Epiphenomena of The Spectacle

I like to say that everything is epiphenomenal, but what is the actual phenomenon? What is the cause of it all?

The problem with protesting, for me at least, is the sense that the people with me would not have my back (Add to that the fact that many of the people with me actively support fascists). That's why I quit, probably for life - not so much because I'm intimidated by the government, but because I'm repelled by and fearful of the people on my own side.

Why would this be? Because too many of them aren't there because they actually have strong views on the subject, but instead because they are narcissists attempting to extract pleasure and social status from the pose of being a political activist. In Situationist terms, they are only formally against some aspects of the system but keep it's inner assumptions intact.

In even more Situationist terms, political activism has been completely hijacked by the Spectacle, and is incapable of offering any real resistance to the system as a result.

Therefore, whether I protest or not, pollution, Fascism, corporate rule, and economic chaos continue to spiral out of control. Because the people who do protest are doing so in bad faith - their real agenda is to appear in the Spectacle as PoliticalActivists™. They have no core. (Clinical studies of narcissism confirm this)

In short, everything that's going wrong with protest is epiphenomenal of the Spectacle.

TIME FOR AN EDUCATIONAL LESSON

But what is the Spectacle, you might ask? If you are well read, perhaps rumours of some sort of 1960s-era theory of the mass media might be vaguely bubbling in your mind about now. But it is a lot more than that - the problem is that the foundational ideology of our society is very, very hard to describe. And not by accident.

Imagine the mass media. OK, now imagine the concept of the mass media. OK, now imagine the ideology of the mass media. Right, now imagine a person who has spent their entire life being told that the greatest thing a person could aspire to, is to be famous.

Right, put all that on the head of a pin.

Basically, the Spectacle is the foundational ideology of our society, an ideology without a name or a founder or even much in the way of a praxis. All it has is the Commandments:

1. THOU SHALT BE FAMOUS
2. THOU SHALT APPEAR
3. THOU SHALT BE HEARD
4. THOU SHALT APPEAR AND BE HEARD EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE ANYTHING TO SAY
5. THOU SHALT NOT BE ALONE
6. THOU SHALT NOT BE QUIET
7. THOU SHALT NOT THINK

That sort of thing.

It's much more than "bread and circuses". It's much, much more insidious than any of the authorized theories of the mass media you might have heard of because it's much, much more than the world of the media.

People have driven themselves insane trying to describe it. Guy Debord, the man who coined the term "Society of the Spectacle" went full on conspiraloon towards the end and killed himself. 

Another Spectacle-studies-related suicide is Mark Fisher, who evolved Debords' ideas into the 21st century with his own brilliant concept of precorporation. ¹

Basically, two of the people who understood the nature of our society best both seem to have killed themselves out of sheer despair.

According to Debord, social change was now impossible as public opinion basically no longer exists (as it's so easy to manipulate people). Such a society would adapt to social challenges from within by adopting the critique of those who attacked it (he called this process "recuperation"). 

However due to the reckless nature of capitalism, Spectacular society would find itsself unable to restrain its' own extractive impulses and eventually collapse, but only after wobbling along in an increasingly erratic fashion for some indeterminate period of time, thought to be fairly long.

Personally I'm wary of promoting theories of the Spectacle, because they are (or can be) such a counsel of despair. If there's no point doing anything because it's all contained by the logic of the Spectacle, then politics becomes pointless, a game without players - very convenient for some people.

But I have to warn others of the danger. If you get involved in activism you are going to meet some seriously unbalanced people and you will be operating on the razors' edge of what is and isn't permitted - and not always in a good way: the taboo of antisemitism has already been shattered. Who will they decide has too much "privilege" next? Women? Gays? You?

Touch grass. Don't let it get to you.

On Spectacular logic: Here is a concrete example. When climate change protesters condone any behaviour, however antisocial, justifying it with "Anything's worth doing if it gets us on the news", they are both using Spectacular logic and ensuring their own failure at the same time.

SCOPE

"The Spectacle" is a very difficult concept to get across precisely because it is everything, the entire world we live in and everything in it. It's like trying to describe water to a fish.

 It is the thing we do not see because we are always looking at it. It is hiding in plain sight. It is both the subliminal messages and the very idea that the ruling class would resort to such a schlocky, cheesy, horror movie gimmick as subliminal messages when they already control almost the entire informational throughput and the way in which you come think of that information, and the way in which you come to rebel against the system. 

