Drawing from Debord and Heidegger, this film examines our subjective experience of time throughout history. It reveals how the relentless pursuit of productivity has shaped society and our perceptions of time, creating a perpetual present driven by an autonomous economy and accelerated by surveillance capitalism. The film explores the societal obsession with busyness and advocates for reclaiming time and leisure to foster true human flourishing.
I have a customer who refuses to migrate away from his Palm Pilot Desktop software Palm Desktop (Windows 7/8/10) last stable release was in 2008. No features have been added in 24 years. The Palm Pilot itself stopped working about 20 years ago. He runs the software in a Windows XP virtual machine.
He runs his entire business off the contact list in the software. Customer has over 50,000 contacts, which the software supports a max of 8k. I got around this limit by using the "Profiles" feature in the software, which allows you to configure multiple users-Each user allowed max of 8k contacts.
I created 10 profiles by dividing the English alphabet into 10 groups based on the frequency of last name first letter in his set of contacts:
Contact Group 1: A, K, T
Contact Group 2: B, L, U
Contact Group 3: C, M, V
Contact Group 4: D, N, W
Contact Group 5: E, O, X
Contact Group 6: F, P, Y
Contact Group 7: G, Q, Z
Contact Group 8: H, R
Contact Group 9: I, S
Contact Group 10: J
Of course, when he needs to search or get data from his contacts, he needs to constantly switch profiles. I can only imagine how mundane that must be, but whatever floats your boat.
HotTake: the result of this should be to nationalize Amazon to be the defacto national provider of AWS services, delivery, logistics, and backstopped retail services.
The Alzabo is a monster from Gene Wolfes 'Book of the New Sun' series where it eats its victims and absorbs their thoughts and memories. It then speaks in the voice of its victims to lure the kinfolk of those hes eaten.
Banks also have a MASSIVE amount of CRE Commercial Real Estate (office buildings) that are completely empty, without lease payments flowing in, and since COVID-19 has shifted knowledge work to remote-first in many cities, these office will be empty for a long time.
The CRE bubble is going to burst in the next 18 months as the 5-year commercial office leases signed in 2017+ are all going to come to an end, and the banks will be realizing these losses starting now and the next few years. Its going to get ugly soon.
It is crystal clear no-brainer that municipalities need to disincentivize non-resident ownership of single, double and triple-unit residential properties with massive taxes.
TL;DR If you don't live there, you pay big massive taxes. If you live there, you don't.
danger is a driverless car turning left onto a bridge that has washed away during a flood, mistaking the map for the territory, it drives us off the bridge because we've eliminated the brakes because we think the car is smarter than the human inside it
> 4. The author advocates a return to prior existence, before all of this stuff ("The Spectacle") started happening:
>> [178:] A consciousness of history that threatens the spectacle is to discover the force potentially capable of reappropriating space for lived time.
He isn't advocating for a return to the past, or to the structures of the past. For Debord, Spectacle exists independently of humanity; history, however is specific to human beings, as it corresponds to humanity's existence in time, and to its awareness of that existence. He contends that human beings are capable of shaping and determining their own lives and circumstances. Consequently, history, in his view, is something that can be made: we can consciously shape our own existence in time. His critique of Spectacle is that Spectacle has dominated history for its own purposes, beyond the control of humanty.
History, therefore, is not just a retrospective catalog of events for Debord, and nor is it just the discipline of studying such events. Instead, it is a process through which human agents shape themselves and their world, and through which they come to know themselves through such activity. This isn't a return to a golden past, but an assertion of control and emancipation from the existing force of Spectacle that determines history outside our control.
> 5. In the final paragraph of the book (Paragraph 221), the author sums up their position on returning humanity to (the author's perception of) historical-existence:
>> [221:] Self-emancipation in the contemporary period is emancipation from our material basis within falsified reality. This “historic mission of establishing truth in the world” [...] by returning power [...]. [...] This can only be made possible when individuals are “directly linked to world history”—where dialog within the council arms itself to defeat its own conditions.
Here again, he is advocating not a return to some mythic past, but to take conscious control of history, to create meaning in our own lives. I fail to see where he is advocating for a return, nor "what" to return to.
Debord was vehemently against a return to some mythical "Golden Age" and explicitly criticizes Fascism as such a return:
> Its [fascisms] strength is how it presents itself truthfully as a violent resurrection of mythic origins—to claim the past as a “Golden Age” and a return to the successes of this golden past. It demands participation in a community held together by mythical archaic pseudo-values: race, blood, and the leader. Fascism is a cult of the archaic fitted out by modern technology
Debord wants to move beyond a period where time is made up of clock-segmented moments of equally valuable commodities to a time determined by the creation of events and situations of our own making, with our own values and meanings inscribed into those successive moments.
> it's just being flash or whether it's also a postmodernist nod to postmodernism itself (which...isn't all postmodernism?).
Keep in mind that Debord was familiar with Lyotard, but postmodernism had only just recently started when this book was written. That said, Debord specifically refutes postmodernist tendencies in [thesis 179](https://unredacted-word.pub/spectacle/#section-179)
Note that Debords concept of Spectacle had *Three Degrees*
the concrete reality of the spectacle, as opposed to its relatively superficial existence as a set of mediatic and ideological practices, ‘can only be justified by reference to these ^^three degrees: simple technico-ideological appearances / the reality of the social organisation of appearances / historical reality^^’
On the first of these three ‘degrees’, or levels – that of ‘simple technico-ideological appearances’ – the spectacle is simply an ideological and media-driven ‘part of society’: something very much akin to Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘culture industry’. Seen in these terms, the spectacle is the sector of society ‘where all attention, all consciousness, converges’. This is the level of Debord’s analysis upon which much of the academic work referred to earlier has tended to focus.
Social media, TikTok, Facebook and the issues you discuss concern this level.
On the *second level* of this schema, however, and thus ‘behind the phenomenal appearances of the spectacle’, such as ‘television, advertising, the discourse of the State, etc.,’ we find what Debord refers to as ‘the general __reality __of the
spectacle itself’, understood as ‘a moment in the mode of production.’ The concept of spectacle, addressed on this second, deeper level, pertains to the social operation of capitalist value, and to the manner in which society has been ordered to suit capital’s continued operation. On the first, more ‘superficial’ level of this schema, spectators contemplate the fads, fashions, adverts and trinkets that celebrate this social order; on this second, more profound level, they become contemplative observers of their own lives, because their social activity has become so thoroughly governed and shaped by that same order. This is the dimension of Debord’s theory that has been addressed by the best studies of his work. Anselm Jappe’s excellent __Guy Debord __(1993, in Italian; 1999 in English) is of particular significance here, as it deals with this theme in detail.
The second level entails that the concept of spectacle also operates on a *third level*: that of ‘historical reality’. In this regard, spectacle needs to be understood as __a relation to historical time__. For Debord, the articulation of all social existence via capitalist social relations involves the separation of human subjects from their own lived activity. The result is a historical moment characterized by a loss of historical agency; or, as Debord puts it in another letter: modern capitalism has produced the paradox of a ‘historical society that refuses history’. Thus, this third and deepest level of Debord’s tripartite schema concerns a state of separation from history itself. Although we will touch on the first level of Debord’s theory in later chapters, and although we will also discuss the technicalities of its second level at some length, this book
will focus primarily on its third, ‘historical’ level.