A Complexity of Spectacles

​“Government is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex”.
-Frank Zappa

Welcome to Cheap Thrills, a column for New Maps that seeks to explore philosophical ideas and pursue practical activities around themes of entertainment, media, art, and leisure in the deindustrial age. In this space I’ll look at traditional forms of entertainment and see how they might offer new inspiration for people who want to live with less. I’ll also be attempting to retrofit some of the newer forms of media to be of use in a low-energy future. In the process of looking at older ways of amusing ourselves, and seeing what can be salvaged from the newer, I hope to explore new combinations of entertainment as well. In doing so I’ll be dipping into art, history, and philosophy while taking into consideration the trends of economic contraction, energy descent, resource extraction, climatic changes, and the myriad crises of our time. All of this is to ask the question: how will we entertain ourselves, communicate, and make productive use of our available leisure time? Civilization as currently configured is unraveling, but by playing on our own and with each other, we can still have some fun, strengthen the imagination, and develop new skills. 

            Perhaps entertainment isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the future. Having a laugh and getting lost in diversions isn’t an obvious answer when confronted with extinctions, political unrest, fossil fuel consumption and all the rest. As we wrestle with the decline of Western civilization, though, the issue of how we entertain ourselves takes on added significance.

What do we allow to occupy our time and enter our minds, for better or worse? How might we now sidestep some of the issues associated with being a passive consumer of the entertainment-industrial complex? What else can we do instead that might add value to our lives, to the people we are in relationships with, while also mitigating the harm, and possibly even doing some good, for the other beings who share this Earth with us?

            These are the questions this column seeks to explore. I’m not sure what answers I’ll find, although I have many ideas of places to go looking. Perhaps it will be best to consider Cheap Thrills as an extended discursive meditation on these and other allied themes.

            A number of answers, in the form of stories, are found in the pages of New Maps. You are here reading a magazine that imagines an entire range of scenarios about the ages to come.  As readers we are entertained and engaged. Deindustrial fiction works in concert with the imagination to give voice to the topography of our concerns. Perhaps these imaginings may also help shape the future through the inspiration they give. Other forms of entertainment can also be of service in shaping how we live.

To start with I thought it might be useful to look at the definition and etymology of the word “entertain”.  It is very interesting to me that one way to define the word is “to hold mutually,” or my preference, “to hold intertwined.” These meanings evolved from the root Latin words inter (among) and tenere (to hold), according to the Oxford English Dictionary; it was the French who joined their forms of these two words, entre and tenir, together into what became the word entertain. Bringing people together has been one of the main functions of entertainment all through the ages. Entertainment holds them and intertwines them in a community, often in a shared imaginal space. 

            Another way the word entertain has been used over the centuries relates to showing hospitality to guests. This aspect of the word emphasizes the reciprocal nature of entertaining, the giving and receiving of gifts. Here the gifts are of time, food, company, conversation, all those wonderful things that make bonds between friends and family. This form of entertainment has not been altogether lost by society, but many people would rather be entertained than entertain. Having people over for dinner, or just for a beer or cup of tea on the front porch, now seems either quaint or stuffy and conceited to many people. Even less common now is entertaining and showing hospitality to the wandering strangers who sometimes showed up on people’s doors.

            Oftentimes it seems that we would rather stay immersed in binge-watching the latest streaming TV series, or stay plugged into social media, than attend to reality and our relations. This points to another meaning of the word entertainment, “that which engages the attention agreeably, amuses or diverts, whether in private, as by a conversation, etc., or in public by performances of some kind; amusement.”  This definition is what those of us in America, and perhaps more generally the English-speaking West, think of when we hear the word: entertainment as amusement and distraction. 

Distraction itself isn’t always a bad thing. Healthy amusement is healthy for the soul. Yet three pervasive mediums for being entertained in the age of the entertainment-industrial complex—movies and TV, sports, and music—work in ways that are quite the opposite of healthy. Instead, they alienate people from actual engagement in community, while fragmenting their attention and time.

These forms show little hospitality to the people who consume and are consumed by these diversions. There will be many challenges in the deindustrial age, and people who are strong-willed and show self-determination will be able to make the transitions to come a little less painful. Those who have made the efforts to forge relationships with others and who are involved with or ensconced in the ecology of a community or communities will have support networks in place. The rough patches of our lives can be softened when we make true connections.