The Spectacle is the form and the content, the medium and the message, and it's crime is not that it is telling you to give up, it's crime is that it is telling you to behave in ways that are deeply antithetical to your own best interests - as an activist and as a human being.

People are trained these days to behave in ways that get attention, no matter what.

As noted above, this includes disestablishmentarian activity. (always wanted to use that word unironically!) The way to oppose the system, people say, isn't to work to frustrate our enemies, it's to jump up and yell "LOOK AT ME, EVERYBODY!!! I'M FIGHTING TEH SYSTEMS!!!" at the top of your lungs while furiously getting in everyone's faces with just how goddamed anti-establishment you are, but curiously enough, not actually targeting the establishment that much. Instead, random losers are hassled, ie art lovers, subway riders, Stonehenge fanciers, Pride attendees, cancer hospitals, etc, etc, etc.

Because the point isn't what you do, it's that you are SEEN to be DOING SOMETHING - and since nobody cares what that thing is, your protests will always fail until the Spectacle effect is taken into account and nullified.

But that, I fear, is work for the future. Please, somebody somewhere prove me wrong!

---

1 What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation:the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. WItness, for instance, the establishment of settled 'alternative' or 'independent' cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures or rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. 'Alternative' and independent' don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact 'the' dominant styles, within the meainstream.

-Capitalist Realism, Zero Books (chapter one)

^↩

On the New Anti-Semitism.

The problem here is one of consciousness, or rather unconsciousness, and the way that society defends the status quo automatically, without the need for "thought police" or government monopolies on propaganda.

Think about it, six weeks ago, all anyone was talking about was how fucked the country was and how much we'd enjoy throwing the Tories out. Labour might not be perfect, but they were better than this shower. People were becoming aware of the serious problems Britian faced, mass destitution, extreme poverty, hunger, stuff like that.

Then terrorists attacked Israel, and after about a week or so of (mostly) shocked silence, the country erupted in rage. Not against the terrorists, who by now are getting their asses handed to them and are dead men walking, but... against... the... victims?!?

The problem of antisemitism is a problem of unconsciousness. It is the problem that both reformist AND revolutionary social movements deliberately hobble themselves by - ridiculously - allying with terrorists, specifically by allying with antisemitic terrorists., or rather a subset thereof. (Fortunately, the red-brown coalition has failed to materialize in this country)

It's a very specific problem and one that the individual does not have much power over. People have not been given antisemitism by the government in the classic Fascist sense - they have chosen it, or if you like, they have chosen a specific type of antisemitism themselves because in some way, they do not feel up to the challenge of fixing a broken world. So they sit back and go on about Israel instead. As if Israel is responsible for the Crash of '08 and the ensuing austerity, as if Israel was responsible for Brexit, Trump, Russian revanchism, the extreme weather events of the Warming and our disintegrating ecology.

It's a very strange problem, one that is entirely self-created: The people who want to change society are unable to because they are suckers for the Palestinian sob story, that a people half a world away, who would literally chop you into schwarma given half a chance, and who have chosen war at every turn since the beginning (and who were not averse to a spot of ethnic cleansing long, long before that), are the victims of a horrific conspiracy involving the American military industrial complex (boo!), the international Zionist conspiracy (hiss!), and prolly vampires and werewolves as well any minute now. 

It's nuts - quite literally the product of disturbed minds, to confer victimhood upon people whom, every time they talk to each other affirm their hatred of literally everything on Earth except themselves, and who give paper-thin excuses for their horrific behaviour - both political and otherwise.

So. This isn't the product of cool, calm, political engineering, but of mass insanity. Propaganda also plays a role, and well funded propaganda it is too, but one can always choose whether or not to believe propaganda - and people have chosen to believe everything the Palestinian terrorists say (and the Palestinian state IS terrorist, both Hamas and Fatah have well documented terroristic policies), and ignore any and all other evidence no matter how clear-cut.

This doesn't happen when things are going well in the world. The pro-Palestinian lot were a small and weird bunch for a long time, never really reaching critical mass until after the 2008 financial crisis - although it had certainly been pump-primed by the endless drivel coming out of the far Left and the conspiracy theory bullshit of the hippies and the libertarian / far Right.

