The Internet: The Living Spectacle

The Internet presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society, it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. (3)

The Internet is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. (4)

The Internet cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified. (5)

The Internet grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the Internet is the present model of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption. The Internet’s form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system’s conditions and goals. The Internet is also the permanent presence of this justification, since it occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern production. (6)

One cannot abstractly contrast the Internet to actual social activity: such a division is itself divided. The Internet which inverts the real is in fact produced. Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the Internet while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. Objective reality is present on both sides. Every notion fixed this way has no other basis than its passage into the opposite: reality rises up within the Internet, and the Internet is real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and the support of the existing society. (8)

To describe the Internet, its formation, its functions and the forces which tend to dissolve it, one must artificially distinguish certain inseparable elements. When analyzing the Internet one speaks, to some extent, the language of the Internet itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very society which expresses itself on the Internet. But the Internet is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in which we are caught. (11)

The Internet presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears. The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance. (12)

The basically tautological character of the Internet flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory. (13)

On the Internet, which is the image of the ruling economy, the goal is nothing, development everything. The Internet aims at nothing other than itself. (14)

As the indispensable decoration of the objects produced today, as the general expose of the rationality of the system, as the advanced economic sector which directly shapes a growing multitude of image-objects, the Internet is the main production of present-day society. (15)

The Internet subjugates living men to itself to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated them. It is no more than the economy developing for itself. It is the true reflection of the production of things, and the false objectification of the producers. (16)

The Interent, as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. (18)

The oldest social specialization, the specialization of power, is at the root of the Internet. The Internet is thus a specialized activity which speaks for all the others. It is the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to itself, where all other expression is banned. Here the most modern is also the most archaic. (23)

The Internet is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence. The fetishistic, purely objective appearance of digital relations conceals the fact that they are relations among men and classes: a second nature with its fatal laws seems to dominate our environment. But the Internet is not the necessary product of technical development seen as a natural development. The society of the Internet is on the contrary the form which chooses its own technical content. If the Internet, taken in the limited sense of “mass media” which are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to invade society as mere equipment, this equipment is in no way neutral but is the very means suited to its total self-movement. If the social needs of the epoch in which such techniques are developed can only be satisfied through their mediation, if the administration of this society and all contact among men can no longer take place except through the intermediary of this power of instantaneous communication, it is because this “communication” is essentially unilateral. The concentration of “communication” is thus an accumulation, in the hands of the existing system’s administration, of the means which allow it to carry on this particular administration. The generalized cleavage of the Internet is inseparable from the modern State, namely from the general form of cleavage within society, the product of the division of social labor and the organ of class domination. (24)

Separation is the alpha and omega of the Internet. The institutionalization of the social division of labor, the formation of classes, had given rise to a first sacred contemplation, the mythical order with which every power shrouds itself from the beginning. The sacred has justified the cosmic and ontological order which corresponded to the interests of the masters; it has explained and embellished that which society could not do. Thus all separate power has been digitized, but the adherence of all to an immobile image only signified the common acceptance of an imaginary prolongation of the poverty of real social activity, still largely felt as a unitary condition. The modern Internet, on the contrary, expresses what society can do, but in this expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the possible. The Internet is the preservation of unconsciousness within the practical change of the conditions of existence. It is its own product, and it has made its own rules: it is a pseudo-sacred entity. It shows what it is: separate power developing in itself, in the growth of productivity by means of the incessant refinement of the division of labor into a parcellization of gestures which are then dominated by the independent movement of machines; and working for an ever-expanding market. All community and all critical sense are dissolved during this movement in which the forces that could grow by separating are not yet reunited. (25)

With the generalized separation of the worker and his products, every unitary view of accomplished activity and all direct personal communication among producers are lost. Accompanying the progress of accumulation of separate products and the concentration of the productive process, unity and communication become the exclusive attribute of the system’s management. The success of the economic system of separation is the proletarianization of the world. (26)

Due to the success of separate production as production of the separate, the fundamental experience which in primitive societies is attached to a central task is in the process of being displaced, at the crest of the system’s development. by non-work, by inactivity. But this inactivity is in no way liberated from productive activity: it depends on productive activity and is an uneasy and admiring submission to the necessities and results of production; it is itself a product of its rationality. There can be no freedom outside of activity, and in the context of the Internet all activity is negated. Just as real activity has been captured in its entirety for the global construction of this result. Thus the present “liberation from labor,” the increase of leisure, is in no way a liberation within labor, nor a liberation from the world shaped by this labor. None of the activity lost in labor can be regained in the submission to its result. (27)

The economic system founded on isolation is a circular production of isolation. The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the digital system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of “lonely crowds.” The Internet constantly rediscovers its own assumptions more concretely. (28)