 Learning to entertain ourselves can also help build will power and self-determination, and coming together to entertain each other strengthens the connective tissues between us.

Yet obstacles remain. By and large people in industrialized countries, plugged in to mass entertainment, are caught up in what filmmaker, theorist, and philosopher Guy Debord called the spectacle.

 Debord: “Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the present mode of production. It is not a mere supplement or decoration added to the real world, it is the heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations—news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment—the spectacle is the model of the prevailing way of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle is also the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the modern production process.”

This idea of the spectacle comes from Debord’s landmark work The Society of the Spectacle, first published in 1967. It is a work of philosophy that used some of the tools of Marxist critical theory, alongside experiences from Debord’s involvement in the Paris avant-garde, to critique consumer culture and a variety of social illnesses stemming from a life of consumerism.  It became the seminal text for the Situationist International, a movement of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political thinkers and theorists. And while I am not a Marxist myself, the critique of society formulated by Debord is one of the best formulations of thought I have come across to explain how capitalism and industrial culture have helped create a passive public who are alienated both from themselves and from each other due to pervasive consumerism and an overarching media.

Debord’s book holds that there is in society a tendency to mediate our social relations through objects. These objects of mediation are the products and services pushed on people by McGovCorp, a term used by musician Kim Cascone that I’m going to borrow for these essays, to refer to the half-dozen or so corporations that control the media and the government that works in tandem with them. Those six are GE/Comcast, Walt Disney Company, News Corporation, Time Warner, Viacom, and CBS. The majority of the ownership of these companies, and of other smaller news companies in America, resides in the hands of just fifteen individual billionaires. 

The process of industrialization, then, and all that has trickled down from those changes, have caused a drastic shift away from individual expression and lived experience to second-hand, mediated experiences. The economies of hearth and home have largely been abandoned in favor of the financial economy. As digital technologies have further infiltrated the human sphere, our pastimes have been traded for more time spent in simulated and over-stimulated virtual worlds. This leaves many of us with gaping deficits in terms of traditional skills for living and for playful recreation with each other.

Furthermore, Debord says, “The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having—human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely occupied by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing—all ‘having’ must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances. At the same time all individual reality has become social, in the sense that it is shaped by social forces and is directly dependent on them.”

In other words we have traded a self-reliance predicated on what we do, for a state of unending adolescence in which we seek approval of our status by a superficial show of what we have, instead of who we are. The spectacle of social media exacerbates this trend to the point where we get hung up on projecting an image to people we’ve never met, and worrying about what they think of us. And that is just one of many ways this tendency plays out.  

The Situationist International, like many other avant-garde art groups, wanted to circumvent the existing society. Their primary strategy was also where they got their name. They wanted to create situations and moments of life that reawakened authentic desires (desires that hadn’t been implanted via advertising), situations that rekindled the love of life and the everyday situations that enhanced liberty. 

The Situationist International was active between 1957 and 1971 and left behind a body of work that still resonates today. Many of their tools are applicable to the current crisis of our time, which remain as entangled, if not more, with the spectacle as they were at the time of Debord’s and his colleagues’ activities and writing. We’ll dig further into some of their history and the tools they left behind as we proceed in these articles.

Running in tandem with the spectacle, there is another factor at work that I wish to explore in this first essay as way of showing just what it is I want to sidestep. That factor is the entertainment–industrial complex. It can be thought of as the confluence of government, military and corporate influence surrounding movies, television, sports, and music, while spilling into other types of media. Closely allied to the military–entertainment complex, it can all be thought of as being part of McGovCorp.

As a way of setting the stage for why we might want to sidestep the spectacle let’s look at how these factors are now at work in film and television, sports, and music.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION

In 2017 journalist Tom Secker compiled a list of 410 movies that were sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Secker has shown in his investigative research the deep ties between the DoD and Hollywood, as well as between the CIA and Hollywood,  and between reality television programs and the Pentagon. He got a lot of his information on these things from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and sifting through deep archives.

