I probably shouldn’t be so eager to quote this man as he had very little good to say about the usefulness of quotes. Nonetheless he wrote so he was resigned to being quoted, and there is no small amount of humor and irony there.

Guy DeBord becomes increasingly important as we sink deeper into the Age of Influencers. Social media has turned us from a society of living people into a society of people who appear to be living. We are certainly alive in a technical sense but it would be hard to argue that we resemble anything that came before us. We have no discernible cultural identity and not much in the way of personal identities. We wake up and play make-believe. We are truly the egomaniacal stars of our own movies but there is no message or plot. It’s about waking up and projecting images against a wall where everyone else’s images are running concurrently. It’s a random montage. Unconnected images are super-imposed over others.

Famous for being famous? A very small handful reach fame. The rest of us are merely… dead. We have rendered ourselves meaningless. Imagine chickens in an overcrowded pen pecking kernels of corn out of gravel, each chicken just sentient enough to believe that it knows which kernels are worth more than the others. Then each of the chickens dies in its own time with little to know more awareness or self-awareness than when it hatched.

Men like DeBord or Baudrillard saw it coming but maybe even they couldn’t comprehend just how right they were.

“The status of celebrity offers the promise of being showered with ‘all good things’ that capitalism has to offer. The grotesque display of celebrity lives (and deaths) is the contemporary form of the cult of personality; those ‘famous for being famous’ hold out the spectacular promise of the complete erosion of a autonomously lived life in return for an apotheosis as an image. The ideological function of celebrity (and lottery systems) is clear – like a modern ‘wheel of fortune’ the message is ‘all is luck; some are rich, some are poor, that is the way the world is…it could be you!”

So that bit from Guy DeBord’s Society of the Spectacle… We all celebrate the spectacle. We ultimately envy the spectacle, and eventually despise the spectacle because it’s not ours. The celebrity is revered, then emulated and then loathed. We cannibalize them and then rather than learning a lesson, move on to another object of desire.

Sounds bleak, doesn’t it but consider this. Basketball legend Kobe Bryant died tragically yesterday and there was an immediate outpouring of grief and love and respect. This very morning though the bad jokes have already started on social media. I can only surmise that it’s a sublimation of our own horrible envy that our own projection or spectacle isn’t the one that flashes so brightly that it obscures all the others on the wall. I can offer one reason his light was brighter. It was fueled by real accomplishment. He wasn’t famous for being famous. He was famous for doing something very well and there’s a lesson there. Not everyone is capable of being an NBA all-star but certainly any one of us could aspire to more than collecting and draping ourselves in the most valuable kernels tossed out by the human farmers of the big Trend Mongers (a Frank Zappa reference for those in the know).

But that’s a bit of a tangent, isn’t it?

**for later — consider the goal of the “influencer.” Why do more people aspire to be this thing on any scale? Why do people aspire more to be seen than to create?**

*Do we spend more time living than simulating having a life?*