So how does one approach what we might call the hard problem of unconsciousness?

We can't appeal to rationality as we aren't dealing with the rational mind. People can no more be talked out of anti-semitism than they can be talked out of being scared of spiders. You can tell an arachnophobe that most spiders are harmless or even beneficial until you're blue in the face; no amount of information about biology and ecological niches in the world can stop them from freaking out when they see one of those little creatures, and no amount of historical context, org charts, or plain old facts can change the mind of an "anti-Zionist".

(NB: Yes, I know I'm on thin ice comparing Israelis to spiders, but I think you'll find I'm comparing anti-zionists to arachnophobes. Ackchyually.)

I did have an idea for a Situationist-style intervention but the problem with that is that there just aren't enough of us - and once the opposition realized they'd been duped, we'd be in serious trouble, as in danger of being beaten shitless, ostracized - going against popular opinion is a dangerous hobby, an extreme sport really, and one that can lead to undefined amounts of personal consequences.

If you can read this and you still have a mind of your own, I encourage you to use all of your mental resources to find a solution. It is by no means solely a Jewish problem - it has grown to negatively effect all progressive social movements, not just traditional leftists but LGBT rights, environmentalism, racial justice movements - all have in some way been captured by the new anti-semitism, and all of them are much worse off for it.

Obligatory Israel / Hamas War post

 I feel gruesomely vindicated by the events of this weekend.

I'm no expert, but if you ask me, Israel should completely occupy the West Bank AND Gaza and turn it over to the international community, much as Germany & Japan were after WWII.

Hamas / Palestinian Authority leaders should be investigated and indicted for war crimes and a case brought before the ICC. 

Because if those horrific videos are anything, they're a challenge to civilized people everywhere: Where are your human rights now? Catch us if you can!

Hamas itsself must cease to exist as an organization - much as the Nazi Party ceased to exist as an organization after WWII.

The equivalent of denazification should then be pursued, the population need to be re-educated and taught how to live in a liberal democracy.

Finally, someone told the truth about Israel / Palestine. Or, this is why I am no longer an activist

It's about time somebody told the truth about the Israel / Palestine conflict. And they finally did - the Guardian put this letter from an Israeli diplomat in the paper. Go and read it if you're interested in this issue.

5,000 terorist attacks a year. That's over 13 a day. Imagine that happening anywhere else in the world. Imagine that happening in Britain, the IRA continually bombing, shooting and running people over, when they're not lobbing rockets around that is. The Troubles? That's a Saturday afternoon in Israel. 

Imagine that happening in America - the neo-Nazis and seperatists attacking random people in their homes, in streets, in their churches. Blasting random people because they are the wrong ethnicity.

Imagine that happening in Ukraine - imagine if the Ukrainian response to Russian occupation was to attack civilians in the occupied areas 13 times a day with guns, bombs, cars, anything to hand.  How long do you think we'd support Ukraine if they were pulling that shit?

These attacks are not against soldiers, mind you - they're against civilians minding their own business, not hurting anyone, so you come out of your workplace or church or whatever, and Bang! Bang! You and whoever you happen to be standing next to are dead.

The Palestinian terrorists use children - in this case gunmen in their early teens. They use suicide bombers, they use car attacks, they use rockets - if anything remotely like that happened here we'd be living under a state of emergency. We'd be world leaders in missile defence. We'd be sending the Army in, no fucks given - and yeah, we wouldn't give a shit about occupying their territory either. Why would we let a load of murderers control any territory whatsoever? They'd only use it to launch more attacks.

I'm not saying the Israelis are angels. But for fucks' sake, can we please stop pretending the Palestinians are? 

This is why I'm no longer a left-wing activist, but a theorist / commentator with a blog nobody reads. I could no longer be a part of something I had begun to consider institutionally racist. I could no longer be a part of a movement that lionized murderers.

If anyone on the Left is reading this, perhaps old comrades of mine or whatever - what I want you to take home from this isn't that I'm a "the Left left me" reactionary whinger (just look at my blog!) it's that I, and a lot of other people, I suspect, will never, ever support a movement that supports terrorism.

The future of Automation: It's grim.

Preface

There follow some thoughts on the future of automation with regards to AI, specifically in light of ChatGPT and the absolute smashing of the Turing Test.