A lot of this material is documented in a book he co-authored with Matthew Alford, National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood. Their book shows the specific changes made to movie scripts at the behest of the government for various political reasons. Often the material that was changed or edited out from the films they discussed had to do with things such as CIA drug trafficking and the interaction of private armies and oil companies, among other things. These forces worked on many blockbuster films such as Avatar, Terminator, and Transformers.

I always suspected the Transformers franchise was a way to continue to pimp car culture on young impressionable minds. The reality was that the DoD worked with director Michael Bay, and many of the films in the franchise were co-written with personnel from the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy. Secker claims that Michael Bay is little more than a government asset in Hollywood. From the evidence he has compiled I think he is right.

Secker continues to document his research on his website spyculture.com. It’s a fascinating resource built upon his FOIA requests and other reporting that shows how intelligence operatives are using their access to entertainment media to shape the spectacle, and in doing so steer the narratives and mindset of the people who consume this type of material.

All of this sounds like it is part of a social engineering and propaganda project to me. As we continue to move into a phase of history disrupted by oligarchies and corrupt power structures, pandemics, brownouts and ruptures in the power supply, it is important for us to remain clear-headed amidst competing narratives. Opting out of Hollywood’s brand of movie-making is one easy way to keep the mind free.

BIG SPORTS

In the sports realm the McGovCorp factor is sometimes called the sport–industrial complex or athletic–industrial complex. Besides the passive aspect of fans just watching the spectacle of sports games inside stadiums and on supersized flat-screen TVs, there are the aspects of how sports as a business has ties with corporations and a crooked higher-education system. Sports do help to create a regional sense of unity and identity for those who follow the teams, yet most of the time, the players on a regional team aren’t even from the region or city they play for. It’s always seemed a sham to me that the players are bought and sold like a commodity, hence there’s no real team any of them are playing for, just a corporation they have a contract with. What Big Sports seems to be all about is providing a captive audience for advertisers who inject their thought-forms throughout an event. Modern sports are a far cry from self-organized games played by people in a community and enjoyed by members of the community.

In my home of Cincinnati a new stadium project for our unproven Major League Soccer team, FC Cincinnati, has been underway the past few years. A groundbreaking ceremony was held in 2018 and now at the time of this writing, the work is close to being complete. This was a deeply contentious move on the part of the city. A 5–4 vote in City Council pledged $34.8 million dollars towards building this edifice in the historic West End neighborhood. The area is mostly black, and predominantly low-income. The folks whose houses were in the way, the people who had lived in the neighborhood their whole lives, suddenly had to scramble to find new places to live, all for a new sports arena. Developers talk of how this stadium is going to bring jobs and opportunities to the neighborhood, but they don’t mention the people who got kicked out in the process.

Military displays in Big Sports have also become more prominent since the events of 9/11.  Huge field-length flags are unfurled across the playing the field, when formerly just a normal-sized flag and a shared singing of the national anthem sufficed to rev the patriotic spirit. Sports reporter Howard Bryant has detailed this intertwinement in his book The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism. To honor those who serve, teams wear camouflage jerseys; to support first responders they let police officers throw out the first pitch. It was once rare for fighter jets and B-52 bombers to fly overhead of stadiums at the beginning of a game or halftime. Such feats were reserved for the World Series or Super Bowl. Now these happen at smaller games. It is awe-inspiring to see huge machines flying overhead, but they are weapons of death, and I find it strange they are applauded. 

Sports used to be something anyone and everyone could talk about, a safe topic like the weather, where politics and world news could be left behind in favor of discussing the prowess of the athletes. The influence of McGovCorp has put paid to that. But hey, I was the kid who tried to get out of participating in gym class so I could write poetry in a corner, so my perspective may be a bit tainted.

MUSIC

The folk music revival and psychedelic rock music of the 1960s fed a huge hippie counterculture that questioned the basic tenets of the Establishment, man. In the 1970s and ’80s, punk rock music came to the fore as part of an explosive subculture with a strong DIY ethic for people who wanted to live outside the system. Punks established their own record labels, venues, and networks of fanzines to communicate their ethos. Hip-hop followed in a similar manner, both genres propelled around urban areas by the power of a skateboard. Ravers in the ’90s partied to the sounds of electronic music in Dionysian ecstasy wherever space could be found.

