communities of renunciation--followers swore off a range of things: sex, beans, etc., in order to focus on the purity of geometrical reality. But, as Bertrand Russell said, sooner or later they all began to hanker after beans and moved on. The Shakers did better with sexual abstinence: that's why there are no Shakers anymore, but the rest of us all know the Pythagorean theorem.
I don't think you are a mad man. But, I do think that you are a rare breed. Oddly, what you are looking for should not be so far left field of the mainstream: a community with a shared identity and social support structures, focused on healthier and happier living. Isn't that what "everybody" wants, and what is so very hard to find these days?
> This is not a fantasy - this is your news feed. The U.S. is predicting a false-flag attack by Russia in the Ukraine. Russia accused the UK of a false-flag attack in Syria. The U.S. accuses China of genocide. China and Iran claimed COVID was a U.S. bio-attack.
> It goes on and on and on. They all want us to trust them and no one else. Behold the future of international politics
Why future? It is nothing new and was present since ancient times, just with a different mediums and stories.
This is a great review. It oscillates hard between thrilling epistemological analyses and staggering lapses in common sense. I'd love to have a glass of wine with the author; I wouldn't take their financial advice in a million years (this is the mark of a true philosopher). Particularly well-written are the passages on experts, terrorism, and the conclusion. Here is some of the stuff I thought was wrong:
On "true competence":
> The all-pervasive nature of mass media has led to the universal victory of form over function and style over substance: "It is in these conditions that a parodic end of the division of labor suddenly appears, with carnivalesque gaiety, all the more welcome because it coincides with the generalized disappearance of all true competence. A financier can be a singer, a lawyer a police spy, a baker can parade his literary tastes, an actor can be president, a chef can philosophize on the movements of baking as if they were landmarks in universal history."
Cross-domain achievement by a single person is the product of 20th century mass media? We literally call such people "renaissance men." Occam's razor says that there are some fundamental variables that would make someone skilled at a few different things, and if you get lucky and score high on a few of these variables, you'll probably succeed in more than one domain.
On black boxes:
> As an example: how much of your daily environment, as a percentage, do you truly understand? Look around the room and reflect on how “even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable.” Your kitchen and your medicine cabinet are filled with mystical objects.... Compare that to, say, a homesteader.
I know that if I accidentally take my partner's medicine I'll experience nausea and fatigue. If I neglect to take mine, I'll experience an uptick in intrusive thoughts. Admittedly I don't understand the mechanism by which either works. The homesteader knows that mushrooms that look like X will nourish him. Mushrooms that look like Y will make him ill. Mushrooms that look like Z will result in a repeat of that incident where he was found trying to ride one of the cows into the lake. He doesn't understand the mechanism by which these things work either. The substantive difference is that in the case of my medicine cabinet, there actually is someone out there who understands the mechanism (though in the case of MY medicine, the mechanistic understanding is so piss-poor that I might as well be the homesteader. I think my partner's medicine is generally better understood than mine). Humans are animals, and we are just much better suited to "metis" than we are to "episteme". Aristotle *defined* us as animals that had the misfortune of stumbling into episteme. If deBord were born a few hundred years earlier he would seek out the same philosophical conundrum in the mushrooms (he'd probably find it too). The author offers a much better take on the relative ignorances of myself and the homesteader in the conclusion. I wish that this line of reasoning had been given the real estate that was afforded to other stuff in section three.
The single most glaring problem is (of course) the non-critique of capitalism. I apologise for fulfilling the author's prophecy about the comment section.
On "capitalism":
Here are a few different characterisations of capitalism the author offers:
1. Debord correctly perceived the totalitarian nature of spectacular capitalism. Your time, your attention, your opinions - all are bought and sold, and can be influenced to better facilitate such transactions.
2. organizing all of existence around the bottom line
3. Unsurprisingly, capitalism is the best system for the accumulation of capital. And despite their pretensions, communist societies had the same goals as every modern nation - wealth, prosperity, innovation, and growth.
Most of the capitalist states I know of have a minimum wage, restrictions on what goods/services one can sell, etc. So the first two characterisations are strawmen. The third characterisation sounds ...kind of okay? Who is against innovation and prosperity? If you want to convince people that the mixed economies of most rich modern nation states are failing us so badly that we should be willing to give a forum to people who–by their own admission–"don't have any better ideas," a helpful starting point would be concrete examples of failure. I actually can't find any in the review! Just lots of vague abstract criticisms. Please correct me and provide examples if I'm wrong about this.
On production/consumption:
> The workday used to be determined by the work, but now the work is determined by the workday. And everyone has to work, not because we need what they produce, but because we need them to spend - else the whole thing comes crashing down.
There is a not-so-subtle logical equivocation happening here on "they." If you remove any one individual's contribution to economic productivity, all other things being fixed, then sure, there is no collapse. But if you remove everyone's contribution then obviously we'll all be hungry tomorrow. Similarly with consumption. If you remove my consumption in isolation it's all good; if you remove everyone's consumption it's a problem.
When the author talks about "production," they apply the "single individual in isolation" interpretation. When the author talks about "consumption," they apply the "all individuals at once" frame. By doing so they create this verbal illusion that modern society is all consumption and no production. This is obviously false, and just a relic of poor logic.
As regards "the work is determined by the workday", there is a serious discussion to be had about potential misincentives created by paying employees by the hour when what you really want is the conclusion of some concrete task. But it's certainly a lot less sexy than "we need them to spend - else the whole thing comes crashing down."
On functionally indistinguishable beliefs:
> But in practice, the science is received wisdom, taken on faith. Our belief in the God Particle is functionally indistinguishable from the belief in God of ages past.
This passage made me stop in my tracks and ask two questions. I've spent too much time writing this damn comment so I'm not going to answer them, I'll just leave them here in case anybody gets this far:
1. We have an unfortunate tendency to characterise science as some combination of string theory and dinosaur studies. But that's really not the bulk of it. What if we substitute "God Particle" with "Newton's second law" ? Or "antigens"?
2. What happens when we substitute "God Particle" with "French critical theory" ?
Great review. I like to think of the spectacle at what an "evolutionary transition in individuality" looks like from the inside. As the unit of natural selection moves from the individual to the culture, and as the culture expands, things start to move in a direction that individuals do not understand or desire. The two are misaligned: what makes a culture take over is not what's more rewarding to the individuals.
That's like a epithelial cell in the stomach thinking "in this new organism we no longer enjoy the reward of following a chemotactic gradient".
I have to admit this review baffled me. It seemed like the book was one big applause light and the reviewer didn't even notice. The fact it felt so prescient despite being from many decades prior should, IMO, have been more of a warning sign than a reason to get enthused.
Do we just get away with claims like, e.g. "While we’ve always been afraid of advances in weaponry, it’s starting to feel like everything is being weaponized" which was in the context of technology? Are LED lamps being weaponised? Are electric cars being weaponised? Is the ability to retrieve rockets for later use being weaponised? Is the James Webb telescope being weaponised? "But we don't mean that kind of technology!" Maybe not, but maybe then we should differentiate and say what we mean?
The reviewer commented on there being a lot of just-so claims from the author, but the review is also full of just-so claims. ctrl+f "most". No graphs, no citations, just a lot of claims, many of which I find highly dubious.
I'm disappointed by this review. I don't usually bother to say something like this, especially since I by default assume a lot of work went into making the review and I appreciate anyone putting an honest effort into summarising books, but I also found this review baffling enough that I wanted to speak up, in case the observation helps someone put a finger on their own feelings of weirdness about the review.
I got very similar feelings as you while reading this one. It seems like some old french communist theory about capitalism, one not all that insightful above what you'd hear at any college campus today
“For maybe the first time in history, most people are apprehensive about the relentless march of technology. ”
The rest of the review was pretty good, but, lol no. This is definitely not true. There was an entire movement called the Luddites in early industrial England who had this as their entire shtick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
Not to mention the Platonic dialogue where Socrates frets about new tech changing the mental abilities of the youth (Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b:)
If you like, I can go find half a dozen more examples
Yes, but it's DIFFERENT now. I won't elaborate HOW it's different beyond vaguely alluding to the idea that now, LOTS of people think that (when that was true in the past too).
Debord was very influential when I was young, but as the decades passed, I came to see him, with the Frankfurt School, the Post-modernists, and now, I suppose the IdPol lobby that feeds off them, as essentially encapsulating the Politics of Masochism. It's all too big. They are too powerful. Even our thoughts are not our own. There is no hope. There is nothing to do except analyse in more and more detail why nothing can be done. Apart from the inherent oxymorons (if my thoughts are not my own then my thought that my thoughts are not my own is not my own either) it's actually a recipe for despair and suicide if you take it seriously. Yet many of the adherents of such ideas in more recent decades have successful careers as lecturers, authors and media personalities, although, by their own theories their ideas are not their own, and there is no hope. Work that out.
It’s reasonable to have an instinctive aversion to any kind of Philosophies of Masochism. That said, the rationalist maxim is “if X is true, then I desire to believe X”, which poses a challenge to that aversion, because the maxim has unfortunately never been sympathetic to complaints that the consequences of believing X are unpalatable.
Im surprised that nobody seems to have pointed out the obvious fact that Cincinnatus didn't conduct a coup. His fellow-countrymen called on him to assume dictatorial power in *defense* of the state against invading barbarians. The whole point of that story is that he then *refused* to do the coup part when he blatantly could have.
Also and unrelatedly, you can hardly call something a work of philosophy if it takes for granted that the Communist revolution and downfall of capitalism are imminently impending, not even in 1967.
The whole time I was growing up I was part of a religious tradition that believed the bible was both literally true and held prophetic power. These people would see, e.g. the Invasion of Afghanistan and think of God's promise to destroy the enemies of Israel with fire from the heavens in Revelations.
When I left that tradition, I, like many apostates, got embarrassingly into Ayn Rand. Towards the end of The Fountainhead, the villain, Ellsworth Tooey, gives a long monologue (because it's Ayn Rand) about how in the future, we will just reflect our opinions back to one another, ostracizing or even killing those whose opinions diverge. I saw this, at the time, as incredibly prescient. A prediction from nearly a century ago about the internet and cancel culture.
Of course, Israel has long had enemies that were killed with fire. And of course, human beings have long struggled with the dichotomy between individualism and coherent culture. These were not prescient, it was completely foreseeable that these things would happen in some way at some time. But the specifics were almost impossible to predict. One could guess that someone would bomb Israel's enemies, but one could absolutely not guess that a terror attack would bring the U.S. into conflict with the Taliban. One could guess that at some point in the future there would be a censorious movement in the U.S. But one could not guess that the creation of social media would allow for powerful populist movements that valued loyalty above truth.
The thing is, when we're evaluating the predictions of people we're inclined to agree with, we tend to use the likelihood of the specific "predicted" event as our judge of how prescient and brilliant the predictor is. But the *correct* metric is the likelihood that what the person said would happen. That's a function of how specific the prediction is and how unlikely it is.
So for instance when we hear:
"It is an inevitable effect of clandestine forms of organization of the military type that it suffices to infiltrate a few people at certain points of the network to make many march and fall" we shouldn't think specifically about a current event in which controlled opposition plays a part. We should instead go "huh, yeah, that is inevitable, since it's been happening in every society for so long that Machiavelli also wrote about it."
Anyway, having this be a major part of my upbringing and young adulthood has made me hyper-vigilant about it, and I might be overcorrecting, but that's why this review failed to land with me.
People saying "But of course things are better, we have so many great gadgets now and our lives are so much longer and more comfortable" might profit from looking up John C. Calhoun's mouse utopia experiment. It turns out that physical ease and comfort doesn't actually guarantee flourishing:
Also of relevance is the hedonic treadmill. Most people nowadays don't actually feel any happier at not having to labour in the fields all day, because they just take it for granted, and ditto with all the other modern conveniences that we don't even think about. Hence modern people aren't psychologically better-off as a result of technological advances than pre-modern people.
I'm not sure that article really refutes my point. It doesn't really matter, for my purposes, whether the mouse society collapsed because of overpopulation or mutational load caused by a lack of natural selection; the point is that living in a utopia of material abundance didn't lead to mousey flourishing. The point about attempted replications only finding some of the results Calhoun reported is stronger, but since they still found behavioural aberrations (albeit not as many as Calhoun), I'm not sure that does anything to refute what I said.
Of course, if you don't like the Calhoun experiment specifically, we could also look at other, similar, cases. For example, many zoos put quite a lot of effort into giving their animals natural-seeming environments, because they know that, if they don't, the animals will fail to flourish, for all that they have better access to food, shelter, and veterinary care than their wild counterparts. It shouldn't really be surprising if modern humans, whose environment is, after all, very artificial indeed, should likewise evince a lack of flourishing.
Yeah, I think I also wouldn't flourish if I were locked in an empty room for my entire life with nothing to do and no hope of escape. That is in no way comparable to modern society, where people are freer than ever before to travel, explore, and pursue their dreams. It might be comparable to the worst prisons, and it's no surprise that prisoners in those places don't flourish either.
Rates of mental illness are up, suicides are up, loneliness is up. Looks like a lot of people aren't currently flourishing, cheap flights notwithstanding.
Up compared to what time period? The period where we don't have reliable data because peasants drunk themselves to death instead of going to the psychiatrist and getting pills?
Compared to the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first.
Though the number of people willing to believe, on no evidence whatsoever, that pre-modern people were all miserable and depressed, is really quite astonishing.
Obviously, not everyone in the past was miserable, just as not everyone today is happy. But the evidence points to modern people being happier overall.
<i>Here is self-reported life satisfaction vs. GDP per capita.</i>
A couple of problems:
(1) GDP per capita also tends to be correlated with things like living in a low-crime, high-trust society, which probably also affect people's life satisfaction. You can't simply assume that GDP leads to higher life satisfaction.
(2) Generally, people get more satisfaction from their relative wealth than their absolute wealth. An inhabitant of a high GDP country might switch on the TV, see some starving third-worlders, and feel wealthy, and therefore satisfied. Conversely, a starving third-worlder might think of rich first-worlders, and feel even more poor and miserable. But pre-modern people didn't have the modern world to compare themselves to: for them, the level of wealth in their society was the normal baseline, and they therefore wouldn't have felt themselves poor just because they didn't have as much as we have.
<i>Obviously, not everyone in the past was miserable, just as not everyone today is happy. But the evidence points to modern people being happier overall.</i>
Actually, the evidence points to the opposite.
"According to a survey published online January 23, 2020 by the health insurer Cigna, more than three in five Americans are lonely, with more and more people reporting feelings of being left out, being poorly understood and lacking companionship. Since 2018 when the survey was first conducted, there has been a nearly 13% rise in loneliness." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7321652/
"Around the turn the century, after decades of improvement, all-cause mortality rates among white non-Hispanic men and women in middle age stopped falling in the US, and began to rise (Case and Deaton 2015). While midlife mortality continued to fall in other rich countries, and in other racial and ethnic groups in the US, white non-Hispanic mortality rates for those aged 45–54 increased from 1998 through 2013. Mortality declines from the two biggest killers in middle age—cancer and heart disease—were offset by marked increases in drug overdoses, suicides, and alcohol-related liver mortality in this period. By 2014, rising mortality in midlife, led by these “deaths of despair,” was large enough to offset mortality gains for children and the elderly (Kochanek, Arias, and Bastian 2016), leading to a decline in life expectancy at birth among white non-Hispan-ics between 2013 and 2014 (Arias 2016), and a decline in overall life expectancy at birth in the US between 2014 and 2015 (Xu et al 2016). Mortality increases for whites in mid-life were paralleled by morbidity increases, including deteriorations in self-reported physical and mental health, and rising reports of chronic pain." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5640267/
"That is in no way comparable to modern society, where people are freer than ever before to travel, explore, and pursue their dreams".
It depend on which timeframe. I am willing to debate this compared to say 40y ago, but since 25y ago it has been a long way downward, mostly quasi plateau with occasional fast steps down (sep 11, H1N1, SARS, covid, ukraine (fuel bump)) that seems to come quicker and quicker. It may be generational, but for me the apex of western middle class freedom was just after the fall of the berlin wall (1989), although at the time HIV was a looming scare that kind of spoiled the fun (without the overall state oppression that came with covid though, even if it could have turned very sour. Why it didn't is something worth analysing and I think it would prove that indeed western world is far from it's 1990 'optimum'.
Regarding happiness, I guess it peaked before because it is more linked to change in well being than absolute level, and my point is that overall level is was upward before 1990 and downward since sep 11.
International Flights are neither as cheap nor easy now that they were in 2010-2019...
Just after the fall of the Berlin wall was the early 1990s recession. During the "apex of Western middle class freedom", flights were 66% more expensive than even in 2022: https://www.bts.gov/content/annual-us-domestic-average-itinerary-fare-current-and-constant-dollars. Not that it was easy to travel even when you could afford a ticket, because you didn't have a smartphone that made every city in the world as easy to navigate as your home town.
H1N1 was no more deadly than a typical flu season. SARS was far less deadly still, and affected China almost exclusively. I'll give you COVID and Ukraine, but pandemics have always occurred, and fuel price surges aren't that rare (e.g. 2010s, 1970s). During any 25 year period in history, you can always find disasters, epidemics, and wars. We were unlucky with COVID, but it's not the fault of modern society that a virus just happened to mutate inside a bat in 2019 in just the right way to start a pandemic.
Well, except I happened to live this period, as a student at first then as upper-middle-class. And, from the inside, as a guy who traveled quite a lot, it has never been more easy and cheap than just after my student years (with first salary). Flight prices (to far away destinations) has increased even compared to inflation (not compared with my salary which increased faster, at least at first but not so for the last 10y), and difficulty has increased too (H1N1 and SARS were not deadly, but caused issue for travelling (like refusal f boarding if you got flagged having fever by a thermal camera), safety checks are more and more intrusive, and so on.
And for other freedoms, depending on your interests and place of living), the changes may have been tremendous (motor sports, trekking in the forest.). Regulations are an ever growing, and can be such a burden that they kill some leisure activities. So yes, if you have virtual activities, I guess the possibilities and ease have grown tremendously. current consoles and netflix sure beat anything I could have had just after my studies, regardless of money. Abundance of entertainement sure has grown a lot, to the point of being totally unable to consume even what I find interresting (and I am a big media consumer). On freedom? Not at all, early internet (which I got as a student, before it was mainstream) was much more free than anything mainstream now (you can still find freedom pockets for sure....which have not changed so much compared to the early days in fact)
For the non-virtual? No, i am not convinced because I personally experienced the opposite....
BTW, for visiting a foreign city, a smartphone is a slight improvement compared to the old travel guides....but it's only slight convenience (which can cost you, depending on roaming data rates and local sim availability). I you think otherwise, I guess it explains a lot regarding how our impression of western freedom/QOL evolution differ....
I thought the early part of the review was quite interesting. I've never encountered Debord, and the reviewer introduced many ideas that seem fruitful. I was initially enthusiastic. However, I wound up very frustrated, primarily, I think, due to two factors:
1) When strings of insights that have the potential to open up inquiry and enrich analysis and understanding of experience are linked into a comprehensive theory, they tend to lose their fruitfulness to the degree that a reductionist model encloses their interpretive possibilities. The insights become tools of the model, and, to succeed as a tool, the model inevitably involves massive reduction. There are many ways this seems to be visible here, from the simplistically imagined lives of people in the past to the cartoonish portraits of historical eras. Debord's "Spectacle," which seems to have elements anticipated in the non-theoretical popular books of Vance Packard and in McLuhan's writings in the '60s, also seems a variation on open-ended French phenomenology and existentialism of the 1940s and '50s, which respond to or extend Marx's insights on alienation, molded into a form designed to compete with closed historicist models derived from Hegel and Marx. It's not that those models don't have a lot of value, but what's valuable in them is often reduced to caricature within the model itself.
2) As the reviewer becomes more entranced by Debord's prescience in anticipating the future, he seems to me to indicate that he himself does not have a lot of appreciation of what I'd call the recent past (having grown up in the '50s--the date 1984 still seems a futuristic to me). When he discusses Debord's 1987 ideas, for example, he appears amazed that Debord seems to anticipate the 24-hour news cycle phenomenon, but in my recollection (refreshed by Wikipedia) it was precisely soon after CNN was created in 1980 that the idea first became stylish, and the evanescence of news significance became a theme. Russian disinformation--is it really possible not to be aware of how pervasive a notion this was from the 1950s on (although I don't recall the word "disinformation" being used; it was folded into the term "propaganda," and familiar to anyone who had read Orwell, or about him)? "Terrorism" as a conservative state foil was a theme in the years after the Weathermen and Red Brigades had been put down; the Munich Olympics were in 1972, and terrorism in the Middle East and Ireland was constant news. Universal surveillance, the (as yet, I think, unnamed) "apophenia" of conspiracy theories . . . Yes, things are worse now then they were then, but things were worse then than they were before then, and these ideas were not prophetic in 1987 and suddenly born with the Internet.
I liked your overall conclusion. People complain about lots of things in our current world (media, social media, inequality etc) but generally things are better than in the past. A lot of what makes people miserable is through their own poor choices. If you instead choose to work hard, limit addictive/polarizing media, and spend time with family and nature, life in the current world can be fulfilling and more interesting than in the past. Unless you want the government to choose what you should be exposed to (eg China), then take responsibility to make the healthy choices for yourself.
The near-to-last paragraph starting "True, our incomprehension........", was very beautifully written and rather profound. Thanks to the author for that! (and I wish Debord himself wrote that way)
> The phone in your hand, the cash in your wallet, the clothes on your back, the food in your belly - how many lifetimes would it take to truly grok the building blocks of everyday existence? [...] Compare that to, say, a homesteader. It really hasn’t been that long since people lived in a comprehensible universe. Our collective knowledge of the universe has deepened tremendously, but theoretical physics is only less slightly hermetical than the occult beliefs it replaced.
I would argue that there are multiple levels of understanding. Knowing how to use something (as a black box) versus knowing what makes something tick, how to build it.
The digital native is surrounded by gadgets they know how to use, but have only a vague idea of what makes them tick.
By contrast, an Old West homesteader also knows how to use the plants and animals they raise for a living, and may have some understanding of how to breed them for traits. But they don't know much about photosynthesis or how to build new plants by mixing traits from different species.
At least, the digital native has the (still limited) knowledge of the world regarding anything from CPUs to plants at their fingertips, even if it would take many lifetimes to understand everything. The homesteader likely does not even have access to the works of Mendel or whatever is cutting edge within their world in the first place.
> Is it any wonder epistemic learned helplessness is a thing?
Modest suggestion: provisionally accept paradigms as useful to the degree that they are used to create new, working technologies. If you see a steam engine and their designers claim that it works on thermodynamics rather than by trapping a fire spirit inside, thermodynamics is likely useful. If every producer of mobile phone claims they run on semiconductors, the likely explanation is that solid state physics (and thus quantum mechanics) are useful. If you offer a different explanation, e.g. 'semiconductors work because foundries bind the spirits of dead animals (or people) into them', by Occam's Razor, the burden of proof is with you.
Of course, this approach does not help with cosmology, history and the like much.
~~~
Also, I would like to go on record defending the internet here. In 1960, A.J. Liebig observed that '[f]reedom of the press belongs to those who own one'. While large parts of the internet (netflix, candy crush, amazon, etc) are clearly a continuation of the spectacle by a few large corporations, the internet also broke the clear separation of content providers and content consumers. Sometimes this leads to QAnon. But sometimes it also leads to LessWrong.
~~~
I am also against idealizing pre-modern rural communities were everyone knew everyone. In a word, the sucked. Even aside from back-breaking labor, starvation and the like, I mean.
Entertainment-wise, you got the Sunday sermon, a few feasts a year, some visiting freak shows perhaps. I will take the internet with instant access to myriads of books, movies, tv shows, video games and subcultures any day of the week over that.
Also, in a community were everyone knows everyone, the individual is under lots of pressure to conform. If I were to piss off the ACX community and be banned for life, I would still have colleagues, virtual friends in other internet communities, a few real-life neighbors I know and so on. For a pre-modern rural community member, the threat of being shunned or cast out is possibly life-threatening. Other respectable communities likely won't accept outcasts, and the retirement plans for vagabonds, brigands, mercenaries and the like don't sound all that great.
IMHO, this very much limits the shifting of the overton window within such communities. If the grocery sellers in the market does not know you from Adam in the first place, you have to think a lot less about them refusing to selling you any vegetables because they disapprove of your opinions or something.
In the times of "apocryphal Chinese curse" it's very useful to be clear about life goals and your meaning of life. More precisely: to make sure that their objective part is meaningful and re-choose (consciously confirm) it's subjective part. See more details in here:
Aka: Buddha-Darwinism on objective meaning of life separated from subjective meaning of life (Cosmogonic myth from Darwinian natural selection, Quasi-immortality, Free will, Buddhism-like illusion of the Self).
For a more neutral view about the nature and processes of longing tapped by various seekers of influence and pleasure, some might find this book useful. Glamour goes back well before mass media, but mass media certainly made it a more common form of rhetoric to experience.
This review is at least less gnomic, cloudy, and circular than Debord is, to judge by the quotations. Beyond that I didn't find it very appealing. I kept waiting for Debord's or at least the reviewer's ideas to cash out in some moderately concrete model or prediction. They never did. I didn't enjoy the slightly manic internetiness of the writing either. I don't doubt that the review (or Debord) is getting at something real, but in philosophy that's a rather low bar especially for theses this subjective.
The best quality of sam[]zdat was making you feel how obtrusively, dauntingly weird philosophy could be if you took it seriously. The current review doesn't quite manage that and from what I can tell Debord doesn't quite manage it either; the required critical attitude isn't there, just hazy angst and speculation. Even so, I appreciated the reviewer's self-awareness and commitment to being interesting. As always, many thanks for contributing!
Tl;dr I'm not getting what the OP got out of Debord quotes. I just get Vagueness.
I think the OP is interpreting Debord too liberally.
My favorite, in part III, is where Debord talks about spectacle uniting people in their separateness. The OP interprets this in gist as a process similar to modern mindless scrolling through social media where They tell you how to be. I was so surprised by this 1967 insight that I read the entire review.
And what I'm getting out of Debord quotes is that he wrote so vaguely about so much, you could really interpret his writing to mean anything. The OP chooses to read him as a 1967 Nostradamus, who is also unreadably vague.
Maybe Debord sounds vague to me because I lack context? I'm very out of touch with modern "spectacle" and COMPLETELY out of touch with Debord time. (I had to google QAnon. I was generally aware of COVID and its controversies but the only thing I noticed personally was that I had to wear a mask sometimes and get a shot. I occasionally have to re-google who is the president of the US. And no, I'm not Amish on a farm---it's just that my Care About This neurons quit firing when people argue.)
Debord wrote vaguely? Meh. I think he was pretty specific but unless you closely read Hegel and Marx and Lenin and understand the history of communism up to 1967 from the perspective of theorists one might miss his specificity.
To understand debord (I'm making no judgment here on his correctness), you probably would also benefit from understand Dada and a generation later, the pop art movement.
"There is no exit to Plato’s Cave. It was only conceit that we ever thought we were more enlightened than our forebears. "
This part is untrue. There are better ways to live – for individuals, if not for the masses, but they are not easy.
What's required is the skills and temperament required to be a great (not just a good) scientist: of these the most important are
- prioritizing truth above everything else (including what you said last week, or what your mortal enemy said)
- being very aggressive in probing where your theory/understanding is incorrect
- consilience, namely forging links between different bodies of knowledge
This is not just pro-science happy-talk, it gets to the root of the issue. Consilience is what makes your knowledge of the world more real than just shadows on a cave, and what makes you substantially better positioned to judge what's nonsense (or what may be true but unimportant) in the stream of garbage factoids delivered to screens every days. Consilience is what allows you to get past epistemic learned helplessness, to see that while claims of ancient astronauts or worlds in collision are very sexy, they simply do not tie strongly to the rest of knowledge, whether history or astronomy. You DO know the kernel of eliable truth, it's the fixed point, or interesection, of all the different bodies of knowledge out there.
But this is not easy, sure! It requires a lot more reading and a lot less watching. Even worse, it requires reading a constantly changing set of materials, whereas it's so much easier to keep reading the same thing again and again (and pretending that you must be really smart because you understand everything you read). It requires constantly asking why, or where you disagree with what you're reading.
The point is Consilience. Falsifiability, sure, where feasible. Experiments, sure.
But Consilience more than anything else, especially now, is the master key. There's a reason E O Wilson made such a big deal about it.
(FWIW I see Debord as someone who does not live by those code, someone who prioritizes blame over truth. This is, of course, the natural human condition, to care much more about ways to attack our enemies, real or imagined, than to forget the damn enemies and attack Ignorance. And it presents in a lack of interest in Consilience, so we see lots of valid points, lots of good examples, but essentially Conspiracy Theory links between these points; a supposed unified theory of the world, but based on strawmanning the opposition and steelmanning one's own theory, rather than the reverse.
Is the point of Philosophy, for Debord, to understand the world, or to complain about it? I want the understanding, but he seems more interested in telling us that, obviously, OBVIOUSLY, the Society of the Spectacle is bad (so he doesn't have to justify this claim) and here are five hundred things related to its badness. That's not Consilience, that's theology, starting with the revealed truth and then asserting how that truth manifests itself in one item after another.)
"All dialogue is psychological warfare" works, as long as you're content to characterize a mother comforting a scared child as psychological warfare (or competition to impose a particular memeplex). If that doesn't seems a little forced, then you've probably built the equation in as an axiom, rather than as a useful analogy, with "warfare" holding independent meaning. If it does seem forced and you draw a line to say some dialogue is psychological warfare and some isn't, who could disagree?
"Warfare is dialogue"; "Warfare is chess"; "Warfare is mating ritual" . . . All good punchlines, in their place.
Sure. She's acting to achieve a goal she wants (and every action can be analyzed that way, no matter how altruistically ethical--it's built into the scope of "to want"). But why is that "warfare" in any respect. If the psychology of all social action is warfare, isn't it equally diplomacy, or gaming, or compensating, or self-deception (which seems to be where Debord was headed, in a Sartre-like way)?
More basically, the idea that all intentions are selfish (one step from your description of the mother) is a common argument, as indicated above, but this involves a willful blindness to the meaning of "selfish" in natural language, while hoping that the statement will be interesting precisely because of the affective connotations entailed in that meaning.
And thanks for taking the bite. I surprised myself when I actually hit the Post button for such a picky point. I was annoyed by the review, where I felt a string of interesting ideas were each being stretched beyond validity, so I quibbled with you instead when I thought your aphorisms were headed that way too.
It's Sunday evening, Machine Interface, and I'm afraid I'm going to bloviate.
There are thousands of words we could do away with because they are not analytically useful. But we don't, because we use language principally for living, not for analysis. When we tell a kid who snatches a toy away, "Don't be so selfish!" we're teaching a lesson about social protocol in a way that can be understood. That's the word-world we live in, and there's no escaping; if there's a we (or an "I") at all, that "we" exists in a world with conventional words baked in. That's precisely the world in which the sentence, "Every act is selfish," is interesting. When you unpack it into "degrees of long- and short-term X, Y, Z" you get binders of spreadsheets no one will read outside of a paradigm-enclosed disciplinary group: the moment it expresses its findings for an audience it will have to reintroduce the unpurified words to demonstrate interest.
Nor can we identify and quantify all the components of intentions to perfect a model for describing them, because they arrive in a protean stream of complexity, without an objective observer. I think that to say that natural language presents a layer of moral obfuscation is to deny that morality is "real." It is indeed a "construct," like everything else of interest to people, but it's intrinsic to social experience. I don't think we actually have much of a clue about what's "really going on," which is just as well, since I think in principle there's no way to describe that--its reality would always be contingent, a function of the individual/species of observer who/that observes it.
As for spreading genes, while our particular dispositions do or don't favor spreading them, I think very few things exist *to* favor spreading them. My urge to bloviate must be part of a package that is the outcome of a natural selection process (I'm here, so the lottery "wanted" me!), but I'm not bloviating in order to hook up or even, when it comes to memes, to propagate the model of online bloviation. (I'm more likely to have promoted the model of the tl;dr eyeroll two paragraphs ago.) Of course, if I were marketing a new comic series, "The Bloviating Man," I'd design an ad campaign to spread the meme, but I doubt my marketers would encourage me to make personal bloviation an element of it, despite my advanced skills.)
If there is justice in the world, this rant deserves to be refuted in a sentence or two.
There’s no justice in the world.
Great timing on publishing this…I enjoyed watching Jordan Peele’s new movie “Nope” last night, and this book was a clear influence.
Best one yet. Doesn't make the book sounds like a particularly enjoyable read though.
Does the sheer amount of linkage you threw in mean this review is peak "spectacle"?
According to Wikipedia, Debord had nothing to do with the choice of the book's cover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle#Translations_and_editions
In the review, you seem to be completely sidestepping the whole Marx/Hegel angle, which is very prominent in the book and conceivably necessary to deeply understand its thesis. I say "conceivably" because this is where Debord lost me. To put it mildly, his writing didn't encourage me to try to understand more of Hegel (or parts of Marx that derive from Hegel, for that matter).
I really do like the term post-capitalist, I find it oddly “fun”? I don’t know how to describe how I feel about it per se but that’s ok.
The problem with post capitalism is that it is worse than capitalism. No one is stopping anyone from being post capitalist right now, nor have they for quite a while i the US. But those types of organizations generally do not thrive.
What would it take (in the USA) to entirely remove oneself from the capitalist system?
To entirely remove oneself, very hard, to mostly, quite easy. Tons of structures exist to form co-ops, hell some large power companies and other utilities in the upper Midwest are co-ops. Though of course utilities are a natural monopoly so they are a bit immune to competition.
Or you can simply go live in a shack in the woods.
Mostly you can form whatever type of utopian community and organizational structure you want (particularly if going on the anarchism rather than authoritarian axis).
No one is really stopping tons for worker owned enterprises from sprouting up.
They just tend not to work well, and provide lower wages and Stan dares of living and so people don’t find them attractive.
A lot of the large housing co-ops in my state (mostly associated with universities and set up in the 60s), have slowly collapsed due to inabilities to deal with free ridership, crime, squatting etc.
What co-ops exist in competitive areas like housing are mostly supported by charity, or huge amounts of outside technical assistance.
Do co-ops count as non-capitalist?
I mean one of the main structures non capitalists argue for is member owned or worker owned co-ops. Both of which exist and are common, but generally don’t dominate the market in their sectors.
Ah yes, I see. Well you would expect them to be a bit less efficient at making money, but humans are not motivated only by the desire to be efficient.
I prefer the term pre-capitalist. True capitalism has never been tried!
LMFAO
BTW, my impression was always that Debord is basically like Baudrillard but less flashy and more opaque. Does your reading support this view?
What if I think there are things that are fundamentally wrong with contemporary society, but less so than ever before?
Then you are an adult with a good grasp on the world?
Seconded
I think the counterargument implied by the review is that we can conceive of Moloch as subject to constant selection pressures such that the remaining dysfunction is increasingly well "adapted" to resist fixing. Like, sure, it's a hell of a lot better to have "constant AI Panopticon to get you to consume and submit to the will of the state" be your immediate problem rather than "starving during the dry season" or "suppurating leg wound with no effective infection treatment," but the former is an existing problem that capitalistic impulses incentivize making even worse (much like being tethered to your phone as an email or communications medium all the time) whereas the latter are ones that have pretty obvious solutions.
Think of it like using one of those antibacterial soaps that proudly advertise "kills 99.9% of bacteria!" -- whenever I see that I can't help but think to myself "....thereby guaranteeing that only the fittest, toughest, best adapted bacteria resistant to antibacterial soap remain to reproduce..."
I Guess the TL;DR version of this as a blog post headline would be something like "Moloch as Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria."
This may be something you already know and just part of the metaphor, but those soaps don't use what we would generally call antibiotics and my impression is the bacteria that survive generally do so by not being exposed, not by being marginally resistant. The analogy I've heard is that if you dump lava on a herd of cows, one or two of the cows might get missed by the lava and survive but you're not going to evolve lava-resistant cows.
I was not actually aware of that, so the antibiotic-specific metaphor sounds like it's much more relevant than the soaps one (I'd heard that triclosan-resistance didn't seem to be much of a Thing despite its ubiquitous use in antibacterial soaps but had not / have not ever looked into the mechanism of action). The fault is mine and thank you for the clarification!
"In addition, laboratory studies have raised the possibility that triclosan contributes to making bacteria resistant to antibiotics. Some data shows this resistance may have a significant impact on the effectiveness of medical treatments, such as antibiotics."
https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/antibacterial-soap-you-can-skip-it-use-plain-soap-and-water#:~:text=In%20addition%2C%20laboratory%20studies%20have,medical%20treatments%2C%20such%20as%20antibiotics.
Immune systems are doing just that: killing 99.9% (or whatever) of bacteria, thereby guaranteeing that only the toughest, fittest, best adapted bacteria resistant to immune systems remain to reproduce. And yet nobody sane would suggest that this is a bad thing, or that we'd be better of without immune systems.
This is probably correct with a caveat. Some things along some measures have simply worsened. If you care about those measures over others then society will look worse.
So choose your measure.
To my mind, the preferred yardstick in these arguments, material well-being, is clearly not enough. If suicide rates have climbed in the US for several decades, should we take this as a sure fire sign that life is worse off, and things have not improved for that time period? Or is the price of a transistor the preferred measure?
1. There is evidence that suicide is contagious.
2. My guess is that controlling for well-being, different cultures now and throughout history would have varying levels of suicide.
3. If well-being is held constant but suicide is made easier culturally, technically, politically, etc suicide will increase. Now, you may claim that such a culture is inherently worse...but I don't think I buy such a claim.
We can put this a different way. What is well-being in the minds of fervent modernism apologists? It is typically things like: infant mortality, crime rates, ease of access to goods, average lifespan, and other such easy to measure qualities. There is no arguing these are good things.
But it’s easy to imagine a society where all of these factors could be increased and yet you probably wouldn’t opt to live in it. Would you choose to live in a society where everyone works remotely and lives sealed in a chamber separated from everyone else? One where all of your needs are met and you receive the best care possible? I would not, and yet deaths from injuries would be low, crime rate would be low, and all measures of access to goods could be held at arbitrary levels.
If you would not choose to live like this (and many wouldn’t) then you understand these critiques implicitly. The argument is that the tradeoff of freedom and community is the same and the difference is in magnitude. The persistent problem with this discussion is that loneliness and freedom have imprecise measures. You basically must take self-reports, which makes it easy to dismiss if you are willing, and apologists are always willing.
I feel like you're having an argument with someone who isn't here.
Then you would do well to dwell upon how suspicious it is, that from all the thousands of years and hundreds of different cultural milieu and social organizations, the one you were born into (by sheer ignorant and blind chance) is that which uniquely minimizes suffering, stupidity and immorality.
Consider that there are more societies than there are gods, your chance of being born to the right society (that which is most beautiful, merciful, rational,...) is strictly less than that of being born believing in the one true god.
That’s as bad an argument against Western exceptionalism as it is against Christianity. If you have values and metrics then there must exist a society that scores best against those metrics. And there must be (or have been) someone who lives (or lived) in that society. If that’s you, just be grateful.
The question, of course, is: Do you *really* have values and metrics ? or did you craft your values and metrics, conclusion-to-premise, to suit whatever society\religion you found yourself in ?
In software engineering you are encouraged to write tests before you write the code, because if you do it vice verca then your leftover assumptions from writing the code will muddle your tests so that they are not "testy" enough. You are also told to make sure the tests fail on trivial incorrect code, because tests that cannot fail are useless.
Are you sure your values and metrics are really independent measures of your beliefs that your society just so happens, oh very happily and coincidentally, pass ? or are they tests that cannot fail ?
>If that’s you, just be grateful.
Or be skeptical, because the odds say it shouldn't happen.
To keep it simple, let’s stick with your proposed values: “minimizes suffering, stupidity, and immorality… most beautiful, merciful, rational.” There is a society somewhere in time and space that best fits your values. It can be debated, of course, and that’s half the fun. But science, knowledge at our fingertips, Western music and art (before postmodernism), lower than ever illness and mortality rates, egalitarian Christian moral intuitions, liberalism in the rule of law, Enlightenment rationality. As with any society, you can pound on the flaws, but I still don’t know how any other society can beat peak The West in the values you proposed. That said, I do think that moment is now permanently behind us. Hopefully I’m wrong.
They were saying that the current society and structures are doing better than the past, not that they are the best possible.
And regardless you can think society has plenty of room for improvement and maximization without thinking Marxist maunderings have merit.
Ok top of that, unlike gods societies are evolving and improving and changing with the conditions.
Imagine a car salesmen telling you this is the safest car ever. You might have doubts, you might even think it is instead sole other slightly different car. What it’s not going to be is a car from 40 years ago. The quality of societies is not randomly distributed through time. You would expect the best ones (especially for current conditions), to mostly be current.
"""They were saying that the current society and structures are doing better than the past, not that they are the best possible."""
Did I imply otherwise ? the past contains "thousands of years and hundreds of different cultural milieu and social organizations".
"""you can think society has plenty of room for improvement and maximization"""
"Improvement" implies you're on the right track, that you're doing worse on a measure that you should be doing better on. But what if you're not even wrong ? not even heading remotely in the same direction you should be ? You can't "improve" a ship to fly, you have to tear it down and make it again, the sheer amount of wrong assumptions its design makes is impossible to gradually rectify.
"""without thinking Marxist maunderings have merit"""
I too sometimes don't understand marxist intellectuals or have patience for their prose. But what they are saying is irrelevant, as long as it is to the effect that something is deeply and irreversibly wrong in the way people live. You don't have to set a beautiful alarm tone to wake up, just a loud one. Marxism is and have always been just a loud alarm tone.
"""Imagine a car salesmen telling you this is the safest car ever"""
Imagine you live in a universe where community and human dignity are not quantifiable goods that get better with mass production. You live in a cramped and inferior society among countless nameless millions like farm chattel. You are controlled by monstrous alien entities called States, composed of people like animal bodies are composed of cells, caring about the welfare of people exactly as much as animals care about the welfare of their cells : not at all, unless relevant to their survival.
You were not built for this perversity, for hundreds of thousands of years your ancestors lived among people whose very flesh and blood was molded out of the same language as them. Nobody needed to craft rules on how to live with each other; or rather, nobody needed to craft rigid and easily exploitable set-in-stone (or paper or computer memory) rules. You started with the willingness to live with each other, and a natural affection only life born out of itself can hold, and the rules trickled down and evolved as needed. You look upon ants and bees, they are marvellous in their numerousy and organization, but you're not like them, your place is to live among a hundred or a thousand of your kin, governing no one but your kin, and being governed by no one but them.
The society you live in is a poor imitation of ants and bees. Everytime you complain someone points to some numbers and explains how they have gone up, how it's good that they go up, how your complaints are misguided and irrational because the only thing that matter is numbers going up, and the societies you're nostalgic for are societies where those numbers have not gone up, and thus can't be worth living in.
Can you imagine that ? Some of us don't have to, because we're living it. If you're not, count yourself lucky that you adapted to the life of ants and bees, but don't dismiss or make fun of those who long for the long lost life of humans.
When/where was this time when "human dignity" and "community" were not quantifiable goods?
As for living like chattel, not the vast majority of Americans do not live like chattel, that is just wrong. There are WAY too many people, I will agree with you there. It would be easier to setup a society of human flourishing if we cut the global population down by 90%. But in the fuck are you volunteering to start with?
>You are controlled by monstrous alien entities called States,
Not really, the state has relatively impact on my day to day life. Certainly compared to medieval village, and likely very little impact compared to whatever Marxist dystopia you are imagining.
>Caring about the welfare of people exactly as much as animals care about the welfare of their cells
Ok now you sound like you are 18 years old.
As for life being the life on ants and bees. Umm no its not really. Modern life does a TREMENDOUS job of mostly allowing people a large amount of room for personal choice and for pursuing projects that are tangential, or even directly orthogonal to what society wants or is good for it. The exact opposite of ants and bees. yes there are some sacrifices required to live in a well ordered society in a world with 8 billion humans, but um, not a ton compared to what it could be, and certainly nothing like ants of bees who cannot breed, and have zero interests outside supporting the colony.
I spend pretty much 100% of my time pursuing my own projects in a way entirely directed by me. I do need to kick back ~25% of the resources I earn to the state in exchange for the services it provides, but that seems roughly fair even if I don't approve of many things it does.
I do need to agree to not steal from my neighbors, but I also get some protection from the same. What exactly is the great sacrifice I am making here that is so terrible? That I have to listen to my boss/client? You don't think hunter gathers had to listen to people ever?
You sound so filled up with hatred for modern society, but with literally nothing but platitudes as a replacement. Which is sort of par for the course for Marxists and Marxist adjacent people.
Imagine a world where everyone can do whatever you want! (So like a world where people are stealing my stuff and I need to constantly attend to my wife/chidden to ensure they are not harmed?).
Multiple responses to this subject that I've dwelt upon for many years:
1. Do you find it suspicious that current technology is more advanced than ever before? Can you articulate the difference between technology and society with regards to "betterness"?
2. A better framing of the chances of being alive where and when is just to count (or estimate) the number of people alive in western societies vs those who have ever existed in other societies. A few estimates I've seen around around 7-8% of people who have ever lived are now alive. Guesstimating based upon population of western countries now and in the past I'd say it's at least a few percent chance. However, I think this whole endeavor doesn't work because of...
3. There's basically a zero percent chance I'd live in some other time or society since I'm a product of this time and society. Another way to say the same thing is that if my genes were instantiated in ancient Rome or somewhere and then I was magically transported to today, there's no reason to expect that I'd hold the same opinion I posted in the root comment.
All this is to say that while there is a glimmer of a point to the type of argument you're putting forth here, I *have* dwelt upon such arguments, and in this case, on balance, it doesn't weigh enough to flip me into thinking other than I do.
1- On technology : depending on how you define 'technology' and 'advanced'. There are plenty of times where technology not only didn't advance with time, but actively retrograded. Technology is not a linear path.
On technology v. society : the difference is obvious off course, it's the number of dimensions in the objects you're comparing. "Better" makes no sense unless said about single-dimensional objects : is 5 better than 4 ? yes or no, because they are single-dimensional totally-ordered quantities. But is the ordered pair (40,2) better than the ordered pair (9,11) ? any way of saying yes or no must reduce the problem of comparing ordered pairs to the problem of comparing single-dimensional quantities, or possibly several such problems.
In (some) technologies, the (cherry-picked) questions are always about single dimensional quantities : Does the airplane fly faster ? does the car drive longer ?. But can you compare a cat and a dog ? can you compare a mountain and a sun ? where would you start ?
The questions that moderns devise to compare societies are made up bullshit to make themselves feel better, "I earn more 'money' [being a sort of meaningless colored paper that people who don't give a shit about me or my labor print in abundance] than the primitive man, so hoorraay me! I won the lottery of history!"...... ??? that's about as convincing as a roman bragging that they have more emperors than any other kingdom or nation.
(2) the estimated total number of 'humans' (a fuzzy category) is 117 billion, today's 8 billions are indeed about 7% of that (~6.8% to be more percise). If you generously give 1 billion to "western societies" (a fuzzy category), then your chance is 1/117, or 0.85% percent. So not "a few percent", it's less than 1%, and that's not counting all the terrible ways of being alive in a western society.
(3) Isn't this just my point, restated differently? You think that today's society is the best possible among all past competitors because you were born in it, and so does a 1940 A.D german, and so does a 1000 A.D muslim,and so does a 100 A.D roman, and so does a 70000 B.C caveman. But all of those people are wrong : There were societies before 1940s germany that were vastly 'better' (in whatever non-arbitary metric you choose to define) than it, there were societies before 1000s islamic civilizations that were vastly better than it, there were societies before 100s roman empire that were vastly better than it. Isn't it suspicious how all societies and civilizations have betters that existed before them, except yours ?
I lost my whole comment here, so this is a shortened version:
1. It all cashes out! I can say 2022 Car Model 1 is better than 2022 Car Model 2 and both are better than 1905 Car Model 3. Cars vary across many dimensions, but I can still pick one as being better because the dimensions cash out.
Of course we can compare a cat and a dog! Everyone who owns one or the other has made that comparison!
The relevant comparison between technology and society is that both, roughly, progress and build upon that which came before.
> The questions that moderns devise to compare societies are made up bullshit to make themselves feel better,
You're continuing an argument with a group of people without considering if I'm a part of that group.
2. I shouldn't have used "western societies". Most societies of the past 100 years would meet my original comment. But I won't belabor the point since as I mentioned I think the whole framing is wrong.
3. "Isn't this just my point, restated differently?" No, I don't think so.
I'm not claiming that any of those people would or would not make the same claim I do about the relative ranking of their society. Just as in today's society, many people do not agree with me, I believe each of those societies would have people who do not have the same view of their society and that the proportion of such people would vary greatly from society to society.
I more or less include a 1940 German as being part of my current society...a more loosely connected part, but a part.
My point here isn't that my preferences were shaped by the society I developed in(though they are), but that me living in some other society is a nonsensical thing. I do not exist outside of my society.
> Isn't it suspicious how all societies and civilizations have betters that existed before them, except yours ?
Yes, it's suspicious which is why I don't take it at face value. However, it would be more suspicious if societies and humans didn't evolve to better match the needs of each other.
Just because someone is a suspect doesn't mean they're guilty. We can investigate and gather evidence to determine their guilt.
The main theme here is that societies and humans (roughly) progress. I'm better able to judge older societies from my standpoint because I can examine them and I have the ability and opportunity to do so to a degree unlike people from long ago.
I also think that the further back in time you go, the more and more likely a randomly chosen society will be worse than its predecessors. Progress in society (and humans and technology and most everything) has to...build up steam and momentum.
It's also worth stating that progress in society is noisy. Society might be worse in ten years, I can make no good prediction with any confidence. I'm much more confident that it will be better than today in a few hundred years.
Additionally, over time and geography, the edges of society are fuzzy. Just like I consider the 1940 German to be part of my society, I consider someone from modern China to be so as well and I'd likely consider someone from 2060 Brazil to be also. As such, society might have been better in 1980 USA or will be in 2035 Thailand. I'd still consider that to be my society.
But, just like the stock market, past returns are no guarantee of future performance.
There seems to be an extremely common failure mode where someone thinks they're saying, "Life sucks these days because of Capitalism/technology/whatever," when what they're actually saying is, "My life sucks these days because I'm depressed/have chosen to care about stupid shit."
Maybe I'm the weird one but most of this kind of stuff just seems like whining about non-issues.
I think the amplification of narcissism by social media qualifies.
Can you elaborate? Personally I find it pretty trivial to a) not be narcissistic on social media myself, and b) not pay too much attention to people who do.
A google search "social media narcissism" (scholar or otherwise) reveals much done in this area. Best, B.
I'm pretty confident that if I bothered to make that search I'd just turn up a bunch of people making the same mistake I was complaining about in my original comment.
Then we disagree on the corrosive impact of narcissism in today's world (except for you). and it's obvious amplification by the internet. The book title, "The Society of the Spectacle", and your comment prompted my thoughts.
Okay, they're making a mistake. Why? What's your big plan for stopping this? Telling them all to stop making the mistake?
I mean I'm not sure people writing silly things on the internet (or elsewhere) is the kind of thing that necessitates a "big plan" in response but to the extent that it does my strategy includes:
-Announce publicly that I think it's a mistake.
-Mostly ignore them.
-Encourage other people to ignore them as well.
Narcissism has always been with us. There's no obvious reason to believe that there's more of it in some sense than ever before. Yes, there are twits who obsess over their number of followers. And those same twits used to obsess over what they were wearing, or whether they got enough of an awed reception when they entered the club.
The fact that you see the most narcissistic individuals in the media (because by definition they are the ones who try very hard to be noticed) doesn't prove your claim.
Asserting "narcissism is being amplified" and that this is "being caused by social media", and that both of these are "obvious" is not a proof, it's simply a reflection of the fact that you go along with conventional wisdom. And yes, conventional wisdom is often correct. But it's ALSO often incorrect. The primary reason the social sciences have made so little progress compared to the physical sciences is that the social sciences continue to prioritize folk beliefs and conventional wisdom, something the real sciences abandoned somewhere around Galileo.
Word. I got nothing out of this. I like the *reviewer's* style more than most or all of the others, but the work itself is so uninteresting and pointless — at least, to me — that I just couldn't enjoy the review. None of the societal criticisms or examples resonated or seemed essential (rather than, say, merely a problem with what someone on an individual level has chosen to value or how they've decided to view things).
I don't think it is _totally_ pointless:
"Or you used to, at least. Before the spectacle, your models, mentors, and rivals were real people you knew in real life. Now we have an acronym for that - IRL - because reality is everywhere in retreat."
Reflects a real change. We spend more of our time on things like electronic media rather than things and people in our immediate environment. In other terms this is a _very_ old complaint:
"In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates calls into question the propriety and impropriety of writing. Throughout his discussion with a colleague, Socrates insists that writing destroys memory and weakens the mind"
Literacy is also a technology, and allows us to read words from times and places distant from our immediate experience.
There is always a tradeoff in where we direct our attention. Communications and storage technologies let us pick and choose from words and images from a vast range of times, places, writers, and artists, selecting those of the most interest to us - but when our attention is on them, it is not on our immediate surroundings and companions. C'est la vie.
But "real" people are boring. Whenever I happen to overhear some gossip about somebody's personal life or their children I always feel that I couldn't care less. Whereas the better stories are crafted in such way as to abstract away the boring parts and focus on interesting action. Of course, one might say that this is superstimulus and bad, but so what? I like what I like, superstimulus or not, and saying that I should like something else instead won't change my preferences.
Perhaps you only find them boring because you've become so desensitized.
People in the past got more fulfilment of having a real *community* around them than people do today from hearing from the "most interesting" people on TV/the internet they can find.
People got more fulfilment from cooking the same style of food every day with their extended family/village/community than people today feel from getting a cuisine from a different part of the world delivered every night.
People got more fulfilment by listening to (or actively participating in themselves) music performed by their community in relatively simple styles and without much variety than people today get by listening to the "best" music in the world.
You like things? Great. But by and large Americans today are not happy, and the loss of having a genuine, "IRL" community to living atomistic, hedonistic and materialistic lifestyles is almost assuredly a big factor.
But did they really find fulfillment in those things, or simply were doing them because they had no other choice? It's easy to romanticize the past, but I can't help but notice that revealed preferences of people seem imply that they aren't eager to live in it. As for being unhappy, well, humans simply aren't designed for happiness, hedonic treadmill is always there to ensure that no matter how much better our lives are now by any objective measure, we're always unsatisfied.
"It's easy to romanticize the past, but I can't help but notice that revealed preferences of people seem imply that they aren't eager to live in it."
Good point! Yup, people have the option to turn off the phone or TV and talk with their neighbors - and that is not the direction average behavior has been changing. "revealed preferences" are a powerful clue!
>Perhaps you only find them boring because you've become so desensitized.
Even if that's the case, they must actually be relatively more boring anyway — and what's wrong with preferring the less boring thing to the more boring one?
I'm not so sure that we can make all these claims about who got more fulfillment, either. Is there any good evidence for "more fulfillment" -- especially corrected for the ability to notice and express unfulfillment? (That is: would a medieval peasant have had time to worry about such a thing as self-actualization and personal fulfillment, or any expectation that it should be an option for everyone?)
You can see that even in the past, when e.g. people could *stop* eating the same limited diet every day, they did. When they obtained the power or wealth to go listen to different and fancier music, they did. Conversely, I am unaware of many writings about how fulfilled someone was with having no choice but to eat the same few foods or listen to the same simple music, or many examples of people with both options choosing the latter (relative, at least, to the examples of people choosing the former).
It's possible for other forces to have caused a sub-optimal equilibrium, but ordinarily we'd not expect to see people abandon more fulfilling things for lesser ones.
All good points, Many Thanks!
"You can see that even in the past, when e.g. people could *stop* eating the same limited diet every day, they did. When they obtained the power or wealth to go listen to different and fancier music, they did. Conversely, I am unaware of many writings about how fulfilled someone was with having no choice but to eat the same few foods or listen to the same simple music, or many examples of people with both options choosing the latter (relative, at least, to the examples of people choosing the former)."
I'm mostly on your side on this issue, but in this case I don't think the facts prove what you'd like them to prove. That people of the past also abandoned simpler music as soon as they could go listen to fancier music, etc., only proves that they were also susceptible to superstimulus in the same way we are, which is exactly what you'd expect from heredity being real. Also, there are plenty of writings from at least the 18th century in Europe about how rich/powerful/upper-class people's lives tend to end up weird, alienated and somehow empty in spite (because?) of their abundance, and indeed some architectural evidence – the Little Trianon's "Hamlet of the Queen" for example, a place where the queen who remains a watchword for rococo opulence went to pretend to be a peasant. So, it seems reasonable on that basis for someone to suspect that this is at least a known problem or tradeoff of abundance, one which has simply spread as abundance increased.
The oldest text about someone deliberately choosing rustic simplicity and a lack of choice and abundance due to its salutary mental-health effects is probably the Tao Te Ching.
"People in the past got more fulfilment of having a real *community* around them than people do today from hearing from the "most interesting" people on TV/the internet they can find. "
Do you have any evidence for this claim?
"by and large Americans today are not happy"
I don't think there's been a single society where the average person was "happy", depending on where you set the slider for that word.
Could you produce some statistical evidence that Americans are significantly less happy now than they are in whatever halcyon era you'd like us to return to?
I have a snippet of evidence _against_ that conclusion, at least for very recent changes. The CDC has a web page on depression https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db303.htm which showed that
"From 2007–2008 to 2015–2016, the percentage of American adults with depression did not change significantly over time."
Surveys appear to suggest that Americans are less happy than usual.
Let's even stipulate that that is correct (as opposed to something like people having a changing idea of what 'very happy' should mean).
We don't get from that to the cause you claim.
I can give dozens of alternative explanations:
- people are lonelier than ever before. Blame theory: rules that made people increasingly frightened to approach others to ask for a date in any circumstances because "harassment".
- people are all experiencing anomie (ie deep connections to their culture). Blame theory: technology has created so many choices that none of us can find much in common with anyone else; we watch different movies, listen to different music, read different books; we don't live in the same culture.
- people are all experiencing anomie (ie deep connections to their culture). Blame theory: identity politics has destroyed the idea of, and attempts to maintain, a common American culture, and the inevitable result in a country as large as this is that there is no longer any common culture, certainly not one that one can take pride in and feel strengthened by.
- people feel no agency in their lives.
Blame theory: it used to be possible (even as a teenager) to simply leave a bad situation, move somewhere, start a new life. The law and child support services have rendered this ever more impossible; credentialization has rendered it ever more difficult to move from a career track you hate to something different; something (social norms? government welfare tied to a known address and suspicious of random moves?) has made people a lot less willing to move from a dead-end situation to something different the way they were still doing in the 60s.
- people feel no agency in their lives.
Blame theory: Life has become so complicated (so many forms, so many things that have to be dealt with, even for what used to be private matters like eg renovating a house) that everyone feels they can be hit with some sort of random government penalty at any time. Didn't fill in your tax form correctly; Didn't fill in some paperwork related to your kids and school; You have one month to get your backflow preventer tested and submit the report on this form; ...
- people don't have enough religion and ritual in their lives.
Blame theory: you can fill this one in yourself.
etc etc etc
"But "real" people are boring."
Exactly. Shakespeare is more eloquent than my next door neighbor.
"Whenever I happen to overhear some gossip about somebody's personal life or their children I always feel that I couldn't care less."
Perhaps typical local news rises to the level of a poorly written soap opera? :-)
Good point — there *is* a real difference there, and of course it isn't an unalloyed good. Like you say: there's always a trade-off. I personally feel like "boy I sure am glad I get to make this trade-off", but it seems some feel differently.
The quote re: Socrates and writing is pretty interesting as well. That's something I sort of had in mind when reading the review / writing the comment (though I didn't have such an apt reference!) — such a complaint seems hardly worth considering, now; which makes me think similar complaints, about the Internet or smartphones or whatever, are... well, similar: rather than incisive and iconoclastic critiques of modern life, they're merely a manifestation of *every* society's vague and eternal discontent.
Many Thanks! Very much agreed on all points.
This is true, but I don’t think it’s important. The question is do more people share your values and views or Debord’s? A lot of people find society shitty. They are not wrong. They value or desire something else from life.
Xpym and Himaldr-2 had excellent points about revealed preferences. The simple fact that a vast number of people choose to spend a lot of time online rather than talking with their neighbors implies that the former is, in practice, more attractive to them. This doesn't apply to _everyone_, but it seems to be common.
The notion of revealed preferences is a stupid one. Alcoholics have “revealed preferences” smokers have “revealed preferences”. It’s true in a simplistic sense, but we can probably recognize that people have different preferences for short term and long term action, that they can be in conflict, and that a society which makes it easier to satisfy short term over long term preferences can lead to some dismay, even if self-inflicted.
"The notion of revealed preferences is a stupid one."
Bullshit. They are what people _actually_ choose.
Verbally declared preferences are often lies, "politically correct", status seeking, and/or self-deception.
Yes, I know what a revealed preference is, but I’m not as fascinated with what people claim it to reveal. Again, take the addict as an example. It is puerile to say to an addict’s face that they have a revealed preference for abuse. It is correct in a shallow sense, but not useful. The same goes for most claims of revealed preferences. True, but not insightful or useful, certainly not in the way that people who use the term consistently want it to be.
We can only take one action in a given moment, and always take an action, and so there is some sense in which preferences must be well-ordered. So in what way is this level of analysis useless? Because we have multiple, different desires to satisfy, and the relative importance of those desires differs depending on scope of time used in decision making. For example, satisfying my sex drive or hunger are things I think of impulsively on a day to day basis, and will plan for on a weekly basis perhaps, but for my long term goals plays a small role. Ten years down the line I have career goals which I am strongly drawn towards, and yet on a day to day basis feel no “impulse” to satisfy and require discipline instead.
Succinctly: the notion of revealed preferences is factually accurate but useless for analysis because it ignores the modular nature of our desire, and the varied ways in which that desire drives our decision making at different temporal scopes.
And once they grasped that, they would desire something else, and upon attaining that they would desire something else, and so on ad infinatum. Want and longing is the engine of the human soul and the devil driving us on with the lash, and anyone who promises "your wants will be satisfied" as the path to happiness instead of "you shall master Tyrant Want and break his scepter" is either naïve or a charlatan.
Hmm... Yeah, the hedonic treadmill is real.
Re: "Want and longing is the engine of the human soul and the devil driving us on with the lash", I would have said something like "the incentive of all action" rather than "the engine of the human soul". I'm reading what you wrote as ambivalent about wants. Is that correct or incorrect?
Re: "you shall master Tyrant Want and break his scepter"
Wants range from the trivially satisfied to the physically impossible. The former are something more like a mild itch than a tyrant, and I see it as generally rational to satisfy those wants that are trivially satisfied - but always bearing in mind that for sufficiently difficult wants "The game is not worth the candle".
"Is that correct or incorrect?"
I am a Buddhist. My fundamental belief is that life is characterized by the discomfort and pain caused by our ceaseless longing and attachment and that peace and serenity can only be attained by breaking the cycle of longing and attachment, instead cultivating compassion, benevolence, and a harmonious existence with our environment. So yes, I do in fact think of Want as a bad thing.
Thanks for the clarification!
In my view, some longings and attachments are either unattainable or not worth the effort they require, and for them, modifying one's psychology to try to break the attachment is indeed sensible. On the other hand, some wants are trivially satisfied, and I don't believe there is a reason to leave them unsatisfied.
edit: For clarity, let me give an example of what I mean by a trivially satisfied want. For a typical person in a 1st world nation, getting a glass of water is a matter of getting a glass, turning on the kitchen tap, filling the glass, and drinking the water. Satisfying the want of thirst (in that context, barring unusual circumstances like imminent surgery) seems perfectly sensible to me. It doesn't even trigger a hedonic treadmill. It is driven by a specific homeostatic drive to avoid dehydration, and slaking it doesn't create a new desire for something else.
The bit about history and the notion of time needing a broader scope than just the passing of the seasons needing to be invented was interesting. Obvious in hindsight (like all good ideas) but still interesting.
Agreed.
A more succinct way to put it than my comment above ...
<i>There seems to be an extremely common failure mode where someone thinks they're saying, "Life sucks these days because of Capitalism/technology/whatever," when what they're actually saying is, "My life sucks these days because I'm depressed/have chosen to care about stupid shit."</i>
People's mental health, and the things that they value, are both influenced by the society they live in, which in turn is influenced by its economic structures and available technology. Choosing not to care about what society tells you to do may help, but it may not -- e.g., if it's impossible to form deep friendships because everybody's been atomised by social media and economic forces force people to move every few years for the sake of finding work, then giving up social media and staying in one place isn't going to help you deepen your friendships unless other people do the same.
That may be true, but I think the Neil Gaiman quote the review links to in a footnote is relevant here. It seems to me that a lot of these people end up with a very broad sense of malaise and dissatisfaction and I'm not confident that they're doing a good job tracing it back to the actual root causes. I suspect the truth is that in every era some people have felt like this, and often blamed it on their particular society when in fact it's much broader.
At the same time, there are some obvious root causes that can be traced back pretty straightforwardly to capitalism/capitalistic tendencies. For instance, climate change, which clearly affects the mental health of young people - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(17)30045-1/fulltext - is pretty difficult to extricate from capitalist systems. Every so often we get a reminder of that when some new story breaks about Exxon lying deliberately to stall climate change progress (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/30/exxonmobil-lobbyists-oil-giant-carbon-tax-pr-ploy) or Shell continuing to drill/plan new drilling aggressively despite the recommendations of the IPCC (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/shell-climate-change.html).
That would be one example where you could directly link depression/malaise to capitalism as it is practiced. It's quite hard to give such examples because the language is broad and there's an information maelstrom to navigate.
[I'm assuming you're broadly referring to younger people, because they're more likely to my mind to say things like "Life sucks because of capitalism".]
Again, my contention is that the causation mostly runs the opposite way. That is, there's a certain kind of person who just innately feels that everything is terrible and the world is doomed, and looks around for something in the world to justify that feeling. In today's world climate change is a prime candidate.
But if you actually look at the science, climate change almost certainly won't actually doom the world, especially not from the perspective of a reasonably well off person in a first world country. This is a bit tricky to talk about because I don't want to sound like I'm saying the actual likely outcomes won't be bad- hundreds of millions of deaths in poorer countries isn't out of the question- but I do think that the kind of people I'm complaining about tend to overstate the magnitude in a way that is neither accurate nor productive.
(As an aside I'd push back on exactly how tight the connection is between capitalism and climate change- the USSR's record on environmental issues was also pretty abysmal.)
And I'm not trying to say there's no legitimate criticism of capitalism, our society, etc. There's plenty of concrete issues that are certainly very bad, including climate change as I mentioned above. I'm just saying this specific kind of overly broad and emotion driven critique doesn't seem to me to have much useful content.
[I don't think it's just young people- this book was written in the 60s, for example. But as I've alluded to, I think this is a common impulse that people will manifest differently depending on their context and the worldview they're working with. Those on the right might talk about "degeneracy" or "decadence" and so on.]
I agree. Especially the old Frankfurt School texts read like depression diaries. There is an urge to judge negatively, a search for surprising twists to the worse and even a feeling moral righteousness when breaking rules of logic is necessary to reach new depths of misery. The vagueness of this prose - all quantification is absent - allows the reader to apply it to anything around, making him feel 'understood'.
> Again, my contention is that the causation mostly runs the opposite way. That is, there's a certain kind of person who just innately feels that everything is terrible and the world is doomed, and looks around for something in the world to justify that feeling. In today's world climate change is a prime candidate.
Yeah, this is a fair point. But how would we know? It's possible that these people start depressed, and look for a cause to be more depressed. It's possible that these people are pretty positive but then they spend their formative years being barraged by negative news about the world, and their actions seem small and unimpactful by comparison, and it leads to depression. On a subjective level, I have friends who work in climate emission policy, who don't believe we can avert the more catastrophic levels of temperature rise and who live perfectly happy lives. People are strange. I just don't think it's fair to say that anyone who feels depressed about the climate was depressed anyway and simply latched onto the climate. Might be true for some people, will definitely not hold true for everyone. The actual quantities of each group are difficult to ascertain, particularly as being anxious reinforces your tendencies to look for negative stimuli.
> This is a bit tricky to talk about because I don't want to sound like I'm saying the actual likely outcomes won't be bad- hundreds of millions of deaths in poorer countries isn't out of the question- but I do think that the kind of people I'm complaining about tend to overstate the magnitude in a way that is neither accurate nor productive.
Yes, I think I understand this position, I've heard it before from friends. For instance, the case of the missing soils, where a bunch of news journals reported that the UK had sixty harvests left, which turned out to be based on... not very much. I'd be interested to see what sort of sources you looked at when reaching this conclusion ("climate change almost certainly won't actually doom the world"). I don't think I broadly disagree, but I find the projected losses very difficult to stomach.
> I'm just saying this specific kind of overly broad and emotion driven critique doesn't seem to me to have much useful content.
Is this critique from newspapers? Or from writers? Or from general sentiment? Trying to determine what critique you're talking about.
> [I don't think it's just young people- this book was written in the 60s, for example. But as I've alluded to, I think this is a common impulse that people will manifest differently depending on their context and the worldview they're working with. Those on the right might talk about "degeneracy" or "decadence" and so on.]
Yes, fair enough. I was just responding to the specific quote you cited!
> It's possible that these people start depressed, and look for a cause to be more depressed. It's possible that these people are pretty positive but then they spend their formative years being barraged by negative news about the world, and their actions seem small and unimpactful by comparison, and it leads to depression.
Yeah that's certainly worth considering. But to the extent that it's true I think the kind of overly broad, poorly evidenced inchoate doomerism is probably actively making things worse, and encouraging people to take it less seriously is still the right move.
> Is this critique from newspapers? Or from writers? Or from general sentiment? Trying to determine what critique you're talking about.
Not sure I get what's being asked here. You see different forms of it in different places, mostly in essays and books like the OP but also sometimes on social media.
"climate change almost certainly won't actually doom the world, especially not from the perspective of a reasonably well off person in a first world country."
I see this kind of commentary a lot on SSC and rationalist-adjacent spaces and I can't ever help but feel that it always carries a very strong implication of "well, whatever, fuck nature, who cares about the puffins or the coral anyway?" And the answer is: I do. Beyond physical trips to see such stuff, I don't watch anthropological documentaries for enjoyments but I do watch nature documentaries. This weird anthropocentric parochialism where people seem to want to live in megacities and just spend their time surrounded by nothing but concrete and other humans makes me feel like I'm sharing a planet with people who are nominally my species but with whom I have nothing other than base physiology in common.
I agree completely. I think one valid point raised by such people is that due to the way the news cycle works, some damage from climate change is overexaggerated - see my sixty harvests point above. But the baseline rate of extinctions being 100-1000x times higher than it should be (https://ourworldindata.org/extinctions#are-we-heading-for-a-sixth-mass-extinction) cannot justify a 'so what' response.
I admit I care more about the humans than the animals but I agree that both are very bad. Regardless I don't think the relative weighting of humans vs animals (and other wildlife) matters that much to the main point. Either way it will most likely be very bad but not to the point of the world being "doomed."
Do you think that if the Amazon rainforest was 1% of its current size, you would ever finish exploring it? Do you even have any intention of beginning? If 99% of the species on Earth went extinct, would you ever see or learn about any significant fraction of the 1% that remained?
I love nature, but I don't live there. The city surrounded by concrete and humans is my home. It's why I haven't died of hunger, disease, bear attack, or the hundred other ways people used to die before modernity. As such, I'm a proud anthropocentric parochialist. If we need to cut down forests and drive animals to extinction so that billions of people are raised out of poverty and given a dignified life, then cut down the forests and kill the animals.
How many hundreds of millions are you willing to starve to save the puffins? How many billions should be relegated to extreme poverty so that you can enjoy your nature walks?
I think there is a lot of merit in your comment. I'll just add that the period of 1989–2001 was unusually optimistic and lacking a great enemy. People coming of age during this time might have unnaturally high expectations of how well the world should be run.
Oh for sure a pre capitalist economy with our technology definitely wouldn’t have problems with climate change….
Or say a non capitalist one like 1960s China or the USSR, I am sure they were all about environmental stewardship…no wait…
Hmmm.
I didn't mention any of those examples. You can criticise the systems that capitalist market structures produce without thinking that a feudal or agrarian economy is better. I think you'd be better off steelmanning my argument rather than injecting noise into the conversation. Seeing a critique of capitalism and quickly googling the USSR's record on the same thing feels a bit reductive, no?
Those aren’t frivolous examples, they are the ONLY specific real world examples we have of non
-capitalist attempts to run a large economy. And they were no better for the environment at all.
You didn’t really present any arguments. Your main problems seem to be with markets and human nature more than capitalism. And markets are so powerful we definitely don’t want to ditch those even if they are not always best totally unfettered.
What is you suggestion for how to allocate capital and ownership in a way that magically stops climate change and still provides people with a lifestyle people will accept?
"You can criticise the systems that capitalist market structures produce without thinking that a feudal or agrarian economy is better."
I don't agree. "Obvious root causes that can be traced back pretty straightforwardly to capitalism/capitalistic tendencies" only has any meaning if all or most non-capitalistic alternatives would not trigger the root causes. If all or most non-capitalistic alternatives also create climate change, then climate change cannot be traced back to capitalistic tendencies.
>For instance, climate change, which clearly affects the mental health of young people
To be clear, it's not climate change causing this, its concern over climate change causing this. Subtle but different.
And please, let us know. Is China capitalist as you view things?
> To be clear, it's not climate change causing this, its concern over climate change causing this. Subtle but different.
Sure, a good point. If you wanted to you could say in response that the current western media ecology is capitalist, and that drives the concern. I don't think we're going to get anywhere on this line of argument.
The reason I said that the 'language was broad' is because I don't think 'capitalism' is a very useful term beyond a surface analysis. I mentioned it because Paul Goodman referred to it, and I should have phrased my comment differently because various people have now turned up to do the 'capitalist versus state-capitalist versus communist' arguments and I'm not interested.
Is it impossible to form deep friendships, or is it easier than ever thanks to many more ways to interact with people and stay in touch?
I would have had no friends at all, growing up, if not for exactly the things you say make it impossible to form friendships!
Exactly. I made a book club with some of my close friends. All for of us live in different cities, and yet most weeks we all get together and talk for an hour or more. Other friends and family I play online video games with and it lets us stay in touch and spend quality time together regularly even though we can't meet in person more than once or twice a year at most.
Critics would say that your "friendships" are not real friendships- those can only be formed in real life and organically. By seeking out deliberate companionship and becoming someone's friend for the sake of being their friend, via digital channels, you are merely performing a hideous mockery of friendship, like a changeling trying to ape the actions of real humans. You have no genuine attachment to your friends, but merely fear being alone, and thus cannot and will never be able to form a genuine connection with someone.
If this sounds cruel and sneering, let that reflect my opinion on this kind of pseudointellectual exercise.
Not sure I follow what your point is. Do you in fact believe that our friendships are fake? Or is the "pseudointellectual exercise" you're criticizing the same thing I'm complaining about in the book and the review?
My point is the kind of people who make these arguments tend to be obsessed with procedure and the RIGHT way to do something, often so that they can sneer at all the people who are living incorrectly and feel better about themselves. For some reason, this pathology is overwhelmingly present in French intellectual culture.
Because the French developed a massive inferiority complex after being the center of Europe for hundreds of years and then seeing modernism and science cause the UK, Germany, and later the US blow by them.
Been creating nonsense philosophy ever since.
If you cannot be a winner, change the game!
The data I have seen, admittedly only from Scandinavia, show that the percentage claiming to have at least one good friend has increased somewhat during the last decades. (same question across time, national surveys (level of living surveys), same sampling method).
I absolutely believe this.
To be clear, I think people who talk like the critic I described are raging assholes with degrees.
Yep. I intended to reply to Jason M's (empirical) statement, but mixed up the comments-to-whom.
That's cute, but we know for a fact that people have less friends than they used to. And when something affects a whole country, it's silly to act like this is an individual issue. People didn't spontaneously decide to start acting different. Something bigger is going on.
"We know for a fact that people have less friends than they used to"
That sure sounds like a normative claim on the world, so in the place of Himaldr-2 I'll be the one to ask: do you have data that reflects your claim, and can I see it?
I think you mean descriptive, not normative.
I mean that he is claiming something about the world where we can look at the thing he's talking about as best as we can and see how close his words match reality.
<i>Is it impossible to form deep friendships, or is it easier than ever thanks to many more ways to interact with people and stay in touch?</i>
The former.
"According to a survey published online January 23, 2020 by the health insurer Cigna, more than three in five Americans are lonely, with more and more people reporting feelings of being left out, being poorly understood and lacking companionship. Since 2018 when the survey was first conducted, there has been a nearly 13% rise in loneliness...
The Cigna report found loneliness to be more common among men and heavy users of social media were more lonely as compared with light users. Feelings of isolation were prevalent across generations, with Gen Z (18–22 years old) having the highest average loneliness score while Baby Boomers (55–73 years old) had the lowest."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7321652/
Oof, this is tough, but I want to play Devil's advocate on this one.
What if an online social life, while lacking in some necessary areas, is overall more attractive due to the being able to interact with those who are interested in the same things as you are?
I think it's attractive in the same way that, e.g., on-demand, high-fat and -sugar fast food is attractive -- nice in the short term, but in the long term tending to reduce your wellbeing.
As for being able to interact with those who are interested in the same things as you are, that's a real benefit, and for some people -- e.g., those with quite niche interests, or who have social anxiety, or live in isolated areas without many other people around -- having access to the internet and social media probably does improve their social life. For most people, however, I think the gain in breadth (how many people they can interact with) is outweighed by the loss in depth.
Many Thanks for the actual data!
I wish I'd checked back here sooner! I might have suggested that this could reflect, rather, the culture of the U.S., rather than anything intrinsic to modern life: over the same time period, the Nordic countries and Germany showed a decrease in reported loneliness among the younger generations; the UK, no change.
These are just the examples I decided to Google real quick, not cherry-picked ones! There may indeed be an overall trend, or may be one if we look over a longer time period. Probably the latter is true, if I had to guess; but I, personally, wonder how that can be...
...though I'm unusually solitary and unusually fond of textual interaction, I admit. (As a kid, I fantasized about being alone on an isolated space station... ...I was a weird kid. But even now — as much as I love my mother and my girl, as much as I like my friends — I mostly prefer texting to speaking, even with such as they. I can organize my thoughts better; and I suppose I feel that, in a way, through text you connect with someone more purely than in person: the accidents recede into irrelevance, and only the substance — mind — remains.
But others, uh, might not share this fondness for deep, isolated silence, broken only by the clickety-clack of keypresses...)
Many Thanks!
"over the same time period, the Nordic countries and Germany showed a decrease in reported loneliness among the younger generations; the UK, no change. "
so it can't be a toxic effect of exposure to crystalline elemental silicon :-)
Broadly agree. You can live an amazing life away from the spectacle. Truly unparalleled freedom, safety, and creativity in modern times. But if 99% of society is chained to their preferred flavor of Spectacle, you can't really connect with them. We could all walk into a sports bar right now and start cheering for Tom Brady and connect with other people who think he's the GOAT. But when try to peel back what's really going on with these people, it's either empty or ugly.
I find myself wishing other people would just do some introspection and figure out what they want and who they are. But they all seem to be on autopilot stuck in a loop of working a pointless job, paying the mortgage/rent, watching the latest thing on netflix, and just generally being checked out. I know there is something human inside, but it is just so buried.
If 99% of society is chained to their preferred flavor of Spectacle, then if you are e.g. a Bay Area resident that *still* leaves you living in a metropolis larger and more diverse than Elizabethan London or Colonial New York City, in a civilization as vast and interesting as Rome at its height. But, with lots more drones to run the technologically advanced infrastructure and markets to provide enormously greater opportunities and comforts for you and all your interesting friends. Do you really need to make a deep, personal connection with everyone you meet?
Oh, thank God, it's not just me!
Yeah, "no introspection" is a good way to put it — or a large chunk of it; I think there may also be another thing (or other things) missing.
It is hard to put into words exactly, but I truly believe — and I say this in full awareness of how I will come off — that a large portion of the population can't really think; can't reflect; can't self-motivate; can't — doesn't even feel the need to — come to an independent conclusion on any question bigger than "what do I want to eat?".
The process, I swear, goes something like "thing is trendy = thing is good" *and it really feels like just the latter part to them*.
...Yeah, yeah, I'm like the guy in the comic Scott posted recently: "pfft, they have no idea, they're all sheeple..."
Sure, it's true: sometimes we do fail to credit others with attributes we'd find they do in truth possess, if only we saw a little deeper and more clearly; sometimes we do have blind spots where our own relative strengths and skills are concerned; sometimes we *are* all more similar than we think!
...but sometimes, you really are smarter than the average bear.
Sometimes, what appears to be a duck is, in fact, a duck. Sometimes, in other words, what appears to be someone with a barren wasteland of an internal life that is empty of wonder and filled only by vague, unexamined wants and tribal urges inculcated by their surroundings, the In-Group, and stuff they saw those cool celebrities do...
...well, you know where I'm going with this (he said, cleverly avoiding having to find a way to compose a pleasing end to a sentence that really should not have been constructed in the way it was). I think some people *really don't* ever look up from their shoes, so to speak — or even know why they don't, or that it's something that might be desirable.
(And I base this off asking people about, or overhearing conversations on, topics like our place in the universe, the nature of consciousness, why we do the things we do, what is right and how do we know, etc. "Huh? I dunno, it's just normal I guess? Anyway let's take a shot!")
And hey, it doesn't mean they're *bad* or anything. If you've a good heart, I'm pleased to share a species with you whether or not you have attempted to find your place in the universe or based your values on as firm a foundation as your thought can manage.
------------
I'll share a story about the sort of "cognitive normie" that does worry me a bit.
I once said to a Christian fellow, as we prepared a response to a drug deal gone bad: "hey, don't you think Jesus would frown upon what we're about to do?"
He replied, "Do I look like Jesus to you?"
So... you believe that God Himself, an infinite being of infinite might, has — out of a love and kindness so vast He would sacrifice a part of Himself just for us, for we who are less than ants to Him — has, I say, given you a direct and untainted glimpse of the Truth and the Right, a sacred instruction such that men would have died for just a glimpse of such righteousness and surety...
...and you don't even want to, like, wonder? Don't want to maybe ponder a little bit about what it would mean for such a thing to be true? Don't want to try to imagine, for a second, what the universe would look like and what your place in it would be, if the thing you profess to believe were indeed reality?
Huh. Okay then.
-------------
I could (and will, for I am only human, and my hatred of the Out-Group cannot be stayed) draw a parallel to certain modern phenomena — of the "I never thought leopards would eat MY face!" variety; you (that is, you the normie, not you the intellectual ACX reader) want to censor things you don't like, say. Fair enough. But... this is not from any *principle*. It is not a rule you came up with and are following. It is not reasoned from a cold-blooded EV calculation, either. It is not even based on an intuition you have mapped out for yourself.
No, it is purely emotive; you are parroting the current groupthinkery. You don't think about what your angry judgment and virtuous performance are really *based* on; you don't really *try* for reality, the way you do when your life depends on it (well, sometimes not even then, really).
It isn't *principle*... even if you know that *saying* it is is the password for certain challenges that may be met. In a time where the password was "faith", well, then *that* would be what you're basing it all on, like the *good, cool* people.
I swear it can't be thought like you (now you as in VolumeWarrior, or other ACX chads) or I understand it. There is no consideration of "what if everyone thought like this? what if someone who disagreed with me wanted to censor *me?*" — because they are wrong and probably know it, see, and *I'm* right, so it's *different.*
And *even then* they do not wonder at the circumstances — how either they totally would come up with all that stuff on their own and (luckily!) ended up born into the one place and time that *just so happens* to match up perfectly with their (independent!) reasoning... or else they'd have been one of the people they now hate so much, waving a torch at the bound witches and kicking the natives, were they born 400 years earlier.
The seems like the epitome of "anecdata" which rationalists should be opposing. That some people do well under "problem of the day" doesn't mean it isn't a problem and says nothing about the broader impacts of "problem of the day". Pretty sure plenty of people were saying the same thing you are saying during monarchy, too.
There's plenty of room for concrete, specific complaints about the current state of society that I take seriously.
The thing I'm arguing against is particular these extremely broad and diffuse critiques of some general trend towards fakeness or alienation, generally itself not backed up by any hard data. In fact they seem to amount to saying, "all the data says things are great but I still feel bad about it for some reason," and then trying to explain or invent what that reason is.
I don't think it's a coincidence that this kind of take tends to be really wordy and use a lot of dense language that's jargony or otherwise highly abstract.
Both data analytics and abstraction/philosophy can be useful tools. Unfortunately, both are easily manipulated.
The (fictional) empire in Asimov's Foundation claimed that "all the data" was looking better every day.
You can have flow dynamics data on a stream, but I would recommend some abstract modeling in case there's a waterfall ahead.
It seems more like the epitome of anecdata to say "I'm kind of upset and stuff, therefore society is moving in a bad direction."
There's some broader stuff here, but I'll admit they lost me at the "Society is collapsing because it used to be more fun to play video games" bit. I think it's much more likely that adult responsibility has made me more aware of problems than it is that the world got worse.
I agree.
It was also really weird reading this after Criticism of Criticism of Criticism. This book seems to be doing what CCC criticizes.
In my experience, 95% of the complaints about capitalism are actually complaints about thermodynamics.
Wait, what? So it's those thermodynamic b*st*ds been secretly screwing us all along?
Right? I'm not saying there aren't valid complaints about modern society, or even that socialist thought is wrong, necessarily (I think it is, but not arguing about it here).
But so many of the arguments are like "nobody should have to work just to have a roof over their head" and... homes aren't naturally occurring? If you think we can collectively do a better job taking care of each other, advocate for that. But never forget that life is a constant struggle against entropy we're all destined to ultimately lose. No economic reform will change that.
Yeah, I agree with this. At the same time, I do think that the spectacle idea has one interesting point: that we now have lots of close "relationships" with fictional characters. That includes fictions like James Bond, and fictional personas that people present on Instagram.
This isn't exactly new. It's exactly what religion did. But I do think it's interesting to look at how these different fictions shape our conceptual worlds.
My naive first guess is that it's better to have an amazing variety of different fictions to relate to and learn from, and in particular to have fewer fictions pretending to be reality, like religion did. So I'd lean towards thinking that this development makes the world better. But I'd like to see people trying to research this.
I completely agree that the reflexive "X has happened therefore society is doomed" just seems like a dumb way to write a book.
Hmmm. My life is awesome, I'm not depressed, I have lots of deep relationships, and do tons of cool shit. And yet, nearly everything in this essay resonated with me.
Welcome to the boundary of the illusion/spectacle. This is the place where the conditioned self is discovered.
Are you under the impression that people are generally happy these days?
And if millions of people are depressed and this is a product of "caring about stupid shit", why are so many people making these mistakes? Did they all spontaneously and individually choose to care about the wrong things?
If students one year start struggling on a test, and then this worsens for years and years on end, should we assume that the students all individually decided to be lazy and stop studying enough? Or should this make us look for the existence of a broader trend driving this underperformance?
This comment gets to the heart of a problem when we discuss these kinds of issues:
"the students all individually decided to be lazy"
This sentence suggests that you're looking at this as a question of *where to assign blame*. I'm guessing you assume that if I (I kinda agree with the commenter you responded to, so I'm putting myself in that place - sorry if I'm treading on any toes!) can assign blame to the students, then I will think there is no need to further examine the problem, and no need for anyone else to do anything about it. This is the kind of dick move that people like Ben Shapiro make: If I can use figures to "prove" that X is causing their own problems (where X is almost always African Americans) then that's the end of the conversation.
But I think that there are a bunch of other possibilities that can be explored without either embracing the "secular decline" catastrophism of Debord, or the "I'm an asshole" blame mongering of right-wing microcelebs.
For example: the question are people generally happy - this is open to a lot of interpretation, and I'm not convinced the answer is no. People used to commit suicide *a lot* in the not-very-distant past. (I live in China, which was much poorer much more recently than the USA, so these contrasts are starker. Suicide by rural women in this country was sky-high as recently as 30 years ago.) I don't know how suicide stats are collected, but I wonder what proportion of the people who died in agricultural "accidents" and in war are people who kinda sorta almost deliberately fell into the woodchipper or the machine gun. I have no evidence if this is true, but it could be.
For example: the question of "caring about stupid shit" - I don't know about you, but I'm a pretty hardcore atheist, so I'm committed to the belief that for thousands of years, people have built identities, institutions, artistic sensibilities, and entire cultures on "caring about made-up shit." If sudden changes in material culture and the invention of some radical new technologies do indeed make people "care about stupid shit," I won't be surprised. And I'll be very pleased if it only takes humanity a few centuries to work through the problems caused by the invention of Twitter, because the last time something similar happened (invention of writing), we went down some weird paths for millennia.
For example: "should we assume that the students all individually decided to be lazy and stop studying enough? Or should this make us look for the existence of a broader trend driving this underperformance?" - we shouldn't assume anything, but there several different questions here. (1) Is this really a problem? Is changing scores on a made-up test a problem? Are changing happiness statistics a problem? Personally, I have worries about the ability of any government or institution to make me happy. I would like my government and institutions to keep me safe: protect my physical person, maintain an environment in which I can earn my living. Past that, I don't want much from them, and I really don't want the Chinese, British (I'm British), or American government worrying its head about my happiness. I regard that as my responsibility. (2) If the test scores (or happiness statistics) changed, what might the cause be? Does that cause imply a problem, or might it be that the test has become less suitable? and (2) Is there anything anyone can do about it? Even when you know the cause of a "problem"/phenomenon, whether or not an institution can fix it, and whether you want an institution to fix it, is a completely separate problem.
Sorry if you know all this stuff! You only made a short comment. But your comment seemed to include some assumptions and conflation of things that often pop up in media I see, so I wanted to try to write them out and disentangle them a bit.
Are you under the impression there was ever a time when people were generally happy? The world is full of perfectly valid, concrete things to be miserable over and always has been. It's the arguments that things are getting *worse* that tend to seem incoherent and driven more by the author's subjective feelings than any hard evidence. But mostly it looks like Phil H covered most of the stuff I would have.
I think there's some degree to which technology makes it *extremely* difficult to disconnect from all the stupid bullshit. Smartphones have taken over everyone's life but while they've improved mine in several discrete ways (basically Google Maps, Spotify, Audible and Facetime), being reachable (and expected to be reachable) in my pocket at any hour of the night and having lazy resort to the Internet a click away has, on net, made it much harder for myself and those around to me to be "present" and almost *impossible* to just fucking disconnect completely and do my own thing without having to worry that an important work email came in.
Concentrated, diffuse, and integrated modes of spectacle sounds remarkably like Moldbug’s two stroke and four stroke societies. Wonder if he read Debord.
"everyone is xfss"
What?
I was surprised how little space you gave to the point that mass media was one-way (Lawrence Lessig called it "read-only culture", citing Sousa on gramophones displacing human singing), whereas modern social media is two-way (even if there is still a skewed distribution of the producers vs consumers that wouldn't surprise Pareto).
Boy, I hated this. Not that the review was badly written -- I like the authorial voice here just fine, perhaps even most out of all reviews so far, and the reviewer's comments were often cogent and amusing or interesting -- but the *book's* complaints make very little sense to me; the entire thing seems to me much ado about nothing. Paraphrasing an early passage in the review: "But I don't think [he was just railing against change out of some personal emotional difficulty]. Life is *different* now. You want to use your phone even when the TV is on, and don't want to lose GPS signal when in a strange place." Uh, yeah, those both seem fine to me. Where's the part that's supposed to explain why life is so bad now and we're less "real" and stuff?
There are some parts I liked a bit more, later on, but overall I feel like this sort of thing is a waste of time: pseudo-profundity through overwrought, foggy prose, for those who are unhappy and want something to blame it on.
Yes! Like, I'm open to be convinced that life is worse now because of any of the discussed stuff, but the whole thing just seems to mostly stand on asserting that it is bad or worse than before and moving on.
Rates of mental illness are higher now than they were in previous decades. It seems that, on a subjective level, a lot of people are worse off than in the past.
How sure are we that this isn't better or different measurements?
Do we have any reason to think that it is due to better or different measurements?
I don't know! Given the changing state of the art and stigmatisms around mental health over the decades it seems like something I'd definitely want to investigate before making the claim that it is or isn't worse.
Yes, we have lots of reasons to think that! It's a very well-known result with regard to physical ailments, for example: many more breast cancers were caught with increased focus on breast cancer and better diagnostic tools... but the actual rate does not appear to have much increased.
With a *lot* more focus on mental illness, mental illness being much less stigmatized (and indeed becoming perhaps the opposite of stigmatized among a certain demographic), relaxed diagnostic criteria, more (and more thinly-sliced) categories of mental illness, and more access to mental-health-care, it should be our default assumption.
Scott has written an interesting article about this (or, rather, a closely-related phenomenon, more accurately).
But also, Jonathan Haidt always makes the point that hospital admissions for self harm among teen girls are way up since the early 2010s, as are suicides. That part, at least, isn't due to relaxed diagnostic criteria.
We have reasons to believe otherwise. Suicides are also up as are certain causes of it (loneliness, for example). If causes and effects of depression are up, then it would stand to reason that the observed increase in depression is not because “we are so good at detecting it.” As an aside, one should double check conclusions that so handily lets society pat itself on the back for something negative.
Yes, which is why I didn't draw any conclusions. There are plausible reasons to think both ways
How much higher, over what period of time?
>Rates of mental illness are higher now than they were in previous decades.
This is a verifiable quantitative statement. The review has many stylistic merits, but it didn't present such things.
People are rich enough to care about their mental health and pay others to look into it.
I'm impressed by your openness to being convinced -- always a good sign. Interestingly, however, the reviewer was right to link Scott's piece on epistemic learned helplessness. You being convinced wouldn't really prove anything, any more than you already having been convinced that things are better now proves anything. I certainly wouldn't argue with you either way.
If anyone reading this wonders "how could anyone think that things are worse now?" and finds the line of questioning introspectively engaging, I suggest checking for the following biases:
1) Am I a kind of person who would have had poor outcomes in the version of the past I believe happened? For instance due to being physically small or weak, sickly as a child, in need of corrective lenses, midly disabled in some other way, or a member of a racial, ethnic, sexual, or gender group that is reported to have had a hard time previously?
2) Am I addicted to comfort, ease, entertainment, snack food, intoxicants, central heating/cooling, the automobile, pornography, or something else that would have been hard to obtain in times past?
I think that the two examples you've pulled out have to do with not being able to do things, with focusing on the TV or navigating on one's own as examples; the broader point is like, living in the society of the spectacle means having your thoughts controlled by e.g. what cable news is covering today, and your knowledge potentially controlled by the same. I think that people would like to possess the ability to focus and navigate and think about what they wish in order to be able to act according to their advantage more often. For example, in my experience, focusing on one form of media at a time causes me to think about it more clearly and, let's say, see the main character's flaws in myself and set out to live my life differently. The urge to resist mind control is expected to be automatically understood by a lot of people because they feel it strongly instinctively. Also, if someone is unhappy, there is probably a reason, they might as well look for it. But I agree that this is a very thought-provoking question, I think that more of us who identify with this book's complaints should try to answer it
Yeah. I also think some of the stock examples require a lot of projecting.
> It takes an act of will to put down your phone so you can focus on the TV. Low battery is an emergency. Losing signal is bereavement. Navigating without GPS is an anxiety attack.
None of these are relatable. I get some people have a problem with them, but I don’t think that these are core parts of the modern experience or whatever. I think most people are able to just take these in stride most of the time.
It's an empirical fact that people's attention spans are getting shorter.
"Like all great thinkers worth their salt, he was an embittered alcoholic who took his own life in despair."
All great thinkers worth their salt are embittered alcoholics who commit suicide? All of them?
I'm fairly sure that was a joke by hyperbole, not a serious claim.
Could be the humor got past me because it's hard for me to find humor in alcoholism, despair or suicide. Seems making a joke of Debord's or anyone's suicide is just making a spectacle of the situation.
Not trying to be too down on humor/attempts at humor when more humor is needed. Not sure if that means less suicide/alcoholism/despair humor or just *better* suicide/alcoholism/despair humor.
Google dark humor?
It sounds to me you simply do not enjoy dark humor, and that is all fine and dandy. But as I have to remind people again and again these days, it seems: just because something does not fit your aesthetic does not make it a bad, wrong thing to enjoy.
I'm all for better suicide/alcoholism/despair (SAD) humor. And I admit I might be a suicide/alcoholism/despair (SAD) humor snob. But I have no problem with someone else enjoying something that's not top shelf.
Not trying to be mean here, but are you on the spectrum?
Maybe a little for humor related to suicide and alcoholism. Dude was plenty funny all through the rest of his/her/their enlightening book review, so I was able to catch some of that.
I hope you enjoyed that Rickroll anonymous reviewer, cause it cost you my vote.
This response is interesting to me. When I get rickrolled my response is something along the lines of "goshdarnit you got me, you silly rascal. take your upvote".
How can the anonymous reviewer savor his victory without knowing I shake my fist at the clouds?
:-)
I'm quite familiar with Critical Theory and Marxism, so I'm not biased against it and I have been influenced by many authors in this area.
Yet I can't help but thinking "so what? so what? so what?" all the time while reading this review. I guess that's the difference between lower-c and capital-C critical theory.
I just never got lower-c.
Is it a bad thing that episteme > metis, that we spend more time with on-screen than IRL memes? Why or how? These basic things are just never explained.
"We hope for the best, but 2122 is shaping up to be some unholy amalgam of Gattaca, The Matrix, and Minority Report."
Is it? How do you know? The author is just assuming you agree with hyperbolic assertions all the time, without looking at the analytical content or meaning of basic terms.
What specifically about all the poems describing the modern world is bad? What is the harm done? How would you quantify it?
Oh, am I an epigone of the commodification ideology?
Or is it possible that the doom-and-gloom scenarios are really jumping out of the head of the author and make for a pleasurable experience for readers high in neuroticism and anxiety?
Peak-commodification if you will.
And then this groundless hyperbole: "If you want to actually seize power, you will need to conduct a coup - which, so I’ve heard, is top-down. It’s the only strategy that has ever really worked,"
Uhm, what?
Maybe that has helped in seizing power but what followed was almost always worse. The bourgeoisie revolution, "the only true revolution", was not a top-down coup.
So much for ... just assuming big hyperbolic things, but I am repeating myself.
Yeah, this is essentially what I was trying to say in my comment, above — except stated better than I managed.
I am familiar with it so I am biased against it because it is mostly garbage.
> Whither Kazakhstan? Afghanistan? Who knows and who cares?
I know and I care. I know about Turkey and Syria (which no one seems to be paying attention to) and the conflicts in Mexico and Myanmar and about grain prices in East Africa. It baffles me so many people don't. It's not even like this doesn't affect them. It does! The prices you pay for gas, for bread, for electricity are all affected by it. Whether you are safe or not is affected by it.
This is my issue with all this. The "too cool for school, nothing really matters, it's all showmanship" is the kind of pose you can only take in a society that's extremely safe and free of significant material need. Where having wrong beliefs about the way the world works is buffered by externalizing costs. Material reality exists and ignoring it will ultimately doom you. The a dialectic of rocks hitting your head can't actually stop the rocks.
It reminds me of the old Buddhist story where a student says, "Master, I have become enlightened! Everything is an illusion!" The master nods sagely and says, "Then I have one more lesson for you." The student eagerly nods his head. And the master cracks him over the head with his staff so hard the student screams in pain. "Why do you cry?" The master asks. "Because it hurts!" The student wails. "Ah, but pain is an illusion. My staff is an illusion. The blow is an illusion! So why do you cry?"
The theological point (I think) is that even if the world is an illusion we still experience it. But I take it as point of the supremacy of the physical over the spiritual (at least until you become a Buddha, I guess.) Even if you come to realize you do not exist and think you exist as some kind of Hume-ian pure sensor then you are still sensing the things you sense and those are not entirely within your control or even human control. Likewise, the idea these events are ultimately meaningless epiphenomena ignores the actual cause and effect. (Which, I know, he would argue is just another spectacle/illusion/whatever.)
PS: Russian disinformation has a grand, ancient history, predating even the Soviets.
Well, the story you give is a koan, but the common interpretation is that it is one thing to intellectually grasp the concept of Śūnyatā (the idea that "material" reality is inherently vacuous) and another to actually achieve enlightenment.
Applied to this concept: Maitre Debord spoke of how all relations and events and occurrences in the modern era were vacuous and relationships were impossible, and yet he married two women and had affairs with several others. While he intellectually grasped his concepts, he did not act on them- and well he was to do so, for much like an arhat or bodhisattva, to truly live the truth of the doctrine is deepest insanity to those who live in the illusion.
Thank you for the further detail. I know my interpretation isn't the standard one. I suppose this goes back to the cattle thieves and madmen distinction.
I always thought the point of that Buddhist story was that the truly enlightened have a staff and when they use it, it's just an illusion. Others just think they are enlightened and suffer the consequences. And finally, there are those (conspicuously absent in this story) who are enlightened just enough to realize they need to stay out of range of that illusionary staff.
But I'm not Buddhist so this could all be off.
I have been enlightened.
But why should people care about all that, when they can realistically do nothing about any of it? It seems like a recipe for permanent misery, not unlike one which the author of this book seemed to suffer from.
If you want to live in blissful ignorance that is certainly your choice. But that's not what we're talking about here. Because most people do not. The idea that people who know about these things care about them as an illusion or entertainment is false, is my point.
I feel this so much! All these "woe is the world, it sucks and it's too bad we can't do much about it—oh but please continue to still make these token efforts". Effective Altruism improves on this slightly but is fundamentally unwilling to go beyond treating symptoms.
A good example is every time I read about how the cobalt for electric vehicles is tainted by conflict and child labour. "Oh, see, the solution to burning oil is little better than the current mess. What a shame." Some of the more pro-active types then go and develop batteries that don't use cobalt, which is fair enough I suppose.
But the whole time no-one brings of the obvious solution of just trying to break up the Congo, a stupidly large country with stupid legacy borders, into something that would actually work and produce stable, responsive governments! Rwanda's Kagame, a friend of the West, is now engaged in his third (or is it fourth?) war in the Congo. It would not be difficult to stop him.
But, yes, many of us care. And many of us are frustrated that obvious solutions aren't discussed by politicians or media, in preference of more "what a shame" stories.
What is worse - those who throw up their hands and say it's all too hard, or those who say the solutions are 'obvious' and 'not difficult'? Not difficult to stop Kagame in the same way as Saddam Hussain? Ho Chi Minh? The Taliban? Any of countless examples of leaders who were 'friends' of the West at various convenient times but who also had considerable support that did not rely on the West?
1. The former, those who give up without ever trying, are far worse.
2. Because it worked the last time. From Wikipedia:
> A United Nations report found that Rwanda created and commanded the M23 rebel group.[10] Rwanda ceased its support following international pressure as well as the military defeat by the DRC and the UN in 2013.[11]
You're equating applying diplomatic pressure on covert support for a rebel group with "break[ing] up the Congo ... into something that would actually work"?
Seems to me that actively breaking up sovereign nations which don't want to be broken up is rarely 'not difficult'. Can't think of too many recent examples where external forces directly did such a thing with undisputable positive results.
The only recent example I can think of where external forces actively tried to do that was Yugoslavia and that did have indisputable positive results. Well, except for the Serbians, I'm sure they would dispute it and therein lies the problem with setting unrealistically high expectations that the sovereign country must agree to be broken up. If you do that of course it's never going to work. Military force must be an option.
My counterpoint would be all the external forces that sent military forces into countries and then *didn't* try to break them up: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan (arguably). All would benefit from not being forced to use their colonial borders.
I'm sure that Kosovars are thrilled to have germans own their mines and banks and US keep their peace, while Bosniaks can't control their currency. How convenient that the break-up benefited the major powers that funded and supported it, and I am sure that if US intervened in Afghanistan for example to break it up into smaller pieces the result would be great for the locals, and not at all predatory. [/s]
I didn't mean to equate those two things by the way, I probably should have put them in separate paragraphs. The Kagame/M23 thing was in the news lately so I wanted to mention it and get it some attention.
<i>True, our incomprehension is somewhat different in kind. In the past, it was nature itself that served as obstacle and enigma. Our knowledge amassed, and we gained hope - all the mysteries of the universe were only puzzles, certain to be solved in time. However, as the scope and scale of human endeavor expanded, our ignorance was returned to us by the very means we sought to eliminate it. Technology colonized our lives and our minds, reintroducing unfathomable complexity into realms we once had mastered. Our world becomes increasingly manmade, and as a consequence is more susceptible to human iniquities never found in the natural world. </i>
This reminds me a bit of The Abolition Of Man:
"The real picture is that of one dominant age—let us suppose the hundredth century A.D.—which resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human species. But then within this master generation (itself an infinitesimal minority of the species) the power will be exercised by a minority smaller still. Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car."
"Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car."
Lewis overstates his case, perhaps drastically. Consider electric lights. Yeah, to run them I need the power company, but it is quite reliable and predictable the vast bulk of the time. The choice of which lights to use and when to use them is mine and my wife's, *NOT* "of a few hundreds of men". Not all choices enabled by technologies are centrally controlled. Some technologies really do broaden the range of choices of ordinary people.
Until the power company decides to cut off your electricity, of course, in which case you'll quickly realise that your ability to turn the lights on does in fact depend on other people's good graces.
As I said, it (the power company) is quite reliable and predictable the vast bulk of the time. Sure, it _could_ arbitrarily turn the power off, but it actually doesn't. More crucially, _prior_ to the advances Lewis so cavalierly disparages, the average person had all sorts of vulnerabilities to other people too. A nobleman might arbitrarily extort labor or crops from the peasantry. A pope might start an idiotic crusade and get thousands of people killed.
