The Society of the Spectacle

Please Watch The Society of the Spectacle

This is Guy Debord's film The Society of the Spectacle, with a dodgy English dub. It's 87 minutes long.

If you watch this film, or read the book, this whole wandering thing'll definitely make more sense.

What I've Been Chasing

I'm out here taking pictures of graffiti and building details and walking around, but mostly I'm thinking about false consciousness.

The deeper I get into New York... the more I learn of the city's past and present - and by extension the history of the world over the last 400 years - the more obvious it becomes that this whole planet is held hostage by a small group of pirates.

But you have to be impressed.

12,000 years ago, at the dawn of agriculture, somebody had to figure out how to tell a story that gave reason for why a few folks should sit around and collect the labor of everyone else.

They had to build a system for disseminating that story, and culling anyone that didn't agree with it. And that system evolved over time.

Which means all of us alive today have been through 12,000 of psychological conditioning, as well as selective breeding for docility, because the twigs and branches of the human tree that rebelled have repeatedly been lopped off.

On top of this, depending on where you are, you have up to 1,700 years of accelerated large-scale conditioning by the world's major churches.

And then, in the past 100 years, we have the chaotic cultural hypnosis of global mass media.

And the result is that we are all living in deeply distorted versions of reality, and few of us are ready to acknowledge how profoundly we're stuck in false consciousness.

Since close-reading Cave Metaphor from Book VII of Plato's Republic in 7th grade seminar at my hippy public school in Alaska, it has been my goal to get my ass out of the cave.

At 12 I didn't have language for it, but I knew I didn't want to live in false consciousness. No other goal ever presented to me by society ever remotely measured up.

This drive pushed me to drop out of college and go around the world. It pushed me to leave or blow up dozens of romantic relationships, jobs, housing situations, and personal and professional connections and to keep changing the scene so I could see the shadows on the cave wall from a different angle.

And I'm pretty happy with the ways I've escaped, or been freed, from the cave.

But I'm smart enough to know: I'm still a lot more in the cave than I like to think.

So while I'm out here taking pictures of licit and elicit modifications of the built environment, my mind is often on this matter of waking myself up from this intricately-woven false consciousness.

And where better to do this than NYC, the primary generator of the global projection of unnatural fears and irrational desires.

Guy Debord called this projection The Spectacle - the swirling mass of images that seek to keep us all from realizing that the world is being drained by vampires, and that to varying degrees, we're all prisoners in the cave.

I'm not suggesting you should blow up your life like I did. We've all got our own constraints. But within yours, I want to ask: What are you chasing? And if it isn't trying to get out of the cave, are you sure it isn't shadows on a wall?

Thanks for your visit,

Dan Flag

Written in The Well, on the edge of Sugar Hill, with people singing, yelling, and puking in the street outside. A bit after midnight.