Since those times a new musical form to catalyze the imaginations of people wishing to live outside the spectacle has not materialized. These musical genres and their fans all still exist in various intertwined subcultures. There are very strong flavors of folk, punk, hip-hop, and electronica as well as a plethora of others, all existing in various scenes and corners of the underground, propped up by thriving independent labels and organizers. Yet for the most part, they remain underground.

Meanwhile pop music and the cult of the rock star continue to be pumped into the collective imagination in various flavors. The menu at this musical soda fountain consists of sickeningly sweet corn syrup, artificial ingredients and a fizz that soon goes flat. The songs are also parasitic. Catchy earworms are created and latch onto the brain. Anything a person was thinking before they heard the song is now gone and the song repeats in a subliminal hook.

I actually love a good pop song, a real pop song, one that was written by an artist, and not engineered. Yet many of today’s pop tunes, the ones heard in stores or malls, during the Super Bowl or World Series, have been painstakingly crafted by specialized teams in digital sound laboratories using new techniques crafted to stick in your head. And sell records and products. The people doing this work have found ways to make songs more and more addictive. The more addictive it is, the easier it is to sell products and keep streaming music services going.

John Seabrook traces this aspect of the music industry, the side that works with technology to create songs that are hard to shake out of your head, in his book The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory. Music created this way is not something a composer or songwriter channels from the inner life of their imagination, but a product engineered to sound good while lacking the true critical content of actual soul. Practices like these, and many others, mark the mainstream music business as being part and parcel of the entertainment–industrial complex and the spectacle.

[Note: Since the time I wrote this in 2021 the music spectacle has gone full throttle with the regurgitated sounds of the simulacra being generated by AI.]

SIDESTEP THE SPECTACLE

I could continue to interrogate these three aspects of the spectacle indefinitely. Yet if I waded further into those waters, this column would get swamped in the minutiae that an in-depth critique of each of them would entail. There are already plenty of books and articles around, and anyone who starts scratching at the dirt will soon be digging down to find much more fuel for their fire. There are also other aspects of the modern spectacle I would have liked to look at but, due to time and space, chose to set aside: video games and social media.
Instead, the theme of this column is on strategies for sidestepping the spectacle and having fun. It is often better to move out of the way of an oncoming bull rather than engage in a prolonged battle by locking horns. 
            To that end, having defined a few of the terms and themes to be used in this series, and having outlined the general territory of what is being stepped away from, the next article will look at dreams, and how they can be used to engage the imagination and help the dreamer tap into some of the deeper currents of life. In future articles I’ll also be looking at the cheap thrills to be had from walking and psychogeography, mudlarking, artifact hunting and trash picking. Slow media, pen pals, how to create cabinets of curiosity, surrealist game nights, and three-sided football matches are just a few of many subjects and speculations I have in mind as we proceed.
            So until next time, live cheap, protect your mind and keep it free.

RE/SOURCES:

Part of what I want to do with these articles is to scatter seeds of learning for anyone who wants to look at these subjects further. So please consider the following both sources and resources.
 
The Society and the Spectacle by Guy Debord, translated and annotated by Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014
 http://www.intellectualbubblegum.com/the-big-six-of-media-the-six-companies-that-control-most-of-the-media-you-watch/.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/2016/06/01/these-15-billionaires-own-americas-news-media-companies
Spyculture.com

National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood, by Matthew Alford and Tom Secker, CreateSpace, 2017

https://www.spyculture.com/updated-complete-list-of-dod-films/

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/cincinnatis-soccer-stadium-scam/

https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2018/07/20/military-sports-astore-francona

The Heritage: Black Athletes, A Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism by Howard Bryant, Beacon Press, 2018

The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook, W. W. Norton & Company, 2015

.:. .:. .:.
This was the first essay that launched my Cheap Thrills column in a 2021 issue of New Maps. I am adding these all to my website now, since they originally appeared first in print.

Find my other Cheap Thrills articles here at the links below:

STREAM FORAGING

THE POWER OF THREE: TERNARY LOGIC, TRIOLECTICS AND THREE SIDED FOOTBALL

RADIOS NEXT GOLDEN AGE

THE ART AND PLEASURE OF LETTER WRITING
​
​

.:. .:. .:.
​
The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired.