from Hacker News

The Society of the Spectacle

by raldu on 1/28/22, 2:14 PM with 56 comments

  • by beepbooptheory on 1/30/22, 2:38 PM

    If you are in interested in this stuff at all, can't recommend enough McKenzie Wark's books on the subject, both The Spectacle of Disintegration and The Beach Beneath Street. They had a profound effect upon me.

    Wark also, fwiw, wrote the Hacker Manifesto [1]. Although, ironically, I can't imagine her views there would be that well received on HN.

    1. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674015432

  • by antihero on 1/30/22, 1:33 PM

    I've read quite a bit of this book, and situationalism is awesome - though I do find this writing style quite...fatiguing. Part of me can't work out whether it's written like this to fit a huge amount of meaning into one paragraph or whether it's just being flash or whether it's also a postmodernist nod to postmodernism itself (which...isn't all postmodernism?).

  • by blacksqr on 1/30/22, 3:23 PM

    A key text that helped lay the foundations for the social changes of the 1960s and 70s.

    See _Lipstick Traces_ by Greil Marcus for an introduction to Debord and Situationism.

  • by _Nat_ on 1/30/22, 8:25 PM

    Aggressively anti-intellectual. And.. tortured? It reads like a literary version of [The Scream](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream ), where it aggressively rejects reality as a monster, grasping at straws in the process in a manner that suggests severe psychological disturbance.

    The author seems to be begging for a simpler world -- to go back to an ancient golden age, before things got so complex (before "The Spectacle"). Before science, before economics, before industrialization, before mass-education, before the human knowledge-pool got bigger, and even before people recorded years (the author makes a big point of how only seasons, and not years, should be observed).

  • by lil_dispaches on 1/30/22, 2:37 PM

    This is the actual text of most EULA.

  • by dredmorbius on 1/30/22, 7:37 PM

  • by obiefernandez on 1/30/22, 3:22 PM

    I don’t think the author is surprised about the success of NFTs

  • by pkdpic on 1/30/22, 6:20 PM

    Really happy to see this thread. Its pretty impressive and inspiring that these kinds of conversations happen at all in a community where it's not considered that big of a deal to make over 200k a year. Especially inspiring given how influential the developer community seems to be.

  • by beckman466 on 1/30/22, 1:47 PM

    i'm a fan of these introduction videos by Tom Nicholas:

    Society of the Spectacle: WTF? Guy Debord, Situationism and the Spectacle Explained - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGJr08N-auM

    Donald Trump and the Society of the Spectacle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HAII7QWr_c

  • by eternalban on 1/30/22, 1:53 PM