Guy Debord, born on 28 December in 1931, was a Marxist philosopher and filmmaker who co-founded the Situationist International and authored “The Society of the Spectacle” (1967).

Guy Debord began his career as a writer after dropping out of the University of Paris, where he was studying law. Debord joined the Letterist International, a group of avant-garde French artists and intellectuals, when he was 18.

Debord was first to propose the concept of the “Spectacle”, referring to the role of media, culture and advertising in post-World War II consumerist society, and the way it is able to commercially co-opt and repackage counter-cultural ideas and movements.

On the nature of media and the new-found emphasis on appearance, Debord stated “Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.”

The concept of “Spectacle” became central to the ideas of the Situationist International, which Debord co-founded in 1957. Ideas from the Situationists proved influential on protesters during the May 68 uprising in France, where quotes and slogans from Situationist work would appear on graffiti and posters.

Debord himself would disband the Situationist International in 1972, following internal tensions amongst its members, and would focus on creating experimental film and tabletop war games, publishing “A Game of War” in 1987.

Suffering from depression and alcoholism in his later years, Debord committed suicide at his home in 1994.

“The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.”

  • Guy Debord

Situationist International

The Situationist International (SI) was an international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists. It was prominent in Europe from its formation in 1957 to its dissolution in 1972. The intellectual foundations of the Situationist International were derived primarily from libertarian Marxism and the avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century, particularly Dada and Surrealism. Overall, situationist theory represented an attempt to synthesize this diverse field of theoretical disciplines into a modern and comprehensive critique of mid-20th century advanced capitalism.

Essential to situationist theory was the concept of the spectacle, a unified critique of advanced capitalism of which a primary concern was the progressively increasing tendency towards the expression and mediation of social relations through objects. The situationists believed that the shift from individual expression through directly lived experiences, or the first-hand fulfillment of authentic desires, to individual expression by proxy through the exchange or consumption of commodities, or passive second-hand alienation, inflicted significant and far-reaching damage to the quality of human life for both individuals and society. Another important concept of situationist theory was the primary means of counteracting the spectacle; the construction of situations, moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires, experiencing the feeling of life and adventure, and the liberation of everyday life.

The situationists recognized that capitalism had changed since Karl Marx’s formative writings, but maintained that his analysis of the capitalist mode of production remained fundamentally correct; they rearticulated and expanded upon several classical Marxist concepts, such as his theory of alienation. In their expanded interpretation of Marxist theory, the situationists asserted that the misery of social alienation and commodity fetishism were no longer limited to the fundamental components of capitalist society, but had now in advanced capitalism spread themselves to every aspect of life and culture.

When the Situationist International was first formed, it had a predominantly artistic focus; emphasis was placed on concepts like unitary urbanism and psychogeography. Gradually, however, that focus shifted more towards revolutionary and political theory. The Situationist International reached the apex of its creative output and influence in 1967 and 1968, with the former marking the publication of the two most significant texts of the situationist movement, The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord and The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem. The expressed writing and political theory of the two aforementioned texts, along with other situationist publications, proved greatly influential in shaping the ideas behind the May 1968 insurrections in France; quotes, phrases, and slogans from situationist texts and publications were ubiquitous on posters and graffiti throughout France during the uprisings.

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  • Woly [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    7·
    11 months ago

    Can someone recommend another pseudo programming timesink base building game like Factorio or Dwarf Fortress? I really need something to waste a day or two on.

    Or should I just play more Factorio and Dwarf Fortress

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      4·
      11 months ago

      There’s some game where you build a chemical factory. It’s not base building, more assembly line building. Dyson sphere program has you building a dyson sphere, which involves inter-stellar logistics. Oxygen not included apparently has a ton of wiring and automation. Barotrauma lets you do a limited amount of wiring in-game and go absolutely berserk in the editor. The most complicated thing i ever made was a switch that let’s you operate a sub from two different conns, but there are people who have wired up entire subs to function semi-autonomously and be controlled from a single panel. Someone made auto-turrets which i never understood. Rovs and remote demolition vehicles are popular, too.

      Minecraft with mod-packs can get utterly bonkers. One time my friends were strip-mining the lava out of hell and every so often all the alarms would go off and the base would shut down and we’d have to go move the hell-vacuum bc it ran out of lava it could reach. I was producing refined uranium by beekeeping bees. The insects. We had several different kinds of nuclear and fusion reactors running. Then end goal was to build something ridiculous like 10^20 cubes of hyper-dense matter and combine them in to an ultra-cube. The create mod is in a really good place now and lets you build really cool trains.

      Other minecraft adventures - people getting stuck on the moon. Multiple people almost being deleted bc we creating wildly unstable myst books to strip mine them for resources and we made it back to the escape book as the last few blocks of the world were evaporating in to void.

      Kerbal space program doesn’t have as much automation as some others, but some of the very long range probes need to do most of their stuff autonomously with minimal power and telemetry bandwidth. Lots of mods, too.

      X4 is more about large scale economics than strictly about automation, but a lot of that economics is setting up logistical ships to carry raw materials from refineries to factories, or setting up gigantic vertically integrated complexes to produce scads of warships. My biggest critique of the game is that there isn’t much to do in the end game but conquer the galaxy. Apparently they’ve added some very large scale end game goals since then.