What matters is whether the live options the typical person has the bulk of the time are widened or narrowed by a technical advance. In point of fact, electrification widened them. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. Electricity was a win.
<i>As I said, it (the power company) is quite reliable and predictable the vast bulk of the time. Sure, it _could_ arbitrarily turn the power off, but it actually doesn't.</i>
So the people who hold power over you wield it in a reliable and predictable way. That's nice, but it doesn't mean they don't actually hold power.
<i>More crucially, _prior_ to the advances Lewis so cavalierly disparages, the average person had all sorts of vulnerabilities to other people too. A nobleman might arbitrarily extort labor or crops from the peasantry. A pope might start an idiotic crusade and get thousands of people killed.</i>
Oppressive governments and wars are still around. In fact, they're potentially even worse, because modern technology has given governments many more means of controlling their people, and made weapons far more destructive.
"So the people who hold power over you wield it in a reliable and predictable way. That's nice, but it doesn't mean they don't actually hold power."
Look, it is theoretically possible for e.g. a politician to use the concentrated control that the electric power company has over its customers to cut off electric current to his opponents. I've never heard of that happening. I've never heard of them threatening to use that particular option. Have you heard of such a case? Politicians have lots of power, but, as far as I know, they have always used other means, from murders and prisons to financial levers, to apply political power.
"Oppressive governments and wars are still around. In fact, they're potentially even worse, because modern technology has given governments many more means of controlling their people, and made weapons far more destructive."
That is true, but it is irrelevant to the point that I'm making. The fact that nerve gas makes governments more destructive does not detract from the fact that electrification lets ordinary people control the electric lights in their homes. I never claimed that _all_ technical advances widened the options for ordinary people. I claim that Lewis is badly wrong in neglecting that _some_ technical advances _do_ widen the options for ordinary people. Lewis denigrates "_Each_ advance", "_every_ victory" [emphasis added]. This is simply wrong.
I have a question for people who have read both the book and the review.
Does this review underemphasize the Marxist portions of the book? I tried reading Society of the Spectacle almost a decade ago, and vaguely remember giving up because I ran into too many concepts that I had to google separately. I don't remember Marx being name-dropped constantly, more like the author assumed you should already be well-read in Marxist economic thought to grasp the Spectacle.
Am I misremembering? And also, should I give the book another shot?
I think you need to have read Marx and Hegel to be able to properly access and assess TSS.
And understand dada movement.
I really appreciate the way this review takes a text that sounds *dreadful* to read, and translates it so I can get some of the nifty ideas without having to fight my way through the prose. A valuable service.
This was actually my problem with the review. I would read one of the excerpts, spend a few moments trying to interpret what I think Dubord must have meant, and then read on to find that me and reviewer had come to sometimes wildly different conclusions.
That's not the reviewers fault ofcourse but it does signpost to me that this book is obtuse, "artisitc" garbage. What's the point of language if not to transmit your thoughts as clearly as you can into other people's minds.
Well, philosophy is the field I'm mostly familiar with, and some philosophers write impenetrable prose to disguise the fact that they're full of shit, but some philosophers have valuable things to say and are just bad at expressing themselves clearly, or had writing-style preferences I decidedly do not share. Our current intellectual society seems to me to put a much higher priority on clarity of writing, and to have much higher standards for what it takes for writing to count as clear, than previous generations. I view that as a good thing, but it's also the case that we've simply become less skilled readers in certain respects than our predecessors. So I try not to assume that an obtuse writing style necessarily indicates that the content is garbage.
And some philosophers have ideas that are genuinely novel. Communicating information that fits into existing categories is much easier than rearranging categories.
Walkaway by Cory Doctorow is a good example of a working, post-capitalist society. The basic idea is that advances in 3D printing (along with disregard for copyright) allow people to simply leave society and subsist on renewable power and raw materials.
It's fiction, though. The engineering and supply chains don't need to be worked out, just made vaguely plausible.
Spend some time with real 3D printers and you'll have a different view of them. I love mine, but it's a tool for making fairly precise plastic parts. And the better ones require working with moderately hazardous chemicals. Also, I'm very aware that I'm utterly dependent on industrial supply chains for everything from filament to hardware to electrical components.
>good example of a working, post-capitalist society.
Cory Doctorow writes fiction. It is a bit of stretch call it a good working example. In reality, 3D printing is difficult and limited to only select materials. More complicated the product you want to create, more capital it requires. Reducing the capital required to create and work the many materials human economy uses to a "3D printer" is a difficult problem of engineering subject to laws of physics and chemistry.
And big part of the capitalist society is not the material goods, but the interconnected services and information to discover them. SP500 top-5 valuation tickers are Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Tesla. Only Apple and Tesla make physical things (and for both brands, it is much more about selling a particular experience to certain audience than the products themselves); other three have their business built on information: Amazon about matching the products to customers and cloud services, Alphabet about information discovery and access (Google search results, Youtube videos ... and the adverts shown to people watching them), Microsoft about providing office software tool services.
Unless the magical 3D printers can one day pump out data centers that run perfect software with free electricity at request, none of their business will go away. (And even there is the question, how do you know which products you should create with your magical replicator?)
Subsistence farming is already perfectly possible for those who can afford it and don't mind the loss of modern amenities and luxuries.
Interestingly this is close to the description of hell in The Great Divorce by CS Lewis. It's been a long time since I read it, but I think in hell people can basically invent things with their minds and they slowly move further and further away from each other to live on their own estates where they aren't challenged by anything. In contrast to heaven where at first even the grass hurts your feet until you become more substantial. I'm not really sure what I think about it, but I do think about it from time to time.
Yes with magic everything machines everywhere you don’t need capitalism. Back in reality.
You can already walk away from society. You don't need sci-fi technology. Modern agriculture has already made subsistence extremely cheap. You can already go live in a cabin in the woods or something, and eat very cheaply, either living off welfare or off the returns from a little bit of savings. People don't do that because it means you are a loser in the game of life and society, and nobody wants to be a loser. 3D printing would not change that.
That's reducing trade and interaction rather than eliminating it, though. You're not going to make your own nails, your own medicine, your own solar panels or computer chips.
Maybe a way to think of it is as a form of early retirement? That's something most people want to do if they can save up enough; the question is what counts as "enough?"
Lots of people retiring early would mean lots of people still dependent on the system, though perhaps with reduced dependency if they like to live that way. Dependency increases again as you get older, though.
Very smart rock critic Greil Marcus wrote a book about the Sex Pistols band explaining them through the lens of Situationism, which he said their manager Malcolm McClaren was exposed to in France in 1968. In reply, lead singer Johnny Rotten said he didn't know anything about Situationism. The reason, he said, that he was angry at the Queen of England on "God Save the Queen" was that he's a Catholic Irishman.
It's an interesting article, but, like many other book reviews, it is rather vague on which parts are actually in the book, and which parts are the reviewer's own musings.
This review appears to suffer a particularly acute rationalist flaw. It is entirely too rational, clean cut, and lucid. While I appreciate the attempt to neatly steelman Debord into coherency, in doing so we end up with a rationalist’s version of French philosophy. Which is neither French, nor I suspect, Debord’s. The Spectacle, like Baudrillard’s Simulcra is a totalizing critique that transcends any mere economic system. Yes, it’s superficially about how capitalism generates the spectacle, but once in existence talking about capitalism is a lot like talking about income distributions in the Matrix. Missing entirely that the World and ALL it’s relations are IN THE MATRIX. The idea that Debord would like Rage Against the Machine is (while amusing) fundamentally at odds with his point. Which is that Rage Against The Machine, a Band that sells millions of albums selling fake outrage, and composing a specific means of relating to the world is PART of the spectacle. But I digress. While the review is an interesting blog post of the authors views and very well written. I doubt it is a particularly accurate view of Debord’s often circular, poetic, totalizing and often incoherent thoughts.
Second that. The review is well written, but feels like the reviewer went over Debord with the "rationalist steamroller" which reduces everything to the already known and familiar and is abhors ambiguity (let alone the cardinal sin of incoherence!). No mention of Hegel at all, which means tearing Debord out of his intellectual context (a very "rationalist" thing to do). Debord is a poet. The emotional impression of his prose is a part of the message. Trying to reduce him to purely discursive categories is chopping off his limbs.
Both a more succinct and more evocative critique than mine! Appreciated.
And Debord's poetry about the Terrible Spectacle wasn't also just part of the Spectacle? Or maybe he realized it actually was, and did himself in on account of that?
The author of the review speak a lot about "we", "the society", etc. But I thought the Chinese weatherman story was obviously false as it is was beyond what currently can be done in reality with real technology (without it being cost-prohibitive).
Maybe all of these rabbit holes, society going crazy, just maybe it isn't affecting exactly everyone?
> I thought the Chinese weatherman story was obviously false as it is was beyond what currently can be done in reality with real technology (without it being cost-prohibitive).
That's funny, because the main thing that's false about the Chinese weatherman story is that it wasn't a weatherman, but a news anchor on a financial news broadcast, as the linked Epoch Times article clearly states. (So really more of a reading failure on OP's part.)
It also states its source (announcement by National Business Daily on Dec. 20, 2021) so it was easy to find an article by NBD that fits the description http://www.nbd.com.cn/articles/2021-12-20/2047923.html (link in Chinese obviously).
I also found a link to what appears to be the broadcast mentioned in the article: http://www.nbd.com.cn/corp/AiTv/index.html It mostly seems to be a speech-to-text voice rattling off financial news. I don't know whether they also sometimes show the anchor with lip movement synchronized to the text, but that, too, would be possible with current technology. Maybe you were imagining something else?
The most interesting thing about OP being unable to find English reporting that didn't point to that one Epoch Times article is that it highlights the economics of global news dissemination. It's always easier to just take what someone else wrote and maybe paraphrase it a bit, as compared to doing original reporting. Hence English speakers copied from the Epoch Times, and the Epoch Times copied from Chinese news reporting and by the time the story reached ACX readers it had gone through multiple layers, each offering an opportunity for deliberate manipulation and the risk of accidental distortion by mistaken paraphrases.
My personal recommendation is to stop reading a news article as soon as it mentions other news media as the source; just go find the original report instead.
Straight away, the glorification of suicidal alcoholics fosters doubt about this entire review..."like all great thinkers worth their salt"?! This reads a little too aspirational for me. Just because someone took their life does not mean they were a great thinker and not every "thinker" who took their own life was great.
Edit Ok..I reacted strongly, and after reading all the way through, aptly. This felt very emotional (bravo), and I'm not as mad at the opening paragraph as I was... Just disappointed. Like the last meme, we all know how bad it is and how it's been crumbling, but where is the hope? Who is taking up for optimism? I'm over the doom and gloom. And I suspect many people will be very soon. It seems the overproduced elite are either crying or seething, but since moving to the south, I see more communing and coping. I'm going to hang out in Camp B until we figure this shit out... Or I die which ever comes first.
I thought that was just a joke about the "tortured artist" trope.
Probably, but I was writing about mark Fisher today and people got mad when I made a joke about his ideas being irrelevant since he unalived himself... So I'm just transferring some of their seething 🤣
My take on The Spectacle is it could be contained if we accepted that capitalism has no place in politics. Like fire, capitalism is a wonderful servant but a lousy master. Democracies should be governed by people, not by corporate interests!
In my latest science fiction novel, Clowns, I suggest that an intelligent extraterrestrial species that visited Earth would immediately see through The Spectacle and find our position untenable.
https://www.amazon.com/Clowns-First-Contact-Peter-Cawdron-ebook/dp/B09Z68XB2D/
How is corporate interests running politics "capitalism"? If anything, bribery is far more common under socialism, and the merging of corporations and the state would make the problem even worse.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/
I'm confused, are you replying to the wrong comment or something?
It sounds like The Spectacle is over. We are no longer a society sitting in cinemas staring at movie stars or even sitting at home watching TVs, but a society jabbering at each other endlessly on our keyboards.
It could be The Spectacle is over. Or maybe it's just being crowdsourced?
Sounds like a key element of The Spectacle was "one-way communication". If, today, you want to say something to a movie or music star or news-reporter or government official, you can on Twitter. Have something to say about a blog post you just read? Make a comment! Don't like someone else's comment? Comment on their comment! Or make a video of yourself in response to a video by someone else.
Perhaps this new configuration is more pernicious than the previous, but it doesn't seem like a mere continuation of the old trend wherein more capital = more image power. Want to be a star? Used to be you'd have to, say, move to Hollywood, get an agent, perhaps do horrible things on a casting couch, and ultimately win over the producers who had control of the big bucks to put you in their movie. Now you can make a video in your bedroom for the cost of a mobile phone, put it on YouTube and maybe it goes viral. Or you can put your original song on YouTube instead of winning over a big record company to record and release your album. As well, you don't have to get a degree in journalism and work for a bunch of newspapers to be a journalist, you can simply start a SubStack.
The 4th wall has been broken.
More algorithm + more dopamine +/- more terms of use +/- more oversight board = more pernicious and maybe = more credibility for image power carried in our pockets and one day in our glasses or contact lenses?
Not all bad as pointed out by the good opportunities in your examples.
Builders (big and small) have new tools (and more on the way) to build either The Spectacle or the antidotes for it.
You know, funnily enough the thing that triggered the Gell Mann Amnesia realization for me here wasn't the line about all good thinkers being suicidal alcoholics (which I took as joke that was funny precisely because it's closer to the truth than not), but the paragraph about 5th Generational Warfare: "Taken together, the Comments form a precise description of Fifth Generation Warfare [11], well before the concept was invented. [12] 5GW is basically hybrid warfare without the kinetics. It is a war of information and influence..."
And, well, this was clearly written before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when Russian disinformation was still something to be feared. As Edward Luttwak put it,
"First, the military intelligence advisers both on the Russian side and the American side all belong to the same church. This church preaches “fourth-generation warfare,” hybrid warfare, postmodern information warfare—all new stuff, praised as nonkinetic. Kinetic is the term for war fought by blockheads, just people shooting people. They were drunk, both the Russians and the Americans, on this idea that you have cyber this, you have cyber that, and that the Ukrainan soldier-
Interviewer: Once he opens his iPhone, the Ukrainian soldier won’t be able to function mentally anymore, his morale will collapse, and he will lay down his weapons and surrender.
They believed this nonsense. I have gone to war games until basically I got kicked out. Why was that? Because I would go to these war games and I would see these people, even three star generals running the war games. And I would say, fellows, I don’t know where you have been, OK: And I don’t know what experience you have of war. I guess you flew by helicopter, over Iraq or Afghanistan. I’ve had a gun in my hand and I’ve shot somebody and I have his helmet in my study. I have used a bazooka. I have actually been in combat. None of you guys have been in combat, because you have only fought people who had no artillery, no armor, no air power. And you don’t know what you’re talking about. All of this stuff you’re telling me in the war games. I said, no, this is not going to happen. What will happen is that the bloke is going to pick up a gun.
Interviewer: He is not going to be persuaded to surrender via his iPhone.
The Russians believed it too. The Russians were also hybrid warfare enthusiasts in their war colleges and war games, and so on.
So now, this is absolutely not new. In August 1914, when the fighting started in Europe..."
(from https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/three-blind-kings-edward-luttwak)
The suicidal alcoholics line is fine, because the reviewer clearly knows it isn't true but says it anyways because it's funny and directionally true (just look at Diogenes for example). But the earnest talk of 5th Generational Warfare and warfare without kinetics has convinced me that the reviewer is like the Russian generals: they have no idea what they're actually talking about. I'm not sure if it's a problem with the book, or the reviewer's interpretation of it, but clearly something is missing from this description of reality. Russia tried to conduct a coup through information warfare, as the review proscribes ("If you want to actually seize power, you will need to conduct a coup"), a coup de main for a swift and relatively bloodless victory a la the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968. In February, they eschewed mere kinetics for focusing on how "the internet has made each of us a node in a global network", choosing not to bombard the enemy army from the air like the US did in the Gulf War and the Invasion of Iraq in favor of propaganda bombardments like the iPhone messaging trick. They did everything the reviewer prescribes as the route to power: "The subtle ubiquity of the spectacle allows a level of dominance that dictators can only dream of..."
And yet the average Ukrainian soldier picked up a gun and started shooting back when they were invaded, rather than fall like puppets before a form of war where "the brain is the terrain". Such aphorisms are nice and all, but are they actually true? 5th Generational Warfare is one of the best examples of the theory of the Spectacle in action: a war fought by mass media where "the universal victory of form over function and style over substance" finally applies to actual warfare instead of just culture wars and political battles. And yet it failed. Crashed and burned in fact, like the VDV helicopters at Hostomel Airport.
Honestly, the victory of reality over Spectacle here throws the entire idea of "the Spectacle" into doubt. This was its big chance: the Spectacle as conducted by the masters of the art, the very inventors of disinformation according to the book itself. Now it all sounds like a bunch of useless deepities about "universal victory" and "the brain is the terrain". Glittering generalities, or as TV Tropes calls it, Concepts Are Cheap. Or to put it more savagely, a bunch of delusions by a bunch of people who think they're King Cnut and can overpower reality by the power of their voice alone (in the version of the story where Cnut actually believes this rather than trying to show why it's false). Perhaps the theory of the Spectacle still works in politics and media, where words are all there is... but it certainly doesn't work elsewhere, where NLAWs and Starstreaks stubbornly continue to operate despite the assertion that this is "how power really operates". It's all looking very naïve.
Oh hey, upon reviewing this I've noticed that Luttwak was saying this exact thing: "And I don’t know what experience you have of war. I guess you flew by helicopter, over Iraq or Afghanistan. I’ve had a gun in my hand and I’ve shot somebody and I have his helmet in my study. I have used a bazooka. I have actually been in combat. None of you guys have been in combat, because you have only fought people who had no artillery, no armor, no air power. And you don’t know what you’re talking about.".
Modern day King Cnuts, thinking they can talk Afghanistan into stability with enough PowerPoint presentations, thinking their words have value even without any experience backing them up... the urge to believe that the solution is to organize another worker's council to teach everyone to parrot the right words ("The KPIs are looking up. Afghanistan is going to be okay.") is universal, it seems. Theory and practice should go hand in hand, but when theory replaces practice with praxis...
The Ukrainian soldiers won't be convinced to lay down their arms by social media propaganda, but if propaganda had been effective against citizens and decision makers in the US, the UK or France, Ukrainian soldiers would not have many arms to lay down or pick up.
Yes, but the fact that such efforts failed and #SlavaUkraini started off strong, and has kept going strong, is evidence that the theory "the Spectacle is everything, and the masters of the Spectacle rule everything" is just false. The Spectacle certainly seems to be everything in the likes of politics and culture wars, but in actual war it's fallen quite flat. It seems in fact that mastery of the Spectacle just makes you good at looking good, not at doing a good job.
Your argument seems to be "Russia lost, therefore 5GW refuted", and it just does not logically follow. You can really only get there by assuming only Russians dabble in disinformation, while everyone else can only tremble in fear before the weapon's tremendous powers. (Which is obviously not what the Western military/intelligence thinks, while also obviously being precisely what they want you to think.)
From where I stand, it looks like Russia losing because the other side was better. The US has conducted its own propaganda campaign for months before the actual invasion. The Ukraine is being ran by a literal performer. If a military invasion by itself was enough for an Ukrainian soldier to pick up a gun, he'd have already done so in 2014.
(This is not to somehow deny that, ultimately, reality is what matters. Debord must know that too, if he's a Marxist, base > superstructure and all. To assume otherwise is to argue with a strawman.)
I would say it's closer to
"1. The review said that 5th Generational Warfare should do well, describing the following as gold amongst dross: "If the enemy uses a broader definition of war than you, any attack on that portion of the spectrum where you are defenseless may inflict a decisive defeat." (in Footnote 11).
2. Russia used 5th Generational Warfare, striking not at their enemy's ability to fight but their will to fight, trying to capture or destroy symbols like Kiev and Zelensky while hijacking media networks like the cell phone network to broadcast their own symbols. Their own actions showed that they believed that, like in politics, "the deliberate manipulation of an observer’s context to achieve a desired outcome." would lead to victory. In other words, control the input, and you control the output. Through mastery of the Spectacle, war would be the continuation of politics by the same means. In fact, you wouldn't have to openly declare war at all, since that might create the very hostility and resistance it was seeking to fight. Better to pick "the most subtle and least violent way to conduct such a war" and call it a "Special Operation", because looks are everything.
3. Yeah, those opening days were a spectacle, but not in the way the Russians had planned.
4. The dismissal of mere "kinetics" was the reason they failed, and to fix that they've been returning to a WW1-esque style of warfare dominated by artillery and trenches. Their own actions show that they believe they overweighted the propaganda war over the actual war. Information warfare still has a part to play of course (e.g. electronic warfare, drone reconnaissance, OSINT), but as an equal rather than a replacement.
5. The book, or review, or both make the same mistake of dismissing the importance of the merely physical.
6. What else about the book review's conclusions are suspect? I can only really speak about the military science it tangentially touched on, but it does not fill me with confidence, especially given the confidence the review itself had about its understanding of military science. If it had been less confident, I would be more confident about trusting it.
7. None of this is ironclad, but it is probabilistic, and I don't like gambling on the book review getting things right with these odds."
So in short, Russia was losing because the other side was better *at kinetics*, and now it is winning because it is better *at kinetics*. The propaganda matters, but only in-so-much as it helps or hinders the kinetics: Zelensky managed to get the US and EU to provide arms and supplies, so he helped; but he also mismanaged things on the ground by insisting on "Not one step back!" policies in Severodonetsk and other cities in the East until recently, throwing away perfectly good soldiers in meatgrinder battles against superior artillery they couldn't win, only retreat from. Likewise on the Russian side, their Internet bot farms initially distracted them from the importance of having an army that is also high-tech and well funded, so initially it hindered; but slowly but surely they've been having some success in beating the drum of gas price inflation in the US, energy shortages in the EU, and food shortages in the "Third World" to convince voters to lift sanctions and allow Russia to gain the foreign currency it needs to keep its war machine running. You see this pattern throughout history as well: Mussolini's Italy for example was surprisingly bad at war when trying to carve out its African colonial empire, despite its militarist trappings and fascist pride - because it turns out Mussolini was an effective politician, not necessarily an effective general, and the nature of fascism itself lead to a preference for flashy propaganda over effective governance and administration.
As to why the review says that the Spectacle is everything, contrary to the Marxian base > superstructure belief... my best guess is that it comes from the book review, not the book. The reviewer said they're a post-capitalist, not necessarily a Marxist. I also suppose it might come from Debord himself, many Marxists would agree that many Marxists do not fully understand Marx's arguments - they just disagree over who has the true version of Marxism. In fact, the reviewer themselves don't seem to be the source of the belief that the Spectacle dominates everything, saying "The spectacle undoubtedly exists, to a greater or a lesser extent. It is an important lens, a necessary perspective on where humanity is and where it is headed. But it is only one way of viewing the world among many. It is not the end-all, be-all for sociopolitical analysis.".
But yet the belief still seems to be in the book *and* the book review, with quotes like:
"the spectacle represents the dominant model of life.";
"Pre-spectacular society has already passed beyond living memory. Soon we will hit another inflection point - where no one alive even knew someone who lived before the spectacle. All of human history is now before and after...";
"The all-pervasive nature of mass media has led to the universal victory of form over function and style over substance"; and
"The subtle ubiquity of the spectacle allows a level of dominance that dictators can only dream of."
These aren't the words of someone who believes that reality is equally important to the Spectacle, they're the words of someone who's describing how the Spectacle has taken over and is now running the show. I don't know when the book review is just paraphrasing Debord and when the book review is making its own stand clear, but clearly someone believes the strawman position earnestly enough to make concrete predictions, like "Behold the future of international politics: [Spiderman pointing meme]" and "You can’t identify a forgery if you don’t have The Real to compare it to.". Those are concrete predictions that have been proven wrong, by a war that reminds us that the future of international politics can be *actual wars* that can only be understood through military science instead of media analysis studies, and by an embarrassment of an army that revealed itself as a forgery through its own performance (things like getting shot down, resorting to "cope cages", and constantly running out of fuel) rather than a comparison to The Real. I just don't think it's a strawman when the words and the counterexamples are that concrete.
I still don't see that it is refuted that Russia lost the hybrid warfare. Sure, weapons and flesh and all makes a difference - but weapons provided by USA and Europe based on a successful media campaign. I don't think the campaign is ran by Ukraine - but by weapon manufacturers, US govt (hawkish part that profits from it, or that wants to hinder Russia and EU by getting them in a protracted conflict) etc... A medieval war was decidedly more flesh and arms than this one, and this one is decidedly more about Spectacle - or so it seems to me?
Funnily enough, things are almost the exact opposite of this in military history when you start digging a bit. The battlefield was ruled by the power of the small-s spectacle, with battles being won and lost by morale and getting your opponent to retreat rather than by firepower and killing them all (or a majority).
Napoleon for example said "The moral is to the physical as three is to one.". In the study of Hoplite warfare, one of the most well-supported models is a "pulse model" which is similar to what we can observe of rioters clashing against each other in riots today (two lines close, fight for a short while until their morale runs dry/they feel like they've proven their bravery enough that they're allowed to retreat, and fall back to take a breather so they can repeat the process), while the Rome: Total War-esque model (of formations clashing until almost everyone dies) is... less well supported by historical documents and modern examples of melee combat.
Continued: Pre-WW1 or thereabouts, the majority of casualties in combat were sustained on the retreat as your fleeing footsoldiers were pursued and cut down by the enemy cavalry, or pursued and forced to surrender, or pursued and convinced to desert from their side; the American Civil War had an anomalously high fatality rate for its time because with the relative lack of quality cavalry on both sides compared to the European norm, forcing them to instead win through killing the enemy soldiers instead of driving them to surrender. (If I remember correctly, European military observers of the time chalked this one up as an Americanness they would avoid, not realizing that WW1 lay only fifty years in the future).
Continued: This implies that the best way to minimize casualties is to maximize morale and minimize retreats, and the best way to maximize enemy casualties is to maximize your damage to their morale and their urge to retreat, with the actual casualties taken in battle not mattering so much compared to the casualties afterwards. This is why martial cultures like the Japanese samurai emphasized never retreating so much - they weren't just suicidal, and in fact their suicidal determination was a great way to *survive* battle, since if you never retreated and the enemy broke before you did, you'd be the one inflicting rather than taking all those retreat casualties.
Continued: It also means that bayonets are incredible even once guns have been refined to the point that everyone is using one, because while guns kill, bayonets convince entire formations to retreat; military manuals of the pre-WW1 era emphasize "shock"/charging with cold steel so much because it really was more effective. Paradoxically, this effectiveness caused them to show up very rarely in the casualty figures (because most people ran before they got bayoneted), and it's easy to underestimate their importance unless you've read about how Napoleon used them to turn his army of conscripts into the terror of Europe.
