Re: <nettime> Utopian Plagiarism / Society of the Spectacle

[Joseph Rabie <joe@overmydeadbody.org>]

This sort of rhetoric fills me with unease, as it is too easy to come up with statements as far reaching as they are unsubstantiated.

Slapping "internet" in the place of "spectacle" to catch a ride on Debord's revulsion in the face of modern capitalist society is a form of demagogy. It sounds good but it is meaningless. It is fake intellect.

Joe.

On 03 November 2017 at 10:16 Ian Alan Paul <ianalanpaul@gmail.com> wrote:

The internet is not a collection of networks, but a social relation among people, mediated by networks.

...

The basically tautological character of the internet flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends.

...

The internet subjugates living men to itself to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated them.

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The internet is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue.

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The internet reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.

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The internet is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes a network.

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The unreal unity proclaimed by the internet masks the class division on which the real unity of the capitalist made of production rests.

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The internet is ideology par excellence, because it exposes and manifests in its fullness the essence of all ideological systems: the impoverishment, servitude and negation of real life. 

...

ad infinitum...

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