A black and white illustration of a disinterested woman walking through a store with shelves, and a satirical comment about boredom near the top-right.

Audrey Watters links to this post by Rob Horning which talks about sports, social media, AI, and Guy Debord. So pretty much catnip for me.

I’m just going to share the part about TikTok and Debord’s ‘spectacle’. It’s worth reading the rest of it for how Horning then goes on to apply this to LLMs such as GPT-4o and the semblance of doing rather than simply watching and consuming.

The way TikTok conflates experience with voyeurism makes it a somewhat clear demonstration of Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle.” Debord argues that under the conditions of late 20th century capitalism — conditions of media centricity and monopoly that have only intensified into our century — spectacle and lived experience are in a complex dialectic that sustains a generalized alienation and a universal reification. “It is not just that the relationship to commodities is now plain to see, commodities are now all that there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commodity.” Debord concludes that individuals are “condemned to the passive acceptance of an alien everyday reality” and are driven to “resorting to magical devices” to “entertain the illusion” of “reacting to this fate.” TikTok could be considered as one of those magical devices (along with the phone in its entirety) that manages that dialectic. Under the guise of “entertainment,” passivity reappears to the entertained individual as a kind of perfected agency; alienation is redeemed as the requisite precursor to consumer delectation.

The way TikTok conflates experience with voyeurism makes it a somewhat clear demonstration of Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle.” Debord argues that under the conditions of late 20th century capitalism — conditions of media centricity and monopoly that have only intensified into our century — spectacle and lived experience are in a complex dialectic that sustains a generalized alienation and a universal reification. “It is not just that the relationship to commodities is now plain to see, commodities are now all that there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commodity.” Debord concludes that individuals are “condemned to the passive acceptance of an alien everyday reality” and are driven to “resorting to magical devices” to “entertain the illusion” of “reacting to this fate.” TikTok could be considered as one of those magical devices (along with the phone in its entirety) that manages that dialectic. Under the guise of “entertainment,” passivity reappears to the entertained individual as a kind of perfected agency; alienation is redeemed as the requisite precursor to consumer delectation.

“The spectacle is essentially tautological,” Debord writes, “for the simple reason that its means and ends are identical. It is the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire globe, basking in the perpetual warmth of its own glory.”

Source: Internal exile