Continued: What makes WW1, and modern combat in general, different from everything that came before is that this is no longer true. Battles are won by "fire", not shock; killing the enemy, not damaging their morale. The simplest explanation why is that the firepower weapons (guns and artillery) kept improving while still staying firepower weapons (more fire damage than shock), while the shock weapons (bayonets, melee weapons) stayed the same (same power, same focus on shock damage over fire), so there eventually came a crossing-over point that cleanly divides military history into two.
In short, see https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/w8ybx2/comment/ihsgj19/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3. On the battlefield, modern war is decidedly more flesh and arms than anything that came before. On the operational/campaign level and strategic level, of course, war is still a matter of internal politics/small-s spectacle/morale, but in actual battle people die quite a lot. And no matter how much hope people pin on cyberwarfare, media warfare, grey warfare, 5th Generational warfare, psychological warfare, non-kinetic warfare, information warfare, perceptual warfare, conceptual/memetic warfare, etc. et cetera... there is still no substitute for actually winning battles.
It all reminds me of the overhyped promises of strategic bombing in the Interwar era, a.k.a. terror bombing, really. Conventional military units would be obsolete as bombers would simply fly over them to attack the civilians they were protecting. The civilians would be terrified into surrendering through the use of cutting-edge technologies like chemical weapons. Defence was impossible, since you couldn't possibly build enough gas masks and bomb shelters for everyone. Not only would the bomber always get through, the thinking went, it would win the war by itself. The sight of being attacked would drive people to surrender, no, *demand* surrender. And this way we could avoid having to grind down and kill them all, a la WW1.
All that was false of course, to varying degrees. Land units just equipped themselves with AA guns. Cities were equipped with AA guns, gas masks, and bomb shelters. And most importantly, being attacked did not drive the civilians to surrender - if anything, it strengthened their will to resist, judging by British morale during the Blitz for example, and how the Allies had to grind down Germany and Japan despite bombing their cities far more savagely than the Blitz. Strategic bombing only saw success when it turned its focus from terror bombing to industrial bombing; terror bombing only caught up with the development of nuclear weapons...
... and even then it was because the "kinetics" of a nuclear weapon struck and terrorized everyone in the hit city (often literally shaking them), not because of the mere spectacle of it - the Japanese high command were famously unwilling to surrender even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they hadn't been personally hit so they just brushed off the spectacle and discussed how to keep fighting. (The Emperor of course ordered them to surrender because he *was* affected by the spectacle, but he was the only one in the room. If anyone else had been the one guy broken by the mere sight of it, the Japanese would have kept fighting). The spectacular impact was a matter of its kinetics, not its spectacle.
So in short, kinetics wins wars in a way spectacle doesn't; wars are better understood through the lens of military science rather than media analysis; and I just find it awfully presumptuous that people think they understand military science because they understand media analysis. As an amateur student of the field, I can tell you that military science is a lot of hard work, filled with lots of unintuitive things like everything I've just outlined (medieval battles were dominated by morale rather than flesh and blood, modern battles are much the opposite despite the advent of Shock and Awe, bayonets were arguably more powerful than guns/small arms in Napoleon's time).
Media analysis helps of course when understanding the grand-strategic level of warfare instead of the strategic, operational, and tactical, but I wish other people were as careful about this as I am being here. Politics is not warfare, and anyone who thinks they have mastered war because they have mastered politics and can paraphrase Clausewitz ("War is the continuation of politics.") is in for a rude awakening ("War is the continuation of politics *by other means*."). Just look at the US's failures with South Vietnam and Afghanistan, or how Ukraine has been struggling in the Donbas, or how in the Nagorno-Karabakh War Armenia had a dominant position in Western social media right up until the moment it announced it had lost, or how ISIS surged forwards on social media and the ground only to lose because it lost on the ground... we are not yet at the stage where "The all-pervasive nature of mass media has led to the universal victory of form over function and style over substance". Russia can still win despite losing the propaganda war, and Ukraine can still lose if it loses the kinetic war.
Endnote: Funnily enough, Clausewitz never actually said the famous thing ("War is the continuation of politics by other means.") either. He said "War is the continuation of politics *with* other means.", clarifying afterwards "We deliberately use the phrase ‘with the addition of other means’ because we also want to make it clear that war in itself does not suspend political intercourse...". He would approve of approaching war from the perspective of the Spectacle and 5th Generational Warfare, as long as it was just an approach, but I don't think he would approve of its track record of failing to understand the psychology of the enemy and how resistant they can actually be.
In fact, I think he might just outright argue against it. He would emphasize the true unknowability of anyone else's psychology, a la his emphasis on the unknowability of warfare (the famed Fog of War). The idea that war can be made bloodless would exasperate him as something he had already put down ("Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat the enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: War is such a dangerous business that mistakes that come from kindness are the very worst."). And the idea that war can understood as a cold-blooded calculation (run by weapon manufacturers for example, or fought by psychologists), rather than a clusterfuck collision of those calculations, raw emotions, and people just being lucky and unlucky, would drive him to despondency as he realized people had completely misunderstood him. I think, overall, he would view 5th Generational Warfare as simply his ideas ("War is the continuation of politics with other means.") but worse.
There's this thing we see on the internet very frequently where someone hallucinates that someone else holds a very stupid and often nonsensical opinion and then carefully refutes his own hallucination. Here, you've done a masterful job refuting some hallucinatory version of Debord's point (which may have been obfuscated a bit by the reviewer, I'll admit).
A cynic might smile at your mention of Luttwak and ask how he found himself volunteering in Israel in 1967 of all years, and if perhaps he had not been utterly defeated by information warfare before he left London. Such a cynic also might smile at the idea of mocking a bunch of sad dupes like generals, who appear to actually believe the nonsense they claim to be fighting for a far higher percentage of the time than the politicians do.
Egypt had it coming, the terrorists hate our freedoms, and Ukraine is beautiful and heroic. How naive would anyone have to be to suppose otherwise?
This feels a lot like moving the goalposts. Whenever information warfare fails to be a useful replacement for conventional military science instead of just a supplement, the argument shifts to saying that information warfare won somewhere else, so overall its students must still operate on a higher and more important plane of knowledge than mere students of military science.
It's reminiscent of discussing things with a conspiracy theorist (especially because information warfare theory often boils down to arguing that wars are fought by conspiracies manipulating the public into false consciousness). Point out to a vaccine skeptic that their knowledge of mRNA biology didn't exist yesterday and is probably poorly informed relative to that of an expert, and they will denigrate the very concept of expertise unless it is expertise in conspiracy-finding, because all other expertise has been duped by the experts in conspiracy-generation. That's internally consistent of course, but I find it unlikely and a poor fit for observed behavior in reality.
To pull out Clausewitz again, war is not a calculated affair. It is the continuation of politics with other means, of course, and politics *is* a calculated affair overall, but alloying it with the elements of war results in something quite different from the base constituents. Clausewitz diagnosed these constituents as "a fascinating trinity—composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; the play of chance and probability, within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to pure reason.". Or more vulgarly put, war is a clusterfuck collision of genuine emotion, sheer chance, and calculated manipulation, and this collision results in the famed "fog of war" where nothing turns out as calculated and improvisation rules the day. Hence Clausewitz's prognosis of accepting the limits of planning and handing over some power to your subordinates so they can use their initiative - what would go on to become the famed "Auftragstaktik", which in English is generally translated as "Mission-type Tactics". Those who ignore his advice have overall historically performed poorly, with examples ranging from the Western Front of WW1 to Iraq's performance in the Iran-Iraq war and First Gulf War to the opening days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those who have heeded his advice have overall historically performed well, with examples ranging from the Nazi conquest of France, to Communist China's performance in the Korean War, to the UK's performance in the Falklands War. (If you want, I can elaborate on the Nazi conquest of France example because of its interesting relationship to information warfare by way of the radio, but in a follow-up comment because this comment has gone on long enough.)
Accordingly, based off the empirical evidence, I have to agree with Clausewitz that we should stick to a more moderate position than "War is a calculated affair that can be won before the fighting even starts by using calculation to predict and control the other aspects of war, such as raging emotions and the element of luck.". That is a position only held by people who have never been to war or studied it, who imagine that militaries and governments are far more competent than they really are. Those who have seen the sausage get made meanwhile believe in something more like "War is made up of three equally important parts, which combine to result in an unpredictable mess that limits any one person's ability to control things.".
In other words, the warfare of the Spectacle is simply the belief that calculation alone can dominate the other aspects of war via methods like information warfare, using theoretical analyses from fields that have little familiarity with military science like media analysis, and as you might expect it don't seem to be doing so well empirically. In a community like this, I think that's enough to come to a conclusion: it's simply not true.
(Further note: The warfare of the Spectacle seems to me to be the latest in a long line of "wunderwaffe" drawn up by people desperate to imagine how their expertise in one field [e.g. rocketry, jet engines, giant tanks] can not just substitute for but *dominate* the expertise of other fields [e.g. logistics, industrial engineering, cost-benefit analysis]. Sometimes it's actually true, as with the development of nuclear weapons, and sometimes it's sort-of true, as with the development of chemical weapons, but mostly it's just not true.)
(Further note: Your post feels rather unkind, and I'd argue untrue and unnecessary as well. You haven't actually provided any evidence that your claims are true [Luttwak is a puppet and just doesn't know it; I'm an idiot who's fighting shadows; and nobody in the know actually believes in anything or fighting for anything, and those who do must obviously not be in the know]. And without that, it's just a Bulverism [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism]. It's as if you were speaking at a university about your studies when someone stood up and began shouting "COMMIE COMMIE COMMIE YOU FUCKING COMMIE DON'T BELIEVE THE COMMIE!". It's just rude, saying someone is stupid, nonsensical, hallucinating, duped, and otherwise a fool who believes rubbish like "The terrorists hate our freedom!!!!!". And if one has to be rude, it's still better to substantiate the allegations and make sure they are necessary instead of excessive.)
“The Society of the Spectacle will make no sense if the reader feels there is nothing fundamentally wrong with contemporary society.”
I guess that describes me, because I got almost nothing out of reading this review. No offense intended to the reviewer: I strongly doubt I would have found much of value in the book itself.
These arguments about how modernism is destroying people's lives seem rooted in an utter lack of perspective. Pre-modern life was, for the vast majority of people, incredibly miserable. Most people were peasants who had to spend the bulk of their time doing arduous manual labor, eating barely enough food to survive, with little or no hope of upward mobility. Quality of life was abysmal by modern standards, constant discomfort and hunger and exhaustion and sickness were the norm. Ideas like "the 40 hour work week" and "retirement" were completely unheard of. Nobles got to enjoy more luxuries (though still fewer than even a moderately poor first-worlder today), but also had to deal with constant competition that could and often did turn deadly. Women and children had almost no agency whatsoever, they were very frequently subject to physical and emotional abuse, and rape was commonplace. People with deformities, disabilities, and mental illnesses were shunned at best and often treated as subhuman, or simply killed outright. Queer people were similarly maligned. And everyone had to live under the constant threat of banditry, conquest, war, despotism, famine, and disease. No one had anywhere close to the level of security and stability that even people in poorer countries enjoy today. And that's assuming you're not one of the one-in-three people who simply died in infancy or early childhood. Or a slave whose lot in life was to be literally worked to death in the mines.
But even beyond all of the obvious horrors, people in pre-modern times lacked so many wonderful things that we take for granted. Everyone with a smartphone has access to nearly all of the world's collective knowledge right at their fingertips! We have forms of visual and interactive media that would've been inconceivable to people from previous centuries, and a sheer abundance of art and entertainment options (spanning a truly enormous variety of mediums, formats, genres, and flavors) that former generations could only have dreamed of. Advances in communications and transportation technology have allowed us to build connections with people across the world, bridging cultural divides.
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences were the best thing to ever happen to the human race, to the point where I would describe it as almost miraculous.
10000%
It also tends to ignore the methods of social control that predated the spectacle, at least in the context of the European tradition, which were basically obligatory obedience to an explicit theology that bound you to your born social role on pain of horrible death in this life and eternal torment in the next. If you think social media is bad, you should try serfdom.
The more general class of primitive utopianism is a popular idea that seems unable to account for the fact that, when presented with a choice, nearly everyone prefers the modern spectacle to whatever they were doing before. Every utopian community fails for exactly the same reason: modern capitalism is much closer to utopia than whatever wholesome down-home smalltown bullshit these people cook up for the rest of us.
"modern capitalism is much closer to utopia than whatever wholesome down-home smalltown bullshit these people cook up for the rest of us"
Well said!
Material abundance doesn't automatically entail flourishing, even for animals (look up John B. Calhoun's mouse utopia experiment for an illustration). There's no reason to expect humans to be any different.
Nor, come to think of it, is there any reason to expect the hedonic treadmill not to apply at the societal level as well as the individual.
People whose happiness comes from relative abundance arguing it comes from absolute abundance. Name a better duo.
If this kind of apologism for modernism was rooted in reality humanity would not have survived the Paleolithic as depression would have been rampant and our ancestors would have dove off a cliff collectively. Not to mention the suicide rates that should be plaguing chimpanzees.
There are good things about the modern condition, material well-being, the best it has to offer, is ironically not one of them. Consistent material *improvement* maybe… And that in critical areas (housing, education, healthcare) material improvement has flagged is an important way to understand why griping about the modern condition is now so common.
Here is self-reported life satisfaction vs. GDP per capita.
Notice the clear positive correlation: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-vs-happiness
Obviously, not everyone in the past was miserable, just as not everyone today is happy. But the evidence points to modern people being happier overall.
This is not a germane response. I am not arguing that relative differences in wealth don’t make people happier.
>As an example: how much of your daily environment, as a percentage, do you truly understand? Look around the room and reflect on how “even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable.” Your kitchen and your medicine cabinet are filled with mystical objects. Hell, just look at what’s on your person. The phone in your hand, the cash in your wallet, the clothes on your back, the food in your belly - how many lifetimes would it take to truly grok the building blocks of everyday existence?
On the contrary, I think that the world around us is more comprehensible than ever (even accounting for how much more complicated it is). I don't know all those building blocks off the top of my head, but I know a surprising amount, and if I need to go deeper I know where to look.
I recently replaced the switch in a ceiling fan by following directions I got off of Youtube. 50 years ago, the wiring of the fan would have been a black box - I wouldn't have known if the switch was replaceable, unless I actually personally took a screwdriver to it to see for myself and hoped that I could put it back together when I was done, and doing so might turn out to be a big waste of time. Instead, I got my answers in about an hour of searching and correctly estimated that I could do the whole thing on a Sunday afternoon.
The universe has *always* been mind-bogglingly vast and incomprehensible, the only thing that modern society has done is allow us to *notice* this fact. We can now grasp enough of the universe that we actually have some vague idea of how little it is we know. But by the same token, when we *need* to grasp something it's now within our power to do so. I think it's wrong to say that the Spectacle has *replaced* some previous deeper understanding that we once had - we never had such an understanding to begin with, and even if the Spectacle has paved over the nuances of far-off lands it's also revealed dizzying depths to anyone who's willing to look.
Dang. I'd been feeling underwhelmed by the book reviews to date. This is the first one that really wowed me. I feel like I understand the concepts of this book better than I would have had I forced myself through its... turgidity, and the critiques of it were reasonable, insightful, and gloriously concise.
More and more I find myself falling back on the Kierkegaardian adage: "The crowd is untruth".
I feel like every other assertion in this review was false, and likely it’s subject had about as high a hit rate.
Journalism was hardly ever “pure”, before the modern age, during it, or after.
People still have large parts of their life mediated by the real. Less than before, but still huge portions.
I haven’t forgotten any of those elements of the past, and I had a computer and good internet since age 10 in ~1991. But I still remember and cherish navigating without a device, often read paper books, and think fondly of times when not everyone was reachable.
IDK this seems like a the maunderings of a mopey college student determined to take the negative view of things. Sure there are some insights sprinkled among the dross, but that is no great feat for any intelligent person when throwing out so many ideas.
So far as I can tell, this was a solid review, though that's weird to say when Debord as presented doesn't make any sense to me.
I guess my base confusion is: What were Debord's values/what did he think "better" would even mean? Lack of clarity in how to *reach* socialist utopia I don't begrudge, but I'm not clear about what would make it Utopian. What would make it distinct from the present world such that I would want to live there?
Normally my complaint about Utopians is "building/sustaining their utopia would require humans to behave utterly differently than they have for all of history", but here it's "I'm not even sure what he wants".
Edit to clarify: I don't accept "end capitalism" as an answer here, because 1) it's rarely clear in practice what that would even mean and more importantly 2) saying "X is bad" is not a substitute for specifying "Y is good"
Also almost every single complaint he has about “modern society” or the “changing times” has analogues in the past.
Yes, and such complaints have loomed large in popular culture. Consider Charlie Chaplin's film Modern Times (1936). Or George Eliot's novel Silas Marner (1861). Non-Marxist artists and intellectuals have complained about changes wrought by new technology since the Industrial Revolution began.
And Ecclesiastes was telling us “all is vanity” back in the 10th century BCE. I suspect the “alienation” of Marxism is something endemic in humanity since at least that long ago, and social and technological change just aggravate what’s already there.
I think the problem is that Debord has a worthwhile insight, but also has such a broken/European worldview that it comes across a bunch of twaddle about how "people create time."
The clear statement would be something like:
"Mass media has become a huge part of how people learn about the world. It's also become the main forum in which politics happen, and warps other events in the real world (e.g. protests take place for the benefit of the cameras, businesses factor media coverage into their decision-making). However, it doesn't depict the world accurately. This is partly due to inherent factors in the nature of film/television (it's only showing a single 2-dimensional viewpoint in literal terms, it has to be cut and decide what to show, it can't widely communicate anything requiring more than generalist knowledge, it has space limitations etc). It's also due to mass media being a product in a capitalist economy, and being subject to a host of perverse incentives (pleasing owners with ulterior motives, pleasing advertisers, flattering the prejudices of whatever class creates it or consumes it, keeping in line with regulators/people who can influence regulators etc).
The biggest of these perverse incentives is having to compete in a marketplace, where having the most interesting/entertaining/intuitive depiction of the world is more effective than having the most accurate depiction of the world. This is a problem in news, but is a much bigger problem in fiction - films depict gangsters, astronauts, scientists, politicians or 18th Century debutantes in a way that bares no resemblance to reality, but makes the film more enjoyable. This then forms people's mental picture of all these things.
However, news is ultimately also an entertainment product, and is somewhat fungible with fiction (I could read an Atlantic article about Russian bots, or I could watch Don't Look Up). Because they're competing, they start to slowly muscle in on each other's turf (films pretend they're in some way informative, the news writes articles that read like little biographies of someone discovering something).
Given mass media is essentially people's sole source of information, this is a big problem. It's completely warped everyone's understanding of how the world functions, and subsumed politics into a branch of the entertainment industry. Politics is the only tool we'd have to break out of this trap, but is now part of the trap itself and is almost wholly ineffectual - politicians incentive is to seem like they're radicals who can change things on TV, but not to actually change things, and these two things are slightly anti-correlated (cf. Trump).
Therefore, we need workers councils to bring about a socialist revolution."
I don't think it's a good argument for what he's arguing for - most of his points aren't really about capitalism, they're about the nature of mass media. I also can't see why he'd be a socialist and not an anarchist based on taking these arguments as a radical (presumably in reality, it's because an anarchist society wouldn't have sinecures for twits like him, who are clearly part of "the Spectacle" if you take him to his logical conclusion). There's a case for stodgifying/limiting media here that's broadly compatible with doddery old-school socialism (eg. don't allow fiction or opinion, limit it to one channel for a couple of hours a day, don't let the media report on politics etc), but that's incompatible with his kind of radical posturing). There's an even stronger case for accepting the revealed wisdom of the Qu'ran and banning all images, but I don't think he'd like that either.
Yeah that is a much more coherent (though still wrong in places) point of view, too bad he didn’t say that.
I was agreeing with the comment.
The comment is "I think Debord kind of has a decent insight here but it is too mangled to be understood correctly".
"He is a cleaned up statement of what he should have said X, though I still don't think it shows what he thinks it shows"
Me: "yeah that is a much more coherent statement, too bad he didn't say that".
As for what exact points I thought were wrong?
>Mass media has become a huge part of how people learn about the world. It's also become the main forum in which politics happen, and warps other events in the real world (e.g. protests take place for the benefit of the cameras, businesses factor media coverage into their decision-making).
Not sure either of these things is as unique to mass media as you might think. mass media has perhaps made them worse, but they have existed for centuries.
>However, it doesn't depict the world accurately. This is partly due to inherent factors in the nature of film/television (it's only showing a single 2-dimensional viewpoint in literal terms, it has to be cut and decide what to show, it can't widely communicate anything requiring more than generalist knowledge, it has space limitations etc). It's also due to mass media being a product in a capitalist economy, and being subject to a host of perverse incentives (pleasing owners with ulterior motives, pleasing advertisers, flattering the prejudices of whatever class creates it or consumes it, keeping in line with regulators/people who can influence regulators etc).
Once again opposed to what? Non mass media? it has these same failings. The media of the middle ages and ancient time? Lots of failing of mass media presented that are jsut failings of media generally.
>The biggest of these perverse incentives is having to compete in a marketplace, where having the most interesting/entertaining/intuitive depiction of the world is more effective than having the most accurate depiction of the world. This is a problem in news, but is a much bigger problem in fiction - films depict gangsters, astronauts, scientists, politicians or 18th Century debutantes in a way that bares no resemblance to reality, but makes the film more enjoyable. This then forms people's mental picture of all these things.
There was a marketplace of ideas before there was the capitalistic marketplace. The above isn't true of Homer?
>However, news is ultimately also an entertainment product, and is somewhat fungible with fiction (I could read an Atlantic article about Russian bots, or I could watch Don't Look Up). Because they're competing, they start to slowly muscle in on each other's turf (films pretend they're in some way informative, the news writes articles that read like little biographies of someone discovering something).
I think really there was a pretty brief golden age of the media being really focused on impartiality and journalistic ethics, but it was mostly jsut from the ~1960s-early 2000s.
>Given mass media is essentially people's sole source of information, this is a big problem.
It is still probably better information than they had previously, say 200 years ago.
>It's completely warped everyone's understanding of how the world functions, and subsumed politics into a branch of the entertainment industry.
Also not new.
>Politics is the only tool we'd have to break out of this trap, but is now part of the trap itself and is almost wholly ineffectual - politicians incentive is to seem like they're radicals who can change things on TV, but not to actually change things, and these two things are slightly anti-correlated (cf. Trump).
I agree society could be improved by some politically driven reform and restructure of the media sector.
>Therefore, we need workers councils to bring about a socialist revolution.
Doesn't follow (and the person making the comment seemed to agree it doesn't follow).
I thought about the Amish shortly after reading this, and I think they make a few things a bit awkward.
They seem to be doing a lot of core things Debord wants. They don’t have the Spectacle and their society seems built to resist developing it. They value personal relationships a lot, and that seems to be the opposite of the fake and phonie relationships you have via the media and technology. They are decentralized: they organize in congregations that can share overlapping territory. I don’t think you can put a label on their economics. Personal relationships seem to be the basis for those kinds of interactions at least as much as formal, sterile rules. That seems to cover a lot of what The Real is getting at. At least as much as I understand The Real and The Amish.
It seems like spending a period of time living with the Amish would work as a litmus test for his ideas. I doubt they are exactly what he wants, but he probably could have refined his ideas a lot had he tried it. Has he ever considered any embedded society like that?
Skimming a second time, I think the part about a movement being decentralized vs centralized and working within the system vs remaining outside of it. It notices there is a contradiction. I think that contradiction comes from the requirement that this movement be a singular movement. It centralizes one thing: either we all do it all at one, or none of do. If you get rid of that requirement, the contradiction goes away. And we know that can work since the Amish already exist.
The Amish also have a shitload of carveouts of convenience to let them take most of the benefits of modern society without giving up their penchant for weird clothes and woodworking.
One of the things that Marxists like to point out is that technological progress is not this inhuman, deterministic process that always spits out the best possible technology for the place and time it finds itself in. So, in the lens of the spectacular society, it becomes very interesting indeed that technologies which impact on the real are often much more heavily restricted and shackled than technologies which impact on the unreal (i.e. that sustain and entrench the spectacle).
Want to genetically engineer a new crop plant which could feed millions? Then you will spend millions of dollars and decades worth of time after the fact on field trials to make sure that *this* version of corn doesn't randomly give us all cancer and/or become a super-weed. Want to create a new medicine to cure malaria? Well then get ready to spend millions of dollars and another decade getting it through trials after the lab work is done. Want to create a new source of grid-scale power or self-driving vehicle? I hope you like wading through about a billion cross-cutting regulations and permit procedures with a dozen government agencies.
On the other hand: want to release a new model of phone that sends every bit of data from its cameras, microphone, GPS antenna, inertial sensor etc. to an unsecured data centre? You can do it tomorrow. Want to develop an AI able to reliably fake the likeness of anyone on the planet using a few clips of video as a primer? Then it will be published in an open access journal and the code made open source.
The result is that, while we live in a world where the end of hunger and sickness are just as likely as the creation of the first non-human sapience or the linking of neurons to silicon, we're a lot closer to fully realistic, procedurally generated pornography (the pornucopia) and perfectly realistic CGI than we are to underwater cities, uplifted animals or cybernetic limbs.
I would object to calling Covid or the war in Ukraine "pseudoevents". Maybe the US has the luxury of thinking about Ukraine that way, but I can assure you it's very real in Europe. Instead I'd say that one of the pathologies of the spectacle is that people lose the ability to distinguish pseudoevents from real events, and hence lose the ability to act in the face of real danger. Covid is a great example; it was just another pandemic scare story like the dozens before it, until YOU land in the hospital and realize that sometimes, newspaper headlines actually jump off the page and bite.
Great review, one of the best so far.
Maybe author meant not that this is not an important event, but is not really treated by media and media consumers as important?
Just that endless parade of $CURRENT_THING passes and most do not really treat any as important?
Though it does not apply in cases, in say, of regular people making space in their homes/flats for hundreds thousands of Ukrainian refugees.
"$CURRENT_THING" disguises itself as an intelligent comment on the fashion of politics but, in every single case I have observed, actually boiled down to "the procession of events occurring one after the other without regard to my desire for the cosmos to kneel before some simple narrative view is a sinister plot by my enemies". See insinuations that COVID and the War in Ukraine (both notable historical events that impact the lives of high double-digit percentages of the world population) is being used to "distract" from (insert personal hobby-horse here), or that it beggars belief that TWO historical events might occur at the same time.
