Speaker 1: Call zone media.
Speaker 2: The richest man in the world does a Nazi salute
Speaker 2: while giving a speech at the inauguration of the new president.
Speaker 2: He does a second one in another age. It is
Speaker 2: the most significant event in world history. It's maybe the
Speaker 2: third most fascist event of the day. NBC re uploads
Speaker 2: the address and cuts away from the sig hail a
Speaker 2: broadcasted live. You refresh your timeline. Everyone is arguing about
Speaker 2: whether it was even a Nazi salute. You watch the video.
Speaker 2: It's a Nazi salute. The second one is a Nazi salute.
Speaker 2: None of the headlines will say that Elon Musk did
Speaker 2: a Nazi salute. The articles won't say it either. You
Speaker 2: can't tell whether they've been cowed to submission by the
Speaker 2: threat of a defamation lawsuit, or if they're already running
Speaker 2: cover for the new regime. You scroll through your timeline.
Speaker 2: They made my gender illegal, tried to repeal the fourteenth
Speaker 2: Amendment through executive order to end birthright citizenship. You can't
Speaker 2: follow it. It's too much. The world has become a spectacle,
Speaker 2: and that spectacle is trying to kill you. Welcome to
Speaker 2: ikodap and here I'm your host, Mia Wong. In societies
Speaker 2: where modern conditions of production prevail. All of life presents
Speaker 2: itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. So wrote the
Speaker 2: French social theorist Gee to Board in his seminal nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty seven work The Society of the Spectacle. The Board
Speaker 2: is typically written off as just another theorist of early
Speaker 2: mass media, and today his work is generally confined to
Speaker 2: the art world, which is, to be fair largely a
Speaker 2: demonstration of the fact that nobody who talks about him
Speaker 2: has ever gotten past the opening paragraph of the book
Speaker 2: and made it to the part where he demands the
Speaker 2: formation of armed workers councils. But this is the age
Speaker 2: of the spectacle. In ways when Nightmarish that de Board
Speaker 2: could ever have predicted, his elaborate metaphor is rendered thuddingly
Speaker 2: literal quote. Everything that was directly lived has moved away
Speaker 2: into representation, and indeed living has been replaced by the
Speaker 2: image of living. This phenomena is called instagram. The spectacle.
Speaker 2: Society of the Spectacle opens is not a collection of images,
Speaker 2: but a social relation among people mediated by images. Today
Speaker 2: we literally call the collection of images we use to
Speaker 2: relate to each other social media. Quote. Lived reality is
Speaker 2: materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, while simultaneously
Speaker 2: absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. A reality
Speaker 2: TV star, the old human symbol of the spectacle, in
Speaker 2: which everything that was directly lived has been transformed into
Speaker 2: a representation, is now a president the second time, driven
Speaker 2: by streamers and influencers and podcasters, who stand as the
Speaker 2: new human symbols of the spectacle. They have invaded real
Speaker 2: society and now rule it directly. In the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 2: the debate was whether you could ignore the spectacle because
Speaker 2: it wasn't real. The Board's elegant solution was that contemplating
Speaker 2: the spectacle makes it real. None of that matters anymore.
Speaker 2: You can't ignore the spectacle because it's here. It has
Speaker 2: physically invaded the world. Donald Trump is the president. The
Speaker 2: richest man on earth is Nazi, saluting Elon Musk. The
Speaker 2: autonomous force to Board, described as a spectacle, no longer
Speaker 2: operates at the abstract level. It is the president of
Speaker 2: the United States. Everything is rendered thuddingly, transcendently literal into
Speaker 2: Board's usage. The spectacle is the management of society by
Speaker 2: mediating people's social relations through images. This sounds complicated, but
Speaker 2: on an intuitive level, you already understand this. You and
Speaker 2: I relate to each other through the one way mirror
Speaker 2: of a podcast app. You relate to others by reacting
Speaker 2: to their TikTok videos. You watch the bombs fall on
Speaker 2: Palestine on Twitter. You relate to each other and the
Speaker 2: world through images, and that relation is a system of control.
Speaker 2: As de Board describes it, that mediation takes you out
Speaker 2: of the real world, a world that you can actually
Speaker 2: change with your actions, and thrust you into the world
Speaker 2: with the spectacle, a world where reality is quote an
Speaker 2: object of mere contemplation. Today we call this the discourse.
Speaker 2: The work that inspired the nineteen sixty eight revolutions called
Speaker 2: it the spectacle. Why does it feel like this, the rot,
Speaker 2: the decay, the unreality of the moment that consumes you
Speaker 2: until one day Donald Trump is president and the next
Speaker 2: he's president again. To Board has a simple answer. It's
Speaker 2: because the entire political, economic, and technological system is designed
Speaker 2: to make you isolated, afraid, and alone. Quote. Technology is
Speaker 2: based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn.
Speaker 2: From the automobile to television, all of the goods selected
Speaker 2: by the spectacular system are also weapons for a constant
Speaker 2: reinforcement of the condition of isolated lonely crowds. Later, he writes,
Speaker 2: what binds the spectators together is no more than an
Speaker 2: irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation.
