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January 24, 2025 17 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Call zone media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
The richest man in the world does a Nazi salute
while giving a speech at the inauguration of the new president.
He does a second one in another age. It is
the most significant event in world history. It's maybe the
third most fascist event of the day. NBC re uploads
the address and cuts away from the sig hail a

(00:26):
broadcasted live. You refresh your timeline. Everyone is arguing about
whether it was even a Nazi salute. You watch the video.
It's a Nazi salute. The second one is a Nazi salute.
None of the headlines will say that Elon Musk did
a Nazi salute. The articles won't say it either. You

(00:47):
can't tell whether they've been cowed to submission by the
threat of a defamation lawsuit, or if they're already running
cover for the new regime. You scroll through your timeline.
They made my gender illegal, tried to repeal the fourteenth
Amendment through executive order to end birthright citizenship. You can't
follow it. It's too much. The world has become a spectacle,

(01:12):
and that spectacle is trying to kill you. Welcome to
ikodap and here I'm your host, Mia Wong. In societies
where modern conditions of production prevail. All of life presents
itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. So wrote the
French social theorist Gee to Board in his seminal nineteen

(01:35):
sixty seven work The Society of the Spectacle. The Board
is typically written off as just another theorist of early
mass media, and today his work is generally confined to
the art world, which is, to be fair largely a
demonstration of the fact that nobody who talks about him
has ever gotten past the opening paragraph of the book

(01:55):
and made it to the part where he demands the
formation of armed workers councils. But this is the age
of the spectacle. In ways when Nightmarish that de Board
could ever have predicted, his elaborate metaphor is rendered thuddingly
literal quote. Everything that was directly lived has moved away
into representation, and indeed living has been replaced by the

(02:20):
image of living. This phenomena is called instagram. The spectacle.
Society of the Spectacle opens is not a collection of images,
but a social relation among people mediated by images. Today
we literally call the collection of images we use to
relate to each other social media. Quote. Lived reality is

(02:44):
materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, while simultaneously
absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. A reality
TV star, the old human symbol of the spectacle, in
which everything that was directly lived has been transformed into
a representation, is now a president the second time, driven

(03:07):
by streamers and influencers and podcasters, who stand as the
new human symbols of the spectacle. They have invaded real
society and now rule it directly. In the nineteen sixties,
the debate was whether you could ignore the spectacle because
it wasn't real. The Board's elegant solution was that contemplating
the spectacle makes it real. None of that matters anymore.

(03:31):
You can't ignore the spectacle because it's here. It has
physically invaded the world. Donald Trump is the president. The
richest man on earth is Nazi, saluting Elon Musk. The
autonomous force to Board, described as a spectacle, no longer
operates at the abstract level. It is the president of

(03:51):
the United States. Everything is rendered thuddingly, transcendently literal into
Board's usage. The spectacle is the management of society by
mediating people's social relations through images. This sounds complicated, but
on an intuitive level, you already understand this. You and

(04:13):
I relate to each other through the one way mirror
of a podcast app. You relate to others by reacting
to their TikTok videos. You watch the bombs fall on
Palestine on Twitter. You relate to each other and the
world through images, and that relation is a system of control.
As de Board describes it, that mediation takes you out

(04:36):
of the real world, a world that you can actually
change with your actions, and thrust you into the world
with the spectacle, a world where reality is quote an
object of mere contemplation. Today we call this the discourse.
The work that inspired the nineteen sixty eight revolutions called
it the spectacle. Why does it feel like this, the rot,

(05:01):
the decay, the unreality of the moment that consumes you
until one day Donald Trump is president and the next
he's president again. To Board has a simple answer. It's
because the entire political, economic, and technological system is designed
to make you isolated, afraid, and alone. Quote. Technology is

(05:25):
based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn.
From the automobile to television, all of the goods selected
by the spectacular system are also weapons for a constant
reinforcement of the condition of isolated lonely crowds. Later, he writes,
what binds the spectators together is no more than an