The concept of the Current Thing is not just that some news event is being reported on, or that something is being used to distract from something else. It's more a commentary on the type of person who defines their focus, area of expertise, and even their identity based on what is in the current news cycle. This is best exemplified by the archetypal person who puts a Ukrainian flag in their Twitter name, even if a few weeks earlier they couldn't identify Ukraine on a map.
Identifying something as the Current Thing is not to imply that it's not important or not actually happening, but that there's a certain type of person who suddenly finds it fashionable to center their identity around that thing, even if the thing was happening before but one did not gain status by talking about it.
The thing that best exemplifies this is Yemen. It does seem like there are some pretty terrible atrocities happening there, but it is not the Current Thing, and a lot of Very Online People who appeared to really care about and/or have expertise in the extremely disparate areas of epidemiology, police brutality, vaccinology, international relations, and constitutional law do not seem to give a shit about Yemen, because it is not yet fashionable.
But if/when the media finds a way to exploit Yemen as a domestic political wedge, you can be sure that those people will suddenly start caring a lot about Yemen.
Thank you for repeating the first half of what I said.
No, you said the exact opposite of that.
Which begs the question: why are there not more communes/communities popping up where one can opt out of the spectacle?
Well I see a lot of those popping up - generally on the far left or in diverse religions (see, for example, the Benedict option for a Catholic version). Even the bay area rationalist community has some of this spirit going on (in a much more techno-optimist way).
But the whole point is that it's hard to leave the spectacle - after all, the spectacle is optimised for attention grabbing...
I agree with "it's hard to leave the spectacle". I'm not sure about "lot of those".
Opting out of the spectacle can be a rational, non-extreme decision, especially if the main themes of this essay resonate. It's possible to do so from the comfort of your home, but it's hard when socially immersed in the spectacle. An anti-spectaclite community would help.
The dearth of such communities (not counting legacy communities like the Amish, etc) suggests that there are much fewer anti-spectaclites than one might hope for.
Or that the trade-off just isn't worth it. You'd have to aim for something pretty close to self-sufficiency, which with at most a few hundred people would put you a long way down the tech tree.
Communal living also sounds fairly awful, but doesn't seem to really be necessary when you think about it. Something like a secular Amish community (everyone has their own small farms, within a larger community that avoids engagement with the outside world) seems inherently doable.
I don't see why there would be a need for self-sufficiency.
I think that various communities could/would define/structure "communal living" very differently. Also, they would approach the "opt out" in a variety of ways and levels.
Our preconceptions of such communities are formed by a narrow range of religious communities and hippy experiments.
I suppose you could just have a small town that bans newspapers, radios and televisions and escape from The Spectacle that way.
It's worth breaking out the potential components of communal living then:
1. Dormitories
2. Common kitchens
3. Common nurseries
4. Common supplies (you have a shared stockpile of food, clothing etc)
5. Common procurement (you buy goods from the outside world in bulk)
6. Common enterprise (you all work in the same farm/factory/whatever)
7. Common real property (you all own the whole of the commune collectively)
8. Common capital goods (you share tractors/harvesters etc)
9. Common communal property (you all own community facilities together)
I could live with 8 and 9, and maybe 5 and 6 if there were massive caveats attached. The rest of these sound like the stuff of nightmares.
I'm not sure I'd go for any of the above. Maybe 9.
How about:
Affordable Housing (with Co-living components)
Onsite child care and alternative education operations
Onsite cultural hub
Onsite Rec and sports
Onsite community/sustainability farm
Co-working center
Co-living defined:
Each family gets a "complete" private home: private living room bedrooms, private kitchen, private bathrooms, private outdoor space.
Co-living spaces:
Rec rooms, play rooms, workout rooms, media rooms, co-working spaces, Superkitchens, learning spaces, dining spaces, outdoor rec, community farms, maker space, studios
And, of course, a shared commitment to community values, rules, duties, mascots, traditions, etc, whatever they may be.
Well... It has been tried before. The counterculture communes in the 60's and 70's attempted to do that and they all crashed and burned.
Episode 2 of the documentary series: 'All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace' by Adam Curtis covers it quite well.
When you refer to "it", isn't "it" a relatively small sample by a small subset of a population at a very different time - socially and technologically?
"It has been tried before" suggests, intentionally or not, that "it all has been tried before". But perhaps only 1% of viable community structures has been tried, or .01%. And perhaps in 60s and 70s, structures that are possible today were not even options.
So, I'm not sure your "Bayesian?" priors of crash & burn portray an accurate landscape of potential.
Yes, but that small subset tried some obvious features of communal living and made a frightful mess of it. At the very least it gives you a starting point as well as a cautionary tale.
Counterculture communities shifted away from drugs and free love once enough women had babies that the men found diapers and formula unwelcome interruptions to their fantasy life.
>But this artificial substitute has been about as successful as vegan chicken nuggets.
Okay, look, I'm not smart or well-read enough to directly challenge any of the other copius claims made in this review (or by Debord of Directors). But this is just patently false. Take it from a grocer with access to sales data: these are one of our most popular products *of all time*, we sell dozens of cases every week. As or more popular than every variety of "real" chicken nugget we sell, combined. And they taste great! Almost indistinguishable from the Real McCoy in every way, as long as they're cooked (but then who'd ever eat a raw nugget anyway). Which, yes, we A-B test all the time because there's literally a McDonald's right nextdoor to purchase Control Group McNuggets at. If you wanna talk about the Territory biting a poor Map in the ass, then boy, have I got news for you.
(Yeah, I know it's just a throwaway joke, like many of the other kind-of-mean, kind-of-sneering ones peppered throughout. [Did Freddie deBoer write this as a satire? I'd laugh.] But a book review of a book criticizing spectacle shouldn't be making spectacular claims itself, I think.)
More substantively, I don't really think it's fair to put that giant cop-out disclaimer at the top; "you can only disagree with this book [and implicitly the review] if you hold this absurd Pollyanna strawman view". That just tells me ahead of time that I'm gonna get very little in the way of content or epistemic humility from what follows, so I'll be reading extra-critically and potentially defensively. And, sorry to say, my suspicions aren't exactly refuted: what follows is a *technically* well-written, highly literate review of some truly wacky Kool-aid level ideas. But there's just so little there, there. Every invocation of "we", every example given of Totally Relatable Thing, every ahistorical nihilist doomer griple...I am just like, what are you talking about, man? Maybe I'm just one of those mythical pre-spectacular people whose soul got sent through SERN's time machine or something, but this so strikes me as just a more analog version of today's Very Online armchair criticism. Protip: the Spectacle is not the Territory. Claiming "we" are all hopelessly lost in it is to grant it far more power than it actually has. "The Devil's greatest trick is convincing us that He does not, in fact, exist"
I mean, shit, it even linked to Meditations on Moloch. Does it not strike anyone as weird that the review strives mightily to project the appearance of raging valiantly against the dying of the light, without first checking to see if said light is actually dying? Instead I mostly get the sense of liking or appreciating this doorstopper of Critical Theory[1] doomscrolling, the sort of sad shaking of head, "gosh, Debord is so right...we're screwed, we're screwed, we're really, really screwed. Sad!" It's a post-hoc rationalization, taking an arbitrarily Old Text from <year> and pattern-matching it onto The Present Discontents, and then declaring it as Wisdom of the Ancients. Many other reviews tried this same shoehorn, but at least those shoes fit better. This one is a stretch.
There's this entire part of the review reminding us that we pine for an imagined 1960s (Your Era May Vary), but then this actual contemporary text says the 1960s were Not All That, things were already Going To Shit back then. No, the *true* golden age was an even *earlier* era, the pre-Spectacle Society of <year - n>...do you know what we'd probably be able to find if we went and looked at contemporary art from <year - n>? People saying that the True Golden Age of the Triforce was even further back than that. I notice that this is an infinitely regressable pattern, almost as if disaffectedness with modernity leads one to conjure up an imagined Eden of yesteryear. At no point does actual objective reality step over and tap one on the shoulder, whisper "it's not so bad, mate, look how far infant mortality has fallen!" or such. Not if one is determined not to hear.
So I will go ahead and define terms, even if Debord didn't: The Spectacle is Social Reality. It's bullshit, Debord's book looks like a stone one wouldn't even want to squeeze blood from if they needed a transfusion, and at best I can say this review is a world-class attempt at putting lipstick on a highly Situational pig. It is the very thing it critiques, a triumph of style over substance. E for Effort though.
[1] Which, to be clear, I do think has some valuable ideas amidst all the ennui and je ne sais quois. The emphasis on materialist analysis seems like a Super Valuable Thing these days, a clear repudiation of fudging Maps to hide inconvenient Territory: https://www.slowboring.com/i/33907831/the-good-and-the-bad
Well, you do have to keep in mind that Debord committed suicide. The reviewer is fascinated by these ideas generated by a guy who was trying to find a reason to stay alive, and ultimately failed. I would like to see what sort of review the reviewer would write on Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I try not to read stuff written by people who killed themselves. They are bad role models. Better to read stuff written by people who stayed alive as long as they possibly could. There is a difference in the thought processes there.
That's entirely fair, I admit to not considering such a distinction myself until you pointed it out. I know some of the artists I "enjoy" did end up offing themselves...I guess there's two categories though. Ones who died "in service of" their art, and thus end up with Depressing Ideas like Debord. And ones who died "incidentally or tangentially", e.g. not due to trying to make Art of out the Abyss, but unrelatedly from bad marriage or lack of commercial success, etc. The reference to Rene Girard's mimetic desire seems relevant here; one of the enduring results of sociological research is the contagiousness of suicide. I'd never condone "banning" art just because it might contain eldritch temptations along those lines, but they probably are best understood by those with a predisposition towards such a mindset. So I'd probably have liked this review/book a lot more decades ago, back when I, too, was Really Depressed and Despaired At The World's Failings.
Although now I'm surprised there were no references to Edward Teach and Lacan. The tone is remarkably similar in many ways. "Epistemic Learned Helplessness and You: A Primer for Promising Young Sheep". In a way, it's not true helplessness if one finds value in wrapping the lack of metis meaning itself in an epistolary episteme. (Or maybe it's *extra* helpless, if one needs to be told first they're helpless. Hmm. Chickens and eggs.)
(I really enjoy Kevin Gilbert's music, which is clearly the product of a deranged mind, but he died from autoerotic asphyxiation. Art-related suicide? Maybe!)
If you're worried about catching bad thought processes you don't actually want to have from books, that's fair, but presumably there are ever any circumstances under which people should commit suicide, and if you avoid documents by people who committed suicide you probably won't get information about that, so it is a tradeoff.
I grew up in a household of addicts and crazy people, in a state with the highest suicide rate in the country. I worked as a therapist for almost 20 years, but after both my parents died, (of natural causes, years after I helped them not kill themselves several times, and not kill each other once), I just stopped feeling such a deep need to understand and empathize with those troubled impulses, when I didn’t have them myself. So, I switched careers, and now prefer to consume thoughts of people who have the impulse to live, rather than the impulse to die ahead of time, rather than in the natural course of events. Didn’t mean to sound judgemental or avoidant. I agree, there are probably times when making a conscious choice to die, is a reasonable choice. I just do have quite a bit of information about good and bad reasons to make that choice, and it is not an existential question for me at this point. Thanks for the comment. You can see why I had to stop being a therapist. Just because I do not grapple with this issue, doesn’t mean it’s ok to be overly dismissive of it.
Sorry not to engage with the more substantive part of your comment at the moment but I felt compelled to note that I found your grocer's take on the popularity of vegan chicken nuggets really informative (and, from an animal welfare perspective, actually really good cause for optimism!). Thanks!
You're welcome, haha. Not every plant based alternative has done well, so far...my company tends to be mighty stubborn about selling obviously-externally-branded products, so we've had several "house brand" attempts at meat substitutes that...are...bad. Like, just unequivocally bad. You know a plant-based meat is bad when even the vegan and vegetarians who stop there tell you it's awful!
But the Impossible Nuggets are Legit. We've also got a pretty mean Soy Chorizo and Meatless Bulgogi Beef that I'd kill to know who the real manufacturers are, those were sleeper hits. Impossible's ground beef is fairly popular as well, although it's got astronomical sodium/fat content and thus funges against other health concerns. Cannot compare to Beyond's burger patties though, those are phenomenal. As good or better than beef, they even smell and "bleed" the proper way. It's not yet possible to mimic a true steak or whatever, but for what's available now, I find it quite promising and exciting.
(And I'm an admitted carnist who isn't that invested in animal welfare beyond feeling guilty - I just think they're reliably tasty products at a good price. There really are advantages to shelf-stable frozen plant-based meats; nothing makes me sadder than having to compost spoiled meat. I know just how many resources went into making that unwanted, unloved chunk of cow. Much Of Value Was Lost.)
Not to out avalancheGenesis, but I just saw this product at a T----- J--, bought it, ate it, and went back 3 days later to stock up on it.
I see a lot of the following criticism (paraphrased):
Writer says that everything's F'ed today.
Writer is wrong because things were way worse yesterday.
Can we call it the Pinker Fallacy?
It's not a fallacy because the writer's argument is not simply that things are bad today, but that they're *uniquely* bad in a way they weren't before. So pointing out "hey, actually things in the past were also bad in very similar ways, just much much much worse" is a valid response.
My argument is not "things in the modern world are 100% perfect, can't be improved any further, and should never change." For that matter, that's not what Pinker was arguing either, which his critics would realize if they actually bothered reading his books and essays instead of just making judgments off the general vibe they get from him. It's just a flimsy strawman that reactionaries and other anti-modernists love to build up and tear down, typically to distract people from the fact that their own argument is a motte-and-bailey (wherein the motte is something like "modern society has flaws, just like every other society that ever existed," and the bailey is "modern society is a uniquely terrible dystopia that makes even the barbarism of past societies look good by comparison, and it needs to be completely destroyed").
How about "modern society is a uniquely terrible/wonderful distopía, which is much richer in GDP and social justice than many past societies, but also carries newfound abilities/potential to destroy itself and the environment at unprecedented scale, and is also undergoing a social/technological transformation at breakneck speed, which may make us into superior beings or dehumanize us into walking collections of memes and tweets."
We don't know the cost of our "progress". There's no data on it. History is not going to repeat itself. Something new will happen. One can try to model it or to understand it as it is happening — optimistically or otherwise. But the current, and the future, are neither motte nor bailey. They are complexity. And to compare a philosophy of the present to a history of the past, using a variety of nominal metrics, may be missing the point big time.
Yes, in the words of the great philosopher George W. Bush, "The past is over." That much is tautologically obvious. But while history doesn't literally repeat itself, looking to the past can be useful for observing recurrent patterns which are likely to continue recurring in the present, since the fundamental neurological and psychological underpinnings of human behavior remain constant. As such, any useful philosophy of the present needs to incorporate an understanding of the past, for the same reason that any scientific theory must take past observations into account when determining the implications of a new experiment's results.
The future is unpredictable, of course - perhaps a big space rock will slam into the Earth tomorrow and kill us all, at which point all of our predictions about the future will turn out to have been completely and totally wrong. But that was the case for the past too, back when it was the present and people didn't have the benefit of hindsight: If a giant space rock had crashed into the Earth back in 1776, then the predictions of all those early liberal philosophers would have been wrong, but that doesn't mean their logic would have been any less sound! I am less convinced that the modern age is qualitatively unique in a way that goes beyond quantitative metrics like GDP and life expectancy, except in the sense that every time period is unique: Things like the Fall of the Roman Empire, the Mongol Conquests, and the Protestant Reformation must have seemed like Sui Generis world-shattering events to the people living through those time periods, but looking back we can see that those events fit into a larger context. And I'm reasonably certain that, barring some totally unpredictable non-anthropogenic cataclysm (like the aforementioned space rock), future generations won't see our time as some wholly unique Sui Generis turning point either, but rather as merely another phase in the slow, tumultuous development of humanity.
I think the argument depends on the "in very similar ways" part, and it's not being argued well, certainly not well enough to justify summary dismissal of the criticism of modernity.
I mean, I understand the sentiment, I honestly do, I'd often have a lot of trouble grasping arguments that use comparisons with the past to demonstrate that some changes were directionally bad. I continue to think it's bad form to contrast the present with the past with loaded terms like The Real vs. Spectacle. (Did Derrida ever work his magic on this pair? He should have.)
But that's a problem with communication, not with the underlying insights. When someone produces a book that appears exceptionally prescient several decades later, my first assumption is that he was on to something. And it's not hard to access that something, simply don't treat discussion of specific aspects of modernity as an indictment of modernity as a whole. (Yes, it's uniquely bad, because everything is unique. This doesn't mean going back is possible and/or preferable, and Debord doesn't seem like one of the people who do argue it is. But it does mean some specific issues have gotten worse, and it makes perfect sense to worry about those exact issues instead of things that aren't that worrisome. It also makes perfect sense to worry we're stuck climbing a crappy local optimum and should aim for a larger leap in the search space, and it's not the same as wanting the whole society completely destroyed. )
Hey I eat vegan chicken nuggets every now and then and they're totally great. I mean, junk food will remain junk food but they're just as tasty as the non-vegan stuff!
> For that matter, why are we up in arms about Ukraine and not, say, Yemen? There are clear reasons why - they just have nothing to do with democracy, sovereignty, war crimes, or human rights. I don't mean to say that nobody cares about those things. We all do, at least in a vague and abstract way. But that collective concern only becomes acute when the spectacle brings it into focus.
It is not so bad. Difference is that in Ukraine
- there are clearly actionable things, including doable by regular people
- there is a decent chance of success or at least reducing damage
- there is a clear evil and nonevil side, quite close to optimal as possible in wars
So spectacle started here for quite good reasons (and plenty of not so good reasons, like special interests, politics, Europeans not really so much about people dying in Middle-East and caring more about own indirect security threat than full-scale genocides far away)...
But here reasons for spectacle were quite clear and valid ones.
I disagree, I think the West is focusing so much on Ukraine almost exclusively because of anti-Trumpism. If Russiagate had not happened, I believe the magnitude of the response from the West would have been vastly smaller.
In the US, we tend to only care about things happening in the rest of the world if we can use them as domestic political cudgels or if we can map our domestic politics onto the situation. Yemen is too "other" for Americans to relate to our own politics, but we just spent 6 years talking about Russia non-stop, and Putin is a perfect symbol for the left to map Trump onto - when they fight Putin, they can LARP as if they were fighting Trump. Do Republicans really, truly care about the Uyghurs? No, they are using them to make Democrats seem soft on China and to drive a wedge between the leftist-Muslim coalition.
> I think the West is focusing so much on Ukraine almost exclusively because of anti-Trumpism.
I assure you that actions of Poland (gave 230+ tanks, plenty of other weaponry, accepted about 1 500 000 to 2 200 000 refugees - now about 4% of population of Poland) or Estonia, Lithuania and UK and so on had nothing whatsoever related to Trump.
Maybe in USA it is important factor.
Sure, Eastern and continental Europe has a specific history with Russia that would explain the degree of their involvement. I'm mostly referring to the Anglosphere.
Is Russiagate really relevant at all in UK?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Sergei_and_Yulia_Skripal are likely far more relevant.
And general policy, kept for hundreds of years, of keeping the most uppity and/or powerful countries in Europe down.
I've been thinking about some of the issues raised in this review recently, so the timing of this is quite fortuitous.
I think we're actually at a pretty important inflection point with all of this.
It used to be the case that capitalism offered us a somewhat fair deal. Yes we were required to transform into automatons 9-5, 5 days a week, but in exchange for selling 70-80% of your life to capitalism, you would be able to buy a house and each year you would get a bit richer and be able to afford nicer things.
Now, because of issues like global warming, we are told to keep working as before (or even harder!) but to expect a reduced standard of living in exchange. Don't go on foreign holidays. Don't heat your homes so much or use AC. Ride the bus instead of driving an SUV. Repair clothes instead of buying new. Drink out of a pathetic paper straw instead of a plastic one. And so on.
Is this sustainable for society? I'm not so sure.
I have to confess that I used to be one of these Ben Shapiro-esque free-market bedtime fondlers, but now I think there needs to be a new social contract if we are to accept a lower standard of living in order to save the planet.
I'm interested in communities like the travellers, Amish, Hasidic Jews and the communist kibbutzim. People in these communities don't participate in 21st capitalism like the rest of us, and they seem perfectly happy with a less commodified life.
Maybe people who feel cheated by the system we live in now would be happy to trade in their smart phones and foreign holidays for a new way of life along the lines of these communities?
Religion or extreme political ideology tends to be the glue that helps keep the above-mentioned communities together, but I'm a right-wing, vegetarian atheist so I don't think simply applying to join the Amish is the way forward.
So maybe it's time to look at creating a new start -up community (or commune, for my Marxist comrades out there) along the lines of these existing communities but not with any religious or ideological foundation.
If a rich benefactor like Peter Thiel would donate money to a start-up community like this, I could see it being truly transformative in a way that seasteading or charter cities probably never will be.
We don't need a sovereign state to give up their territory so that it can be run like the Rapture of Bioshock. A start-up community could exist within the confines of an existing state, but we'd just do our own thing away from the rest of society, and if people wanted to join us after noticing we're happier, they'd be free to do so.
I'm just putting this out there to see what other people think. Are the above the ramblings of a mad man, or am I on to something? Let me know!
A solution that says “If a rich person...would donate a bunch of money for other people to live a simpler life...” is no solution to anything.
I'm sure a lot of communities, and US states, were founded by rich benefactors. There needs to be some seed capital to start things off. But it wouldn't need funding in perpetuity. Crowd funding would be an alternative option but I'm just not keen on that model personally.
In my state, the capitalist/philanthropist Robert Owen founded a utopian Harmonite community in 1825. It's still quite pretty there, but the Harmonites gave their project up in 1827, and now its a haven for tourists. Pythagoras founded one of the earliest communities of renunciation--followers swore off a range of things: sex, beans, etc., in order to focus on the purity of geometrical reality. But, as Bertrand Russell said, sooner or later they all began to hanker after beans and moved on. The Shakers did better with sexual abstinence: that's why there are no Shakers anymore, but the rest of us all know the Pythagorean theorem.
If you'd like to join a casual brainstorm on what such a community may look like, send a note to protopiacone at gmail
I don't think you are a mad man. But, I do think that you are a rare breed. Oddly, what you are looking for should not be so far left field of the mainstream: a community with a shared identity and social support structures, focused on healthier and happier living. Isn't that what "everybody" wants, and what is so very hard to find these days?
> This is not a fantasy - this is your news feed. The U.S. is predicting a false-flag attack by Russia in the Ukraine. Russia accused the UK of a false-flag attack in Syria. The U.S. accuses China of genocide. China and Iran claimed COVID was a U.S. bio-attack.
> It goes on and on and on. They all want us to trust them and no one else. Behold the future of international politics
Why future? It is nothing new and was present since ancient times, just with a different mediums and stories.
Very clever stuff, you have to admire those red-pill Marxist philosophes, though wouldn't want to be one!
This is a great review. It oscillates hard between thrilling epistemological analyses and staggering lapses in common sense. I'd love to have a glass of wine with the author; I wouldn't take their financial advice in a million years (this is the mark of a true philosopher). Particularly well-written are the passages on experts, terrorism, and the conclusion. Here is some of the stuff I thought was wrong:
On "true competence":
> The all-pervasive nature of mass media has led to the universal victory of form over function and style over substance: "It is in these conditions that a parodic end of the division of labor suddenly appears, with carnivalesque gaiety, all the more welcome because it coincides with the generalized disappearance of all true competence. A financier can be a singer, a lawyer a police spy, a baker can parade his literary tastes, an actor can be president, a chef can philosophize on the movements of baking as if they were landmarks in universal history."
Cross-domain achievement by a single person is the product of 20th century mass media? We literally call such people "renaissance men." Occam's razor says that there are some fundamental variables that would make someone skilled at a few different things, and if you get lucky and score high on a few of these variables, you'll probably succeed in more than one domain.
On black boxes:
> As an example: how much of your daily environment, as a percentage, do you truly understand? Look around the room and reflect on how “even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable.” Your kitchen and your medicine cabinet are filled with mystical objects.... Compare that to, say, a homesteader.
I know that if I accidentally take my partner's medicine I'll experience nausea and fatigue. If I neglect to take mine, I'll experience an uptick in intrusive thoughts. Admittedly I don't understand the mechanism by which either works. The homesteader knows that mushrooms that look like X will nourish him. Mushrooms that look like Y will make him ill. Mushrooms that look like Z will result in a repeat of that incident where he was found trying to ride one of the cows into the lake. He doesn't understand the mechanism by which these things work either. The substantive difference is that in the case of my medicine cabinet, there actually is someone out there who understands the mechanism (though in the case of MY medicine, the mechanistic understanding is so piss-poor that I might as well be the homesteader. I think my partner's medicine is generally better understood than mine). Humans are animals, and we are just much better suited to "metis" than we are to "episteme". Aristotle *defined* us as animals that had the misfortune of stumbling into episteme. If deBord were born a few hundred years earlier he would seek out the same philosophical conundrum in the mushrooms (he'd probably find it too). The author offers a much better take on the relative ignorances of myself and the homesteader in the conclusion. I wish that this line of reasoning had been given the real estate that was afforded to other stuff in section three.
The single most glaring problem is (of course) the non-critique of capitalism. I apologise for fulfilling the author's prophecy about the comment section.
On "capitalism":
Here are a few different characterisations of capitalism the author offers:
1. Debord correctly perceived the totalitarian nature of spectacular capitalism. Your time, your attention, your opinions - all are bought and sold, and can be influenced to better facilitate such transactions.
2. organizing all of existence around the bottom line
3. Unsurprisingly, capitalism is the best system for the accumulation of capital. And despite their pretensions, communist societies had the same goals as every modern nation - wealth, prosperity, innovation, and growth.
Most of the capitalist states I know of have a minimum wage, restrictions on what goods/services one can sell, etc. So the first two characterisations are strawmen. The third characterisation sounds ...kind of okay? Who is against innovation and prosperity? If you want to convince people that the mixed economies of most rich modern nation states are failing us so badly that we should be willing to give a forum to people who–by their own admission–"don't have any better ideas," a helpful starting point would be concrete examples of failure. I actually can't find any in the review! Just lots of vague abstract criticisms. Please correct me and provide examples if I'm wrong about this.
On production/consumption:
> The workday used to be determined by the work, but now the work is determined by the workday. And everyone has to work, not because we need what they produce, but because we need them to spend - else the whole thing comes crashing down.
There is a not-so-subtle logical equivocation happening here on "they." If you remove any one individual's contribution to economic productivity, all other things being fixed, then sure, there is no collapse. But if you remove everyone's contribution then obviously we'll all be hungry tomorrow. Similarly with consumption. If you remove my consumption in isolation it's all good; if you remove everyone's consumption it's a problem.