Speaker 2: The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.
Speaker 2: This is why the world feels like an endless doom.
Speaker 2: Scroll Instagram, TikTok live streaming this podcast. They're all based
Speaker 2: on isolation. Look at what happened to social media during
Speaker 2: the isolation of the pandemic. How it came to consume
Speaker 2: even more of our lives with the promise of connection
Speaker 2: that simply rendered us more and more and more isolated.
Speaker 2: The spectacle, given technological form in the social media app,
Speaker 2: turns us into a mass in which we are all
Speaker 2: somehow terrifyingly alone. We're not people who form a crowd
Speaker 2: that could do anything from celebrate a holiday to burn.
Speaker 2: The third precinct were spectators with listeners were viewers or
Speaker 2: chat not living but commenting on the image of living.
Speaker 2: The spectacle the app the image mediates or social relations
Speaker 2: with each other and ensures that together in a lonely crowd,
Speaker 2: we wrought in isolation and do only the two things
Speaker 2: the capitalist system needs us to do. Work and consume atomize.
Speaker 2: Individuals are the ideal subject of capitalism, the basis on
Speaker 2: which everything is built. You entered into a free contract
Speaker 2: to live under a state, says a social theorist. You,
Speaker 2: the individual, gave up your labor to your boss voluntarily,
Speaker 2: in another free contract between individuals, says the economist. Do
Speaker 2: not organize with anyone else to get paid more for
Speaker 2: that labor, or God help you. Try to create a
Speaker 2: system where you aren't forced to sell your labor every day.
Speaker 2: That's cheating, says the politician. Your job is to sell
Speaker 2: your labor, buy these products, and comment on a world
Speaker 2: in which someone else is acting. The isolation of the
Speaker 2: spectacle ensures that we're incapable of collective action. Not only
Speaker 2: because we're incapable of forming a collective we're not even
Speaker 2: engaging in the world in which action can take place.
Speaker 2: The extent of the advance of the spectacle today is
Speaker 2: such that the unfolding of the economic system is designed
Speaker 2: to turn every part of you into a commodity, not
Speaker 2: just your labor, but your identity, your beliefs, everything that
Speaker 2: you are is sold to everyone else a spectacle, and
Speaker 2: in turn, everything that defines you becomes the spectacle itself.
Speaker 2: In a world where there is no action, just the
Speaker 2: image of someone else's actions somewhere else, a commercialized political
Speaker 2: identity is much easier to adopt than actually doing politics.
Speaker 2: You don't have to do politics. You can just put
Speaker 2: on a red hat and watch the man on TV
Speaker 2: make the liberals angry. You don't need relations with your family,
Speaker 2: you have Facebook groups. Your relations to the world world
Speaker 2: are relations to images. David Graber wrote that the ultimate
Speaker 2: hidden truth of the world is that it is something
Speaker 2: that we make and could just as easily make differently.
Speaker 2: But the second, slightly less ultimate hidden truth is that
Speaker 2: almost everything we think of as objects, money, capital, commodities
Speaker 2: are really just relations between people abstracted out onto something physical.
Speaker 2: We interact with each other by using objects as forms
Speaker 2: of command. What do you think money is? Instead of
Speaker 2: having real, equal social relations, And that makes it all
Speaker 2: the more dire that the social relations that compose this
Speaker 2: world are no longer even relations with each other at all,
Speaker 2: but relations with images. The spectacle is a strategy of
Speaker 2: control rights quote where the real world changes into simple images,
Speaker 2: the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of
Speaker 2: hypnotic behavior. The spectacle is a tendency to make one
Speaker 2: see the world by various means of specialized mediations. It
Speaker 2: can no longer be grasped directly. As a spectacle advances,
Speaker 2: even rebellion is reduced to meaningless attacks on the symbols
Speaker 2: of power, never touching power itself. Quote. But when the
Speaker 2: insurgents managed to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters
Speaker 2: of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya or in Wisconsin,
Speaker 2: it's only to discover empty places that is empty of
Speaker 2: power and furnished without any taste. So wrote the Invisible
Speaker 2: Committee of the Distant halcyon Days of twenty fourteen, it
Speaker 2: could have been written yesterday. Nine years later, the insurgents,
Speaker 2: now on the right, produced their masterpiece, Brazil's even more
Speaker 2: ineffectual Cousin of January sixth, known forever as January eighth,
Speaker 2: on that day in twenty twenty three. For reasons that
Speaker 2: are almost totally incomprehensible to anyone whose mind has not
Speaker 2: been utterly melted by prolonged and terrible exposure to the spectacle,
Speaker 2: supporters of defeated President JayR. Bolsonaro stormed Brazil's capital. Bolsonaro,
Speaker 2: of course, had already fled to Florida. The Presidential Palace, Congress,
Speaker 2: and the Supreme Court were literally empty when the protesters
Speaker 2: took them. There was nothing to be one, nothing to
Speaker 2: be gained. The protesters vain hopes that simply seizing the
Speaker 2: symbols of power would trigger a military coup to remove
Speaker 2: Lula and restore the Bolsonara regime evaporated like a morning dew,
Speaker 2: leaving nothing in their wake. January sixth at least attacked
Speaker 2: the site of the ritual of power while the ritual
Speaker 2: was technically in progress. The attack was of course, designed
Speaker 2: to stop the certification of the election Congress was at
Speaker 2: least in session, even if that attack, too, was the
Speaker 2: culmination of a series of ineffectual reruns of the Broke
Speaker 2: Brothers Riots, in which right wing political operatives did manage
Speaker 2: to steal an election by stopping the vote count in
Speaker 2: Florida in two thousand. On January eighth, no one was
Speaker 2: even there, So how do we get out? Lashing out
Speaker 2: at the symbols of power is pointless. You can't ignore
Speaker 2: them either Elon's Nazi salute really does represent something. The
Speaker 2: opening of any solution is to go to the source.
