Reversing the Spectacle - From Baudrillard and Debord to a Locked and Loaded Biden

A recent episode of The Daily Show cited a poll, commissioned by The Guardian, which asked Americans how they feel about the US economy. As you can see in the clip in the comment under this article, 55% of Americans believe that the US economy is shrinking, and 56% that the economy is in recession. 49% believe that the S&P is down for the year, and 49% believe that unemployment is at a 50 year high. In all of these cases, the opposite was true at the time of the poll. The Daily Show also riffs on a recent statement by Donald Trump in which he claims that Joe Biden has had intentions to – wait for it – assassinate him…

In a recent article, I argued that Gen Z is often reduced to caricature. Portrayed as a homogenous, deluded youth that is radicalising the political left by upending everything that a socially conservative society holds dear, the fiction about an entire generation is gradually replacing any semblance of objective, nuanced reality. ?

In an even more recent article, I argued that it is of little consequence what the Tories try to do over the coming 5-6 weeks, as the UK has already made up its mind about this general election. A series of policy announcements meant to consolidate the core Conservative vote won’t fundamentally change the outcome of the election, one which will likely see a Tory landslide become a Labour landslide in a single term. It’s not yet clear how a Labour government will perform “change” through “stability”, but the voting public has settled on a feeling: anyone but the Tories, please.

What else can you do but shoot from the hip when trying to choose one fiction over another?

At the start of 2020, the UK went from early indications that the country would take a herd immunity approach to Covid, to months of strict lockdown under threat of “killing granny”. It then went to Eat Out to Help Out, only to go back to another lockdown after that. The period that followed Covid saw Boris Johnson saying that the pictures of him and his colleagues partying in No 10 weren’t, in fact – errr, cough cough – pictures of him and his colleagues partying, but rather, pictures of informal gatherings.

Abroad, the UK, the EU and the US have lent economic and military support to Ukraine to fight a war that the media mostly reports to be going their way – but while the Ukrainians are ostensibly always just one more support package away from victory, the end of the conflict is nowhere in sight, and slender European armies hardly stand on queue to land on the country’s eastern border.

City streets regularly fill with pro-Palestinian supporters asking for a ceasefire in Gaza, while Israel maintain that it is fighting existential threats, and Jews around the world report an increasing sense of insecurity. The mass demonstrations against Israel stand in contrast to a comparative absence of attention on conflicts in Tigray, Yemen, Sudan, Mexico, Nigeria, or the increasingly hostile situation against women in Afghanistan.

And just to bring this back home to the immediate now, the BBC earlier today reported Diane Abbot as saying that Labour has barred her from standing as a Labour MP. Meanwhile, Labour denies that this is true...

In between blatant lies, Orwellian double speak, misinformation, disinformation, troll social media accounts, state-controlled media outlets and Murdoch-owned dittos – what else have you? – it is understandably hard to see what is real over what is fiction. Fiction, as much as what is actually real, has the power to mobilise masses, as well as lull us to sleep.

Hyperreality is not a new phenomenon. Jean Baudrillard coined the term in his book, Simulacra and Simulation, in 1981. Guy Debord proposed the thematically related concept of the “spectacle” in his book from 1967, The Society of the Spectacle, contending that society has replaced reality with representations thereof, through consumerism and mass media.

But without having lived to experience either 1967 or 1981, it is clear to me that hyperreality and the society of spectacles are rapidly evolving concepts, and that the present moment, and our present sense of society, is increasingly fictional.

Agree?

And is there a way to put the cat back in the bag?

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