When the author talks about "production," they apply the "single individual in isolation" interpretation. When the author talks about "consumption," they apply the "all individuals at once" frame. By doing so they create this verbal illusion that modern society is all consumption and no production. This is obviously false, and just a relic of poor logic.
As regards "the work is determined by the workday", there is a serious discussion to be had about potential misincentives created by paying employees by the hour when what you really want is the conclusion of some concrete task. But it's certainly a lot less sexy than "we need them to spend - else the whole thing comes crashing down."
On functionally indistinguishable beliefs:
> But in practice, the science is received wisdom, taken on faith. Our belief in the God Particle is functionally indistinguishable from the belief in God of ages past.
This passage made me stop in my tracks and ask two questions. I've spent too much time writing this damn comment so I'm not going to answer them, I'll just leave them here in case anybody gets this far:
1. We have an unfortunate tendency to characterise science as some combination of string theory and dinosaur studies. But that's really not the bulk of it. What if we substitute "God Particle" with "Newton's second law" ? Or "antigens"?
2. What happens when we substitute "God Particle" with "French critical theory" ?
"...if you remove everyone's consumption it's a problem."
Why? That would just lead to a realignment/shrinking of productive capacity towards the lowered demand.
Like Drukhari bloodsports on Twisted Tuesday, the Spectacle is great fun... till you realize that audience participation is mandatory :)
Great review. I like to think of the spectacle at what an "evolutionary transition in individuality" looks like from the inside. As the unit of natural selection moves from the individual to the culture, and as the culture expands, things start to move in a direction that individuals do not understand or desire. The two are misaligned: what makes a culture take over is not what's more rewarding to the individuals.
That's like a epithelial cell in the stomach thinking "in this new organism we no longer enjoy the reward of following a chemotactic gradient".
I have to admit this review baffled me. It seemed like the book was one big applause light and the reviewer didn't even notice. The fact it felt so prescient despite being from many decades prior should, IMO, have been more of a warning sign than a reason to get enthused.
Do we just get away with claims like, e.g. "While we’ve always been afraid of advances in weaponry, it’s starting to feel like everything is being weaponized" which was in the context of technology? Are LED lamps being weaponised? Are electric cars being weaponised? Is the ability to retrieve rockets for later use being weaponised? Is the James Webb telescope being weaponised? "But we don't mean that kind of technology!" Maybe not, but maybe then we should differentiate and say what we mean?
The reviewer commented on there being a lot of just-so claims from the author, but the review is also full of just-so claims. ctrl+f "most". No graphs, no citations, just a lot of claims, many of which I find highly dubious.
I'm disappointed by this review. I don't usually bother to say something like this, especially since I by default assume a lot of work went into making the review and I appreciate anyone putting an honest effort into summarising books, but I also found this review baffling enough that I wanted to speak up, in case the observation helps someone put a finger on their own feelings of weirdness about the review.
+1
I got very similar feelings as you while reading this one. It seems like some old french communist theory about capitalism, one not all that insightful above what you'd hear at any college campus today
Spot on.
No graphs, no citations -- well put
“For maybe the first time in history, most people are apprehensive about the relentless march of technology. ”
The rest of the review was pretty good, but, lol no. This is definitely not true. There was an entire movement called the Luddites in early industrial England who had this as their entire shtick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
Not to mention the Platonic dialogue where Socrates frets about new tech changing the mental abilities of the youth (Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b:)
If you like, I can go find half a dozen more examples
Yes, but it's DIFFERENT now. I won't elaborate HOW it's different beyond vaguely alluding to the idea that now, LOTS of people think that (when that was true in the past too).
Debord was very influential when I was young, but as the decades passed, I came to see him, with the Frankfurt School, the Post-modernists, and now, I suppose the IdPol lobby that feeds off them, as essentially encapsulating the Politics of Masochism. It's all too big. They are too powerful. Even our thoughts are not our own. There is no hope. There is nothing to do except analyse in more and more detail why nothing can be done. Apart from the inherent oxymorons (if my thoughts are not my own then my thought that my thoughts are not my own is not my own either) it's actually a recipe for despair and suicide if you take it seriously. Yet many of the adherents of such ideas in more recent decades have successful careers as lecturers, authors and media personalities, although, by their own theories their ideas are not their own, and there is no hope. Work that out.
It’s reasonable to have an instinctive aversion to any kind of Philosophies of Masochism. That said, the rationalist maxim is “if X is true, then I desire to believe X”, which poses a challenge to that aversion, because the maxim has unfortunately never been sympathetic to complaints that the consequences of believing X are unpalatable.
Im surprised that nobody seems to have pointed out the obvious fact that Cincinnatus didn't conduct a coup. His fellow-countrymen called on him to assume dictatorial power in *defense* of the state against invading barbarians. The whole point of that story is that he then *refused* to do the coup part when he blatantly could have.
Also and unrelatedly, you can hardly call something a work of philosophy if it takes for granted that the Communist revolution and downfall of capitalism are imminently impending, not even in 1967.
The whole time I was growing up I was part of a religious tradition that believed the bible was both literally true and held prophetic power. These people would see, e.g. the Invasion of Afghanistan and think of God's promise to destroy the enemies of Israel with fire from the heavens in Revelations.
When I left that tradition, I, like many apostates, got embarrassingly into Ayn Rand. Towards the end of The Fountainhead, the villain, Ellsworth Tooey, gives a long monologue (because it's Ayn Rand) about how in the future, we will just reflect our opinions back to one another, ostracizing or even killing those whose opinions diverge. I saw this, at the time, as incredibly prescient. A prediction from nearly a century ago about the internet and cancel culture.
Of course, Israel has long had enemies that were killed with fire. And of course, human beings have long struggled with the dichotomy between individualism and coherent culture. These were not prescient, it was completely foreseeable that these things would happen in some way at some time. But the specifics were almost impossible to predict. One could guess that someone would bomb Israel's enemies, but one could absolutely not guess that a terror attack would bring the U.S. into conflict with the Taliban. One could guess that at some point in the future there would be a censorious movement in the U.S. But one could not guess that the creation of social media would allow for powerful populist movements that valued loyalty above truth.
The thing is, when we're evaluating the predictions of people we're inclined to agree with, we tend to use the likelihood of the specific "predicted" event as our judge of how prescient and brilliant the predictor is. But the *correct* metric is the likelihood that what the person said would happen. That's a function of how specific the prediction is and how unlikely it is.
So for instance when we hear:
"It is an inevitable effect of clandestine forms of organization of the military type that it suffices to infiltrate a few people at certain points of the network to make many march and fall" we shouldn't think specifically about a current event in which controlled opposition plays a part. We should instead go "huh, yeah, that is inevitable, since it's been happening in every society for so long that Machiavelli also wrote about it."
Anyway, having this be a major part of my upbringing and young adulthood has made me hyper-vigilant about it, and I might be overcorrecting, but that's why this review failed to land with me.
People saying "But of course things are better, we have so many great gadgets now and our lives are so much longer and more comfortable" might profit from looking up John C. Calhoun's mouse utopia experiment. It turns out that physical ease and comfort doesn't actually guarantee flourishing:
https://www.iflscience.com/universe-25-the-mouse-utopia-experiment-that-turned-into-an-apocalypse-60407
Also of relevance is the hedonic treadmill. Most people nowadays don't actually feel any happier at not having to labour in the fields all day, because they just take it for granted, and ditto with all the other modern conveniences that we don't even think about. Hence modern people aren't psychologically better-off as a result of technological advances than pre-modern people.
Funny enough Calhoun’s mouse experiments are an example of false common knowledge. See: https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia
I'm not sure that article really refutes my point. It doesn't really matter, for my purposes, whether the mouse society collapsed because of overpopulation or mutational load caused by a lack of natural selection; the point is that living in a utopia of material abundance didn't lead to mousey flourishing. The point about attempted replications only finding some of the results Calhoun reported is stronger, but since they still found behavioural aberrations (albeit not as many as Calhoun), I'm not sure that does anything to refute what I said.
Of course, if you don't like the Calhoun experiment specifically, we could also look at other, similar, cases. For example, many zoos put quite a lot of effort into giving their animals natural-seeming environments, because they know that, if they don't, the animals will fail to flourish, for all that they have better access to food, shelter, and veterinary care than their wild counterparts. It shouldn't really be surprising if modern humans, whose environment is, after all, very artificial indeed, should likewise evince a lack of flourishing.
Yeah, I think I also wouldn't flourish if I were locked in an empty room for my entire life with nothing to do and no hope of escape. That is in no way comparable to modern society, where people are freer than ever before to travel, explore, and pursue their dreams. It might be comparable to the worst prisons, and it's no surprise that prisoners in those places don't flourish either.
Rates of mental illness are up, suicides are up, loneliness is up. Looks like a lot of people aren't currently flourishing, cheap flights notwithstanding.
Up compared to what time period? The period where we don't have reliable data because peasants drunk themselves to death instead of going to the psychiatrist and getting pills?
Compared to the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first.
Though the number of people willing to believe, on no evidence whatsoever, that pre-modern people were all miserable and depressed, is really quite astonishing.
Here is self-reported life satisfaction vs. GDP per capita.
Notice the clear positive correlation: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-vs-happiness
Obviously, not everyone in the past was miserable, just as not everyone today is happy. But the evidence points to modern people being happier overall.
<i>Here is self-reported life satisfaction vs. GDP per capita.</i>
A couple of problems:
(1) GDP per capita also tends to be correlated with things like living in a low-crime, high-trust society, which probably also affect people's life satisfaction. You can't simply assume that GDP leads to higher life satisfaction.
(2) Generally, people get more satisfaction from their relative wealth than their absolute wealth. An inhabitant of a high GDP country might switch on the TV, see some starving third-worlders, and feel wealthy, and therefore satisfied. Conversely, a starving third-worlder might think of rich first-worlders, and feel even more poor and miserable. But pre-modern people didn't have the modern world to compare themselves to: for them, the level of wealth in their society was the normal baseline, and they therefore wouldn't have felt themselves poor just because they didn't have as much as we have.
(3) If you look at the change in happiness and GDP over time, the correlation is much less clear, if it's even there at all: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-vs-happiness?stackMode=relative&time=2003..latest In other words, countries which saw big GDP increases didn't see correspondingly big satisfaction increases.
<i>Obviously, not everyone in the past was miserable, just as not everyone today is happy. But the evidence points to modern people being happier overall.</i>
Actually, the evidence points to the opposite.
"According to a survey published online January 23, 2020 by the health insurer Cigna, more than three in five Americans are lonely, with more and more people reporting feelings of being left out, being poorly understood and lacking companionship. Since 2018 when the survey was first conducted, there has been a nearly 13% rise in loneliness." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7321652/
"Around the turn the century, after decades of improvement, all-cause mortality rates among white non-Hispanic men and women in middle age stopped falling in the US, and began to rise (Case and Deaton 2015). While midlife mortality continued to fall in other rich countries, and in other racial and ethnic groups in the US, white non-Hispanic mortality rates for those aged 45–54 increased from 1998 through 2013. Mortality declines from the two biggest killers in middle age—cancer and heart disease—were offset by marked increases in drug overdoses, suicides, and alcohol-related liver mortality in this period. By 2014, rising mortality in midlife, led by these “deaths of despair,” was large enough to offset mortality gains for children and the elderly (Kochanek, Arias, and Bastian 2016), leading to a decline in life expectancy at birth among white non-Hispan-ics between 2013 and 2014 (Arias 2016), and a decline in overall life expectancy at birth in the US between 2014 and 2015 (Xu et al 2016). Mortality increases for whites in mid-life were paralleled by morbidity increases, including deteriorations in self-reported physical and mental health, and rising reports of chronic pain." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5640267/
"That is in no way comparable to modern society, where people are freer than ever before to travel, explore, and pursue their dreams".
It depend on which timeframe. I am willing to debate this compared to say 40y ago, but since 25y ago it has been a long way downward, mostly quasi plateau with occasional fast steps down (sep 11, H1N1, SARS, covid, ukraine (fuel bump)) that seems to come quicker and quicker. It may be generational, but for me the apex of western middle class freedom was just after the fall of the berlin wall (1989), although at the time HIV was a looming scare that kind of spoiled the fun (without the overall state oppression that came with covid though, even if it could have turned very sour. Why it didn't is something worth analysing and I think it would prove that indeed western world is far from it's 1990 'optimum'.
Regarding happiness, I guess it peaked before because it is more linked to change in well being than absolute level, and my point is that overall level is was upward before 1990 and downward since sep 11.
International Flights are neither as cheap nor easy now that they were in 2010-2019...
Just after the fall of the Berlin wall was the early 1990s recession. During the "apex of Western middle class freedom", flights were 66% more expensive than even in 2022: https://www.bts.gov/content/annual-us-domestic-average-itinerary-fare-current-and-constant-dollars. Not that it was easy to travel even when you could afford a ticket, because you didn't have a smartphone that made every city in the world as easy to navigate as your home town.
H1N1 was no more deadly than a typical flu season. SARS was far less deadly still, and affected China almost exclusively. I'll give you COVID and Ukraine, but pandemics have always occurred, and fuel price surges aren't that rare (e.g. 2010s, 1970s). During any 25 year period in history, you can always find disasters, epidemics, and wars. We were unlucky with COVID, but it's not the fault of modern society that a virus just happened to mutate inside a bat in 2019 in just the right way to start a pandemic.
Well, except I happened to live this period, as a student at first then as upper-middle-class. And, from the inside, as a guy who traveled quite a lot, it has never been more easy and cheap than just after my student years (with first salary). Flight prices (to far away destinations) has increased even compared to inflation (not compared with my salary which increased faster, at least at first but not so for the last 10y), and difficulty has increased too (H1N1 and SARS were not deadly, but caused issue for travelling (like refusal f boarding if you got flagged having fever by a thermal camera), safety checks are more and more intrusive, and so on.
And for other freedoms, depending on your interests and place of living), the changes may have been tremendous (motor sports, trekking in the forest.). Regulations are an ever growing, and can be such a burden that they kill some leisure activities. So yes, if you have virtual activities, I guess the possibilities and ease have grown tremendously. current consoles and netflix sure beat anything I could have had just after my studies, regardless of money. Abundance of entertainement sure has grown a lot, to the point of being totally unable to consume even what I find interresting (and I am a big media consumer). On freedom? Not at all, early internet (which I got as a student, before it was mainstream) was much more free than anything mainstream now (you can still find freedom pockets for sure....which have not changed so much compared to the early days in fact)
For the non-virtual? No, i am not convinced because I personally experienced the opposite....
BTW, for visiting a foreign city, a smartphone is a slight improvement compared to the old travel guides....but it's only slight convenience (which can cost you, depending on roaming data rates and local sim availability). I you think otherwise, I guess it explains a lot regarding how our impression of western freedom/QOL evolution differ....
I thought the early part of the review was quite interesting. I've never encountered Debord, and the reviewer introduced many ideas that seem fruitful. I was initially enthusiastic. However, I wound up very frustrated, primarily, I think, due to two factors:
1) When strings of insights that have the potential to open up inquiry and enrich analysis and understanding of experience are linked into a comprehensive theory, they tend to lose their fruitfulness to the degree that a reductionist model encloses their interpretive possibilities. The insights become tools of the model, and, to succeed as a tool, the model inevitably involves massive reduction. There are many ways this seems to be visible here, from the simplistically imagined lives of people in the past to the cartoonish portraits of historical eras. Debord's "Spectacle," which seems to have elements anticipated in the non-theoretical popular books of Vance Packard and in McLuhan's writings in the '60s, also seems a variation on open-ended French phenomenology and existentialism of the 1940s and '50s, which respond to or extend Marx's insights on alienation, molded into a form designed to compete with closed historicist models derived from Hegel and Marx. It's not that those models don't have a lot of value, but what's valuable in them is often reduced to caricature within the model itself.
2) As the reviewer becomes more entranced by Debord's prescience in anticipating the future, he seems to me to indicate that he himself does not have a lot of appreciation of what I'd call the recent past (having grown up in the '50s--the date 1984 still seems a futuristic to me). When he discusses Debord's 1987 ideas, for example, he appears amazed that Debord seems to anticipate the 24-hour news cycle phenomenon, but in my recollection (refreshed by Wikipedia) it was precisely soon after CNN was created in 1980 that the idea first became stylish, and the evanescence of news significance became a theme. Russian disinformation--is it really possible not to be aware of how pervasive a notion this was from the 1950s on (although I don't recall the word "disinformation" being used; it was folded into the term "propaganda," and familiar to anyone who had read Orwell, or about him)? "Terrorism" as a conservative state foil was a theme in the years after the Weathermen and Red Brigades had been put down; the Munich Olympics were in 1972, and terrorism in the Middle East and Ireland was constant news. Universal surveillance, the (as yet, I think, unnamed) "apophenia" of conspiracy theories . . . Yes, things are worse now then they were then, but things were worse then than they were before then, and these ideas were not prophetic in 1987 and suddenly born with the Internet.
If you are *actually* interested in the solution to what comes after capitalism then I wrote up the answer to that some years ago on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-political-ideologies-that-are-better-than-Capitalism-and-Communism-which-can-be-applied-in-the-real-world-politics/answer/James-Green-265
To cryptically summarise it: trying to force one simple system to do everything isn't it.
I liked your overall conclusion. People complain about lots of things in our current world (media, social media, inequality etc) but generally things are better than in the past. A lot of what makes people miserable is through their own poor choices. If you instead choose to work hard, limit addictive/polarizing media, and spend time with family and nature, life in the current world can be fulfilling and more interesting than in the past. Unless you want the government to choose what you should be exposed to (eg China), then take responsibility to make the healthy choices for yourself.
Thoroughly entertaining writing style!
hope this person has a blog and I remember to look it up when we find out who it is.
I am buying this work–it sounds incredible–as it will likely make a good companion to the Adorno and Horkheimer, my faves.
The near-to-last paragraph starting "True, our incomprehension........", was very beautifully written and rather profound. Thanks to the author for that! (and I wish Debord himself wrote that way)
> The phone in your hand, the cash in your wallet, the clothes on your back, the food in your belly - how many lifetimes would it take to truly grok the building blocks of everyday existence? [...] Compare that to, say, a homesteader. It really hasn’t been that long since people lived in a comprehensible universe. Our collective knowledge of the universe has deepened tremendously, but theoretical physics is only less slightly hermetical than the occult beliefs it replaced.
I would argue that there are multiple levels of understanding. Knowing how to use something (as a black box) versus knowing what makes something tick, how to build it.
The digital native is surrounded by gadgets they know how to use, but have only a vague idea of what makes them tick.
By contrast, an Old West homesteader also knows how to use the plants and animals they raise for a living, and may have some understanding of how to breed them for traits. But they don't know much about photosynthesis or how to build new plants by mixing traits from different species.
At least, the digital native has the (still limited) knowledge of the world regarding anything from CPUs to plants at their fingertips, even if it would take many lifetimes to understand everything. The homesteader likely does not even have access to the works of Mendel or whatever is cutting edge within their world in the first place.
> Is it any wonder epistemic learned helplessness is a thing?
Modest suggestion: provisionally accept paradigms as useful to the degree that they are used to create new, working technologies. If you see a steam engine and their designers claim that it works on thermodynamics rather than by trapping a fire spirit inside, thermodynamics is likely useful. If every producer of mobile phone claims they run on semiconductors, the likely explanation is that solid state physics (and thus quantum mechanics) are useful. If you offer a different explanation, e.g. 'semiconductors work because foundries bind the spirits of dead animals (or people) into them', by Occam's Razor, the burden of proof is with you.
Of course, this approach does not help with cosmology, history and the like much.
~~~
Also, I would like to go on record defending the internet here. In 1960, A.J. Liebig observed that '[f]reedom of the press belongs to those who own one'. While large parts of the internet (netflix, candy crush, amazon, etc) are clearly a continuation of the spectacle by a few large corporations, the internet also broke the clear separation of content providers and content consumers. Sometimes this leads to QAnon. But sometimes it also leads to LessWrong.
~~~
I am also against idealizing pre-modern rural communities were everyone knew everyone. In a word, the sucked. Even aside from back-breaking labor, starvation and the like, I mean.
Entertainment-wise, you got the Sunday sermon, a few feasts a year, some visiting freak shows perhaps. I will take the internet with instant access to myriads of books, movies, tv shows, video games and subcultures any day of the week over that.
Also, in a community were everyone knows everyone, the individual is under lots of pressure to conform. If I were to piss off the ACX community and be banned for life, I would still have colleagues, virtual friends in other internet communities, a few real-life neighbors I know and so on. For a pre-modern rural community member, the threat of being shunned or cast out is possibly life-threatening. Other respectable communities likely won't accept outcasts, and the retirement plans for vagabonds, brigands, mercenaries and the like don't sound all that great.
IMHO, this very much limits the shifting of the overton window within such communities. If the grocery sellers in the market does not know you from Adam in the first place, you have to think a lot less about them refusing to selling you any vegetables because they disapprove of your opinions or something.
In the times of "apocryphal Chinese curse" it's very useful to be clear about life goals and your meaning of life. More precisely: to make sure that their objective part is meaningful and re-choose (consciously confirm) it's subjective part. See more details in here:
"Summing up meta-ethical conclusions that can be derived from Universal Darwinism taken to extremes" https://github.com/kiwi0fruit/ultimate-question/blob/master/articles/dxb.md
Aka: Buddha-Darwinism on objective meaning of life separated from subjective meaning of life (Cosmogonic myth from Darwinian natural selection, Quasi-immortality, Free will, Buddhism-like illusion of the Self).
"I know the names of Will Smith’s kids - I don’t even know if my best friends from high school have any"
I think you're an outlier here even today, though I agree this sort of thing is more common than it used to be
For a more neutral view about the nature and processes of longing tapped by various seekers of influence and pleasure, some might find this book useful. Glamour goes back well before mass media, but mass media certainly made it a more common form of rhetoric to experience.
https://www.amazon.com/Power-Glamour-Longing-Visual-Persuasion/dp/1416561129
Really interesting book, great writing style. My favorite community review so far.
This article demolished my world fourteen times.
Review-of-the-review: 7/10
This review is at least less gnomic, cloudy, and circular than Debord is, to judge by the quotations. Beyond that I didn't find it very appealing. I kept waiting for Debord's or at least the reviewer's ideas to cash out in some moderately concrete model or prediction. They never did. I didn't enjoy the slightly manic internetiness of the writing either. I don't doubt that the review (or Debord) is getting at something real, but in philosophy that's a rather low bar especially for theses this subjective.
The best quality of sam[]zdat was making you feel how obtrusively, dauntingly weird philosophy could be if you took it seriously. The current review doesn't quite manage that and from what I can tell Debord doesn't quite manage it either; the required critical attitude isn't there, just hazy angst and speculation. Even so, I appreciated the reviewer's self-awareness and commitment to being interesting. As always, many thanks for contributing!
Tl;dr I'm not getting what the OP got out of Debord quotes. I just get Vagueness.
I think the OP is interpreting Debord too liberally.
My favorite, in part III, is where Debord talks about spectacle uniting people in their separateness. The OP interprets this in gist as a process similar to modern mindless scrolling through social media where They tell you how to be. I was so surprised by this 1967 insight that I read the entire review.
And what I'm getting out of Debord quotes is that he wrote so vaguely about so much, you could really interpret his writing to mean anything. The OP chooses to read him as a 1967 Nostradamus, who is also unreadably vague.
Maybe Debord sounds vague to me because I lack context? I'm very out of touch with modern "spectacle" and COMPLETELY out of touch with Debord time. (I had to google QAnon. I was generally aware of COVID and its controversies but the only thing I noticed personally was that I had to wear a mask sometimes and get a shot. I occasionally have to re-google who is the president of the US. And no, I'm not Amish on a farm---it's just that my Care About This neurons quit firing when people argue.)
Debord wrote vaguely? Meh. I think he was pretty specific but unless you closely read Hegel and Marx and Lenin and understand the history of communism up to 1967 from the perspective of theorists one might miss his specificity.
To understand debord (I'm making no judgment here on his correctness), you probably would also benefit from understand Dada and a generation later, the pop art movement.
"There is no exit to Plato’s Cave. It was only conceit that we ever thought we were more enlightened than our forebears. "
This part is untrue. There are better ways to live – for individuals, if not for the masses, but they are not easy.
What's required is the skills and temperament required to be a great (not just a good) scientist: of these the most important are
- prioritizing truth above everything else (including what you said last week, or what your mortal enemy said)
- being very aggressive in probing where your theory/understanding is incorrect
- consilience, namely forging links between different bodies of knowledge
This is not just pro-science happy-talk, it gets to the root of the issue. Consilience is what makes your knowledge of the world more real than just shadows on a cave, and what makes you substantially better positioned to judge what's nonsense (or what may be true but unimportant) in the stream of garbage factoids delivered to screens every days. Consilience is what allows you to get past epistemic learned helplessness, to see that while claims of ancient astronauts or worlds in collision are very sexy, they simply do not tie strongly to the rest of knowledge, whether history or astronomy. You DO know the kernel of eliable truth, it's the fixed point, or interesection, of all the different bodies of knowledge out there.
But this is not easy, sure! It requires a lot more reading and a lot less watching. Even worse, it requires reading a constantly changing set of materials, whereas it's so much easier to keep reading the same thing again and again (and pretending that you must be really smart because you understand everything you read). It requires constantly asking why, or where you disagree with what you're reading.
The point is Consilience. Falsifiability, sure, where feasible. Experiments, sure.
But Consilience more than anything else, especially now, is the master key. There's a reason E O Wilson made such a big deal about it.
(FWIW I see Debord as someone who does not live by those code, someone who prioritizes blame over truth. This is, of course, the natural human condition, to care much more about ways to attack our enemies, real or imagined, than to forget the damn enemies and attack Ignorance. And it presents in a lack of interest in Consilience, so we see lots of valid points, lots of good examples, but essentially Conspiracy Theory links between these points; a supposed unified theory of the world, but based on strawmanning the opposition and steelmanning one's own theory, rather than the reverse.
Is the point of Philosophy, for Debord, to understand the world, or to complain about it? I want the understanding, but he seems more interested in telling us that, obviously, OBVIOUSLY, the Society of the Spectacle is bad (so he doesn't have to justify this claim) and here are five hundred things related to its badness. That's not Consilience, that's theology, starting with the revealed truth and then asserting how that truth manifests itself in one item after another.)
In further thinking about the review of reviews,
Should you review a review, if you haven't read the original text?
Should a review of a review be judged against other prior reviews?
Why new reviews when existing reviews already exist?
When is a book review a review rather than a essay, which uses text as starting point.
To this end, I share this
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/opinion/trump-and-the-society-of-the-spectacle.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share