Speaker 2: Trump and Elon are symptoms, not the disease. The spectacle
Speaker 2: is born of capitalism, management strategy designed to suppress any
Speaker 2: attempt to end or even rearrange the terms of the
Speaker 2: class system. Trump and Elon were likewise produced by two
Speaker 2: settler colonies. They are, in their own ways, the manifestation
Speaker 2: of the evil of colonialism and racism. The Board's solution
Speaker 2: to these problems, of course, well the solutions that people
Speaker 2: bother to read. There is a staggeringly racist section of
Speaker 2: this work about how time passes in China that I
Speaker 2: simply cannot recommend. But the Board's solution was workers' councils,
Speaker 2: and he got his wish the next year between the
Speaker 2: factory occupations of nineteen sixty eight. It nearly worked. But
Speaker 2: the last workers council fell a quarter of a century
Speaker 2: ago in Argentina, and there's no sign at the workers council.
Speaker 2: The definitive fighting form of the working class for over
Speaker 2: a century is coming back. In some ways. This is liberating.
Speaker 2: One hundred and seventy years ago, Marx wrote this in
Speaker 2: the eighteenth through mayor of Louis Bonaparte, his own response
Speaker 2: to a nation's nationalist attempt to restore its former glory
Speaker 2: by invoking the name of a previous leader. The social
Speaker 2: revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from
Speaker 2: the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin
Speaker 2: with itself before it has stripped away all superstitions about
Speaker 2: the past. In the days and weeks and months, and
Speaker 2: God help us all years to come, we're going to
Speaker 2: have to assemble a new fighting form, and no one
Speaker 2: knows what it looks like yet. We could perhaps look
Speaker 2: at the airport protests from the first months of the
Speaker 2: original Trump administration, or masses of people, including a very
Speaker 2: young Mia who had not quite realized what gender she was,
Speaker 2: occupied airports all across the country to stop the implementation
Speaker 2: of Trump's Muslim ban by physically forcing the government to
Speaker 2: release the people had detained in the airports. The power
Speaker 2: of those protests was that they directly located the site
Speaker 2: where power was operating the airport and took them. The
Speaker 2: weakness of those protests was that people went home, and
Speaker 2: they went home because they had been told time and
Speaker 2: time and time again by the ACLU and by other
Speaker 2: legal organizations that the fight was over, that they could leave,
Speaker 2: and that the Muslim Bans would be defeated by the courts.
Speaker 2: Most of you lived through it. Some of you remember
Speaker 2: the Muslim ban was never defeated by the courts. It
Speaker 2: could possibly have been defeated in those moments, it wasn't.
Speaker 2: The contest was taken away from the real sight of
Speaker 2: power and into a domain largely ruled by the ruling class.
Speaker 2: But we can learn from both January eighth and the
Speaker 2: airport protests. Marching to a building doesn't guarantee you're actually
Speaker 2: targeting power. You must understand how the system is operating
Speaker 2: before you attempt to go up its works. A thousand
Speaker 2: miniature January eighths is no solution at all. You must
Speaker 2: do the hard work of sifting through the tangle of
Speaker 2: rumors and lies and attempting to work out the actual
Speaker 2: structure of repression. It starts with community self defense. It
Speaker 2: starts with actually engaging with each other instead of the
Speaker 2: mediated images generated by an algorithm. You want to break
Speaker 2: out of the spectacle. Talk to the people around you,
Speaker 2: talk to the trans people and the immigrants in your life,
Speaker 2: and find out what they actually need. Figure out the
Speaker 2: concrete steps you can take to organize the people around you,
Speaker 2: and the steps you can take to lift them out
Speaker 2: of their despair. We're not going to develop a new
Speaker 2: fighting form glued to our phones alone in a digital crowd.
Speaker 2: We're going to figure it out by talking to each other,
Speaker 2: by acting in the real world, not by being rendered
Speaker 2: passive observers of the spectacle. We're going to do it
Speaker 2: by finding the real places where power operates and taking them,
Speaker 2: and above all, we're going to do it together.
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