(05:46):
irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation.
The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.
This is why the world feels like an endless doom.
Scroll Instagram, TikTok live streaming this podcast. They're all based

(06:07):
on isolation. Look at what happened to social media during
the isolation of the pandemic. How it came to consume
even more of our lives with the promise of connection
that simply rendered us more and more and more isolated.
The spectacle, given technological form in the social media app,

(06:28):
turns us into a mass in which we are all
somehow terrifyingly alone. We're not people who form a crowd
that could do anything from celebrate a holiday to burn.
The third precinct were spectators with listeners were viewers or
chat not living but commenting on the image of living.

(06:53):
The spectacle the app the image mediates or social relations
with each other and ensures that together in a lonely crowd,
we wrought in isolation and do only the two things
the capitalist system needs us to do. Work and consume atomize.

(07:13):
Individuals are the ideal subject of capitalism, the basis on
which everything is built. You entered into a free contract
to live under a state, says a social theorist. You,
the individual, gave up your labor to your boss voluntarily,
in another free contract between individuals, says the economist. Do

(07:34):
not organize with anyone else to get paid more for
that labor, or God help you. Try to create a
system where you aren't forced to sell your labor every day.
That's cheating, says the politician. Your job is to sell
your labor, buy these products, and comment on a world
in which someone else is acting. The isolation of the

(07:55):
spectacle ensures that we're incapable of collective action. Not only
because we're incapable of forming a collective we're not even
engaging in the world in which action can take place.
The extent of the advance of the spectacle today is
such that the unfolding of the economic system is designed

(08:15):
to turn every part of you into a commodity, not
just your labor, but your identity, your beliefs, everything that
you are is sold to everyone else a spectacle, and
in turn, everything that defines you becomes the spectacle itself.
In a world where there is no action, just the

(08:37):
image of someone else's actions somewhere else, a commercialized political
identity is much easier to adopt than actually doing politics.
You don't have to do politics. You can just put
on a red hat and watch the man on TV
make the liberals angry. You don't need relations with your family,
you have Facebook groups. Your relations to the world world

(09:00):
are relations to images. David Graber wrote that the ultimate
hidden truth of the world is that it is something
that we make and could just as easily make differently.
But the second, slightly less ultimate hidden truth is that
almost everything we think of as objects, money, capital, commodities

(09:20):
are really just relations between people abstracted out onto something physical.
We interact with each other by using objects as forms
of command. What do you think money is? Instead of
having real, equal social relations, And that makes it all
the more dire that the social relations that compose this
world are no longer even relations with each other at all,

(09:43):
but relations with images. The spectacle is a strategy of
control rights quote where the real world changes into simple images,

(10:05):
the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of
hypnotic behavior. The spectacle is a tendency to make one
see the world by various means of specialized mediations. It
can no longer be grasped directly. As a spectacle advances,
even rebellion is reduced to meaningless attacks on the symbols

(10:26):
of power, never touching power itself. Quote. But when the
insurgents managed to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters
of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya or in Wisconsin,
it's only to discover empty places that is empty of

(10:47):
power and furnished without any taste. So wrote the Invisible
Committee of the Distant halcyon Days of twenty fourteen, it
could have been written yesterday. Nine years later, the insurgents,
now on the right, produced their masterpiece, Brazil's even more
ineffectual Cousin of January sixth, known forever as January eighth,

(11:11):
on that day in twenty twenty three. For reasons that
are almost totally incomprehensible to anyone whose mind has not
been utterly melted by prolonged and terrible exposure to the spectacle,
supporters of defeated President JayR. Bolsonaro stormed Brazil's capital. Bolsonaro,
of course, had already fled to Florida. The Presidential Palace, Congress,

