Society and Production
What you're reading is a protracted attempt to make better sense of the first aphorism in Guy Debord's seminal The Society of the Spectacle. You can read more about the book here.
Let's dive in.
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an intense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
At first glance, this makes perfect sense. However, the fact that it makes sense is something that I find petrifying. Digging deeper, I had a few questions. What is a 'spectacle' and what is a 'representation'?
The Spectacle
Guy Debord defines the theory of the spectacle as:
The moment when the commodity has achieved the total occupation of life.
Replace the commodity with the word product and you'll have a clearer picture of the life of the knowledge worker. Modern societies, in an attempt to make things better, more efficient, and more prosperous have unwittingly reoriented the focus of everyday life into the creation and propagation of technologies that essentially alter the very fabric of our realities.
Computers, television, mechanized transportation, and the like exert such a heavy influence on our lives that they effectively control our perceptions of what it means to exist. When the constituents of reality itself are manufactured, what do you get? I believe this is what is being referred to when Debord talks about 'the representation'.
The Representation
A spectacle is built by and propagated by representations of ideas, objects, things, and even people. What we keep hearing today about building a 'personal brand' and creating a 'founder story' is all a matter of engineering these representations to fit into a grander design - the collective hallucination that we're all participating in.
As a final-year student in college, I once met this dapper gentleman who was conducting a workshop for soon-to-be graduates on what it took to impress interviewers. He ended that immensely entertaining session by saying something that simultaneously filled me with both hope and dread:
After all, can authenticity be learned and faked? One hundred percent, it can.
Much like he did, I'll end this here.
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If any of this sounds relatable, please write to me. Part of the reason I'm writing 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.