(In)visible non-living
What you're reading is an attempt to delve deeper into the 10th aphorism featured in Guy Debord's 'The Society of the Spectacle'. If you missed the last one, you can read it here.
Here's the actual passage:
The concept of spectacle unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena. The diversity and contrasts are appearances of a socially organized appearance, the general truth of which must itself be recognized. Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is affirmation of all human life, namely social life as mere appearance. But the critique which exposes the truth of the spectacle reveals it as the visible negation of life, as a negation of life which has become visible.
Somewhere in this dense aphorism lies a fundamental truth that would explain the rise of the 'explainer' and the concurrent 'understander economy'. But I haven't been able to find it, not yet.
We will instead look at this for what it is: a blunt declaration that the more time we spend spectating, the less we are living.
Synthesis, not Analysis
This headline that you are reading above is borrowed from the tagline of The Nutgraf, a popular newsletter written by Praveen Gopal Krishnan of The Ken. I personally don't read it (not anymore, at least), but this tagline is something that's always stuck with me because part of the genius behind many widely read newsletters is that they unearth seemingly unidentifiable patterns amongst seemingly unrelated phenomena.
Whether or not those patterns exist is not the question. What matters is those patterns can be constructed, and as a spectator, we'll be none the wiser.
Think about it, almost any major information source, be it a blog, a newsletter or a course bills itself as a one-stop shop for those seeking explanations for a wide variety of 'apparent phenomena'. I would peg the success of most modern digital-first business news sources to this deep-rooted sentiment held by the average 'knowledge worker'.
And since 'knowledge' has become so fundamentally divorced from actual physical realities, there is no limit to how much of it can be produced, and how much of it can be peddled.
Nothing is true, everything is permitted
Much like the last one, this headline is borrowed from a video game I loved playing as a teenager: Assassin's Creed 2. It was a phrase that would be used to remind the protagonist of the veiled nature of reality. Some ten years on, this phrase continues to ring in my head because of what I observe online on a daily basis: opposing perspectives peddled with such conviction that both of them seem true, ceteris paribus.
That's what I think Debord was probably getting at: all spectacles peddle an appearance, which harks back to something that lives within all of us; the belief that what we're seeing is a mere facade and that there's something just beneath the surface that we can feel, but can't quite see.
Get busy livin', or get busy dying
This is a line from The Shawshank Redemption, where two inmates discuss the possibility of escape with one believing it possible and the other citing it as a 'pipe dream'. Today, I believe that many of us live in self-imposed digital dungeons, with a few of us telling ourselves that it's by choice (is it, really?).
The more time you spend looking, reading, staring, explaining and 'consooming', the less time you're spending outside of your head, in the real world with all its bounty. Rising screen times are a visible negation of life, and that number (whatever it may be) is as sure an indicator as there ever was about the negation of life which has become visible.
If any of this sounds relatable, please write to me. Part of the reason I write this is to seek out more people who feel the same way I do about the modern Internet.
If you enjoyed reading this, you might like my cleverly disguised rants on LinkedIn too.