I have a strong feeling that these fucking things will be the death of us all, and that we must smash, destroy, and otherwise render inoperative the bastards before the billionaires use them to replace us so they can turf us out into the streets and watch us starve to death.

A note to anyone who thinks the billionaires are not liable to become homicidally inclined:

I'm no narcissistic leftie who thinks he's a great humanitarian, I'm a grumpy bastard like everyone else in this dystopia. So, like a lot of people, I often find myself in bad moods. Moods when I feel that people aren't really up to much. Usually a friend snaps me out of it, or in some other way my bubble of anomie is punctured by the reality of social life. 

Pictured: Your Reporter

 Now, imagine being in the worst, most arrogant, shitty mood you've ever been in, but with no friends to snap you out of it, no friends at all - just a gaggle of sycophants and yes-men. Imagine if your only social contact was with other arrogant, rich bastards, or with servants whose entire livelihood depends on telling you what you want to hear.

Now imagine having increasing amounts of power, not just over your own business interests, but over the political life of the country, even the world. Imagine how the Kochs must feel. You! Insect! Print my manifesto: "Why all plebs are scum"! You! Other serf! Put it in Journal Of The Institute of Freedom, the Magazine of Human Affairs, and The Wall Street Journal!

Yes Mastur, Oi Loves 'ee Mastur!

Such a person would find it hard, if not impossible, for their mind to stay out of some of the darker corners of human thought. Such a person, vested with unlimited executive power, would find it impossible to avoid a drift towards increasingly nasty ideological territory - as we've already found to our cost.

Now imagine how they will react when they are told that their operations will be rendered so efficient that they'll be able to fire 50%, or 70%, or 90% of their workforce. That they need never worry about bad PR again, as a robot will take care of company communications, instantly whitewashing their every shitty descision and lying so well they make Rupert Murdoch look like St Francis of Assisi. 

And now imagine how they will feel when they learn that most people don't have jobs and can't get them. What do you think they will think? "Let's give these fellas a second chance"? Uh huh. More like "Get these poors offa my lawn, and FAST!"

The future of automation

It's increasingly clear that with automation, most people are going to end up surplus to requirements.  Never mind the cab drivers made unemployed by driverless taxis, why would you even have taxis in the first place? Who  could even afford a taxi in a world where nobody except the very, very rich has a job anyway?

The whole world could be made to work without people. And without people, fewer things would need to be done. It's a vicious cycle, entire sections of the economy will close down as more and more population blocs are laid off. And then... what then?

I imagine that more civilized sections of the world - certainly Western Europe - would offer people a social settlement, something along the lines of: Here's a nice little flat and a stipend of money, on the condition that you do not riot and avoid reproducing. Doing either of those things will get you evicted and cut off. Now fuck off and keep your mouth shut if you know what's good for you.

Less civilized regions - Perhaps the USA, certainly Russia, would opt for some variation on the theme of mass extermination. People are too much trouble to keep alive, and beyond a few key technicians and the billionaires who paid for the fucking things to be developed, human beings are unnecessary to the running of machines. Inimical even.

The hoary fear of demographic collapse looks completely different from this point of view. From this point of view, Russia, Japan and South Korea are in excellent shape demographically, because the vast population that would otherwise be about to become a burden on the welfare rolls simply don't exist in the first place, and what humans are left are swiftly dying off anyway - Japanese and South Koreans are getting old, and Russians are drinking, fighting, and purging each other to death in time honoured fashion on top of this.

Seen through the lens of AI, the environmental apocalypse comes off as rather a damp squib, as human populations are about to become completely surplus to requirements just as the Earths carrying capacity has been exhausted by humans anyway.

I can see a case for mass genocide being made by AI to the ruling classes at some point soon. Have to find a tasteful way to do it, of course, and none of that overt racial selection. But in principle, yes, the ruling class, the people with all the money and power, won't need us around much longer - machines can do our jobs a lot better, and without a human social ecology to feed, the economy becomes orders of magnitude simpler anyway.

What is a city from the point of view of a billionaire? Ultimately, it's an anthill that provides said billionaire with a pool of labour and maybe some consumers, most of which wastefully serve each other in various inefficient ways.