(11:34):
and the Supreme Court were literally empty when the protesters
took them. There was nothing to be one, nothing to
be gained. The protesters vain hopes that simply seizing the
symbols of power would trigger a military coup to remove
Lula and restore the Bolsonara regime evaporated like a morning dew,

(11:55):
leaving nothing in their wake. January sixth at least attacked
the site of the ritual of power while the ritual
was technically in progress. The attack was of course, designed
to stop the certification of the election Congress was at
least in session, even if that attack, too, was the

(12:17):
culmination of a series of ineffectual reruns of the Broke
Brothers Riots, in which right wing political operatives did manage
to steal an election by stopping the vote count in
Florida in two thousand. On January eighth, no one was
even there, So how do we get out? Lashing out
at the symbols of power is pointless. You can't ignore

(12:41):
them either Elon's Nazi salute really does represent something. The
opening of any solution is to go to the source.
Trump and Elon are symptoms, not the disease. The spectacle
is born of capitalism, management strategy designed to suppress any

(13:02):
attempt to end or even rearrange the terms of the
class system. Trump and Elon were likewise produced by two
settler colonies. They are, in their own ways, the manifestation
of the evil of colonialism and racism. The Board's solution
to these problems, of course, well the solutions that people
bother to read. There is a staggeringly racist section of

(13:25):
this work about how time passes in China that I
simply cannot recommend. But the Board's solution was workers' councils,
and he got his wish the next year between the
factory occupations of nineteen sixty eight. It nearly worked. But
the last workers council fell a quarter of a century
ago in Argentina, and there's no sign at the workers council.

(13:48):
The definitive fighting form of the working class for over
a century is coming back. In some ways. This is liberating.
One hundred and seventy years ago, Marx wrote this in
the eighteenth through mayor of Louis Bonaparte, his own response
to a nation's nationalist attempt to restore its former glory

(14:08):
by invoking the name of a previous leader. The social
revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from
the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin
with itself before it has stripped away all superstitions about
the past. In the days and weeks and months, and
God help us all years to come, we're going to

(14:31):
have to assemble a new fighting form, and no one
knows what it looks like yet. We could perhaps look
at the airport protests from the first months of the
original Trump administration, or masses of people, including a very
young Mia who had not quite realized what gender she was,

(14:51):
occupied airports all across the country to stop the implementation
of Trump's Muslim ban by physically forcing the government to
release the people had detained in the airports. The power
of those protests was that they directly located the site
where power was operating the airport and took them. The
weakness of those protests was that people went home, and

(15:14):
they went home because they had been told time and
time and time again by the ACLU and by other
legal organizations that the fight was over, that they could leave,
and that the Muslim Bans would be defeated by the courts.
Most of you lived through it. Some of you remember
the Muslim ban was never defeated by the courts. It

(15:35):
could possibly have been defeated in those moments, it wasn't.
The contest was taken away from the real sight of
power and into a domain largely ruled by the ruling class.
But we can learn from both January eighth and the
airport protests. Marching to a building doesn't guarantee you're actually

(15:56):
targeting power. You must understand how the system is operating
before you attempt to go up its works. A thousand
miniature January eighths is no solution at all. You must
do the hard work of sifting through the tangle of
rumors and lies and attempting to work out the actual

(16:17):
structure of repression. It starts with community self defense. It
starts with actually engaging with each other instead of the
mediated images generated by an algorithm. You want to break
out of the spectacle. Talk to the people around you,
talk to the trans people and the immigrants in your life,

(16:39):
and find out what they actually need. Figure out the
concrete steps you can take to organize the people around you,
and the steps you can take to lift them out
of their despair. We're not going to develop a new
fighting form glued to our phones alone in a digital crowd.

(17:00):
We're going to figure it out by talking to each other,
by acting in the real world, not by being rendered
passive observers of the spectacle. We're going to do it
by finding the real places where power operates and taking them,
and above all, we're going to do it together.

Speaker 1 (17:23):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for It Could Happen here, listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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