"We're Not Angry Enough" - A Critique of Social Media Politics with Debord's ‘The Society of the Spectacle’

I have a serious question for you. A question that also implicates my work. What has our online outrange changed, really? Systematically? What’s changed?

“History has taught … it is not enough for people to be angry. The supreme task is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.” -Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., February 23, 1968

I’ve been feeling tension and contradiction with my role as a political “influencer.” I started out with a pure desire to raise the alarm about the white supremacists kidnapping immigrants off the streets. For months now I’ve been asking myself, “what am I even doing, and what’s the point?”

The outrage cycle is constant, and constantly cycling. Gaza, DOGE, CECOT, LA, Minneapolis, Chicago, gerrymandering, Epstein files, and now the war of aggression against Iran and destruction of Lebanon.

I’m reading Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle(1967), and his philosophy has finally provided me the framework to put into words my intuitive feelings that something is deeply contradictory with much of the social media political content that we consume.

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation.

To boil it down, Debord describes “The Spectacle” as capitalism’s instrument for distracting and pacifying the masses. Steve Bannon has admitted on multiple occasions that a core strategy of the Trump regime is to “flood the zone.” Create so many outrages, make so much noise, create such a spectacle that the opposition is overwhelmed and always on the back-foot.

Why do tech billionaires allow ICE brutality videos to go viral on their controlled platforms? If the spectacle of these outrageous videos actually threatened the system of power and control, would they be allowed?

Counterpoint: ICE changed tactics after their occupation of the Twin Cities, so the online spectacle isn’t without impact but I think what really scared those in power was the way the common people of Minnesota unified in a grass-roots way, outside the control of the established political parties. Rapid response patrols, mutual aid networks delivering food, multiple successive general strikes that brought hundreds of thousands out in single digit temperatures. Minnesota became an example of how working class people can unite and fight back. That is what threatened power - not the outrageous spectacle of ICE abuses, which we’d been witnessing for 10 months with mostly impotent outrage.

Now The Spectacle is different than using social media as a tool to organize, and I think that’s a crucial distinction because The Spectacle Debord describes doesn’t lead to action or unity; the spectacle alienates us, divides us, and pacifies us. The Spectacle serves to reinforce the prevailing systems of oppression.

The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender “lonely crowds.” With ever-increasing concreteness the spectacle recreates its own presuppositions.

Under capitalism everything becomes commodified. Relationships become transactional. Real humans are reduced to one dimensional digital representations- viewers, followers, and subscribers. Creators become subservient to the algorithm for the same reason workers are subservient to bosses - your livelihood, your ability to continue to live, depends on it.

And so influencers push outrage, division, fear and false urgency because the algorithm rewards it. Everything is breaking news, urgent, it demands your attention NOW!

The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.

We see images of the genocide in Gaza, the total destruction of historic villages in Lebanon, the killing of school-children in Iran, the young children held in indefinite detention in ICE concentration camps and we rage at our screens. But do we act?

The Spectacle distracts us, it isolates us, it alienates us, it divides us so that we’re too physically and emotionally exhausted to come together, so that we’re too demoralized to even have hope of overcoming the root problem. The root issue is that the system we live under benefits a small percentage of humanity by exploiting everyone else. If we want true change we must dismantle the entire corrupt system and build a system that truly upholds human rights, that provides for the benefit of all humanity without exploiting any vulnerable groups.

With this understanding of The Spectacle I can see that I need to change how I engage with social media. Outrage at genocide, inequality, state oppression is just more Spectacle if we’re not doing anything to address the underlying system that gives rise to it all. Educating myself about the root cause of the problems we face today, and the revolutionary organizations which have been able to fight for the rights of common humanity has renewed my hope. I think it can do the same for you.

The Society of the Spectacle: https://files.libcom.org/files/The%20Society%20of%20the%20Spectacle%20Annotated%20Edition.pdf

An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’: https://hyperallergic.com/an-illustrated-guide-to-guy-debords-the-society-of-the-spectacle/

Start here: https://www.mlreadinghub.org/study-materials/reading-list