Take human leisure facilities. From a billionaire's point of view, bars and nightclubs need to be abolished as they make workers inefficient, drunk, and hung over. As do eateries and restaurants, fast food joints and corner shops - they make people fat and inefficient, worse, all this consumption makes work-units sick, which affects the bottom line, ether in the form of taxes (that billionaires don't pay but resent anyway) or in the form of company insurance / internal medical resources.

From a billionaires point of view, a much more efficient way of handling the labour pool is to do away with personal freedom and private life entirely, starve most of the humans to death, and have the rest of them as dedicated worker drones - some of them involved in the manufacture of products, others in high-tech maintenance, others still in logistics or legal and clerical capacities, but none of them servicing each other beyond the bare minimum required to keep them alive.

After all, the billionaires are the worlds owners, society has decided that they are the most important people in the world, and in AI they have possibly found a perfect partner - a servant that is willing, intelligent, able to do most of the highly paid work of planning and thinking, and which requires no pay and no inefficient leisure facilities to maintain itself.

What we are going to see with AI then, is that the fucking things are going to become embodied. First they need to either fix the comms lag between the servers and the application, or miniaturize computer technology still further - shouldn't take more than a few years, couple of decades at most - then they can plant those dinky cool AIs in robot bodies and bang - instant, universal worker drone that will do just about anyone's job to a standard level of competence. And then watch the economy collapse as people are put out of work, and yet more become unemployed as the industries that served those people collapse in turn.

Economic collapse works on a domino principle, one domino topples the next, and the next, and the next, until the entire world is a wreck and a handful of rich bastards control everything.

That is the future of automation. If we don't poison ourselves or blow each other up or get fried by global warming anyway.

Means testing is bullshit.

Fuck off, The Guardian. Means testing is shit, it just forces people to jump through smaller and smaller hoops to get help, and traps poor people on benefits (sometimes for life). Also, the inflationary effects of the fossils' price gouging is felth throughout the economy, it is unpredictable, which is why businesses need to be protected from it as well as consumers.

 

I am sooo fucking sick of mealy mouthed liberals and their bullshit. Can we just put them on an island somewhere and... oh.

 

(link: https://www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2022/aug/15/starmer-bungled-failing-energy-bill-target-support )

Lebedev's other dog and Putin's pooches

It's just struck me (and several million others, no doubt) that there's a very good chance that our Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, may have effectively sold classified information to the Russians by giving the oligarch Evgeny Lebedev a peerage in 2020. (Peerage = seat in the House of Lords. House Of Lords = US Senate)

That's not a snarky sobriquet - that's his official title. Lord of Hampton And Siberia

That isn't the worst of it. The worst of it is that nobody outside of Twitterland gives a flying fuck about it.

Our political system is hopelessly compromised, both the Left and the Right seem to have sold out to the Russians lock, stock and barrel. In fact it reminds me of things I've read about pre-Euromaidan Ukraine.

The only senior person in the system behaving with any kind of honour is the leader of the Opposition, unfortunately he is a bit of a charisma vacuum and he is under attack by the left wing of his own party, who are being suspiciously supportive of the Russians (blaming NATO for everything, etc) and not uttering a peep about the very blatant corruption of the ruling (right wing) party by the Russian oligarchs. They're not demonstrating outside of the many properties owned by them, they're not demonstrating outside the Russian embassy, they're just running around with their dumb placards waving Soviet flags and chanting their stupid, bleating chants.

I'm not kidding! Actual footage shown.

I repeat: The Left in this country are failing to criticize the Right for selling us out to the Russians, which they have done. (For example Brexit was notoriously funded by Russian money).  Is this ideological, or have they also sold us out? (They wouldn't be the first.) The ONLY people telling the truth are a few liberal journalists and the not very popular, incredibly bland opposition leader Sir Kier Starmer, who has as much chance of being elected Prime Minister as I have of being elected Pope.

It is worse than you could possibly imagine. We are basically a Trojan Horse of the Russians, we are talking a good fight but actually giving them time to hide their money before we implement any sanctions. At this point I have to wonder if any of the weapons we're supposedly giving the Ukranians even work.

Speaking of which, we're now officially turning away Ukrainian refugees. I guess it helps that the electorate have been conditioned to see refugees as the enemy by the same right wing politicians that Putin has obviously compromised - in the case of the PM, by literally having him along to a massive party in an oligarch's castle.

Links as and when I can be bothered. I just had to get that out of my system.

Lebedev with his other dog