The Epstein and the Spectacle
Journalists have a very high opinion of themselves. They see themselves as guardians of democracy and constantly give each other prizes. But the modern news industry helped destroy democracy.
Returning here from a few weeks off…
I’ve been flipping through Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. It really is the only text that fully captures our current moment.
What’s amazing about it is that he wrote it in the 1960s — when TV, newspapers, magazines, radio, and film were all he had to work with. But read today — from the vantage of the internet age, with its never-ending information streams and interactive platforms where everyone and anyone can post and is in fact encouraged to obsessively post and take part in the spectacle — the text is every more prophetic. It reads like a religious text, in fact. With its short burst of insight and morality, verging on esotericism, it could be up there with Prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah, Ezekiel, Debord…
With the internet, the Spectacle Society has come into full maturity, adding billions of voices and billions of mirrors — all to better multiply spectacle, to make it seem more real and authentic and organic, to reflect the spectacle back at us in billions of shards, enthralling us, confusing us, trapping us forever in the Hall of Mirrors Vampire Castle, to mix a few metaphors.
I’ve been thinking about The Spectacle, working on the first ep on my Vampire Castle internet doc. And more Epstein stuff is again dropping. And I have to say that Epstein is so great for the spectacle. It’s the ultimate story. It has all the elements.
Sex.
Powerful men.
Beautiful, vulnerable women.
Sex with underage girls.
Exploitation.
Secrecy.
Exotic locations.
Politicians.
Billionaires.
Embarrassing cover-ups.
Multiple Presidents involved, one of whom is currently in office.
The British royal family, too!
People think that it’s important to our politics. And maybe in a different time and a different society it would have been important. But it isn’t here and it isn’t now. As things stand, Epstein is as pure manifestation of The Spectacle as you can get. All these sexy drip-drips are ultimately useless politically, serving no other purpose than to entertain and to keep everyone looped in, posting, stuck in the Vampire Castle. The news media is loving the Epstein story now.
I’ve written about why I think the Epstein story has become a political dead end, a kind of spectacular defensive mechanism for American society. (I mean, Trump just whacked some random guys on a boat and currently abetting a genocide. Is it that surprising that he’d be capable of hanging out with a high-end pimp and potentially committing some sex crimes? What do people think bored, powerful men running things in a massively unequal society do in their free time? Give money to homeless shelters? Exploiting people, using their bodies and tossing them aside is the norm here. That’s how business is done.) But questioning the importance of the Epstein story upsets a lot of people. Why? Probably because, as Debord writes over and over, the spectacle to us is the only thing that’s real now, and if you question the validity of the spectacle, you attack the very fabric of people’s reality.
I don’t want to argue this Epstein line too much. I want to talk about something bigger. I talk about technology — and about how technology and capitalism have influenced culture and what’s in our minds. Specifically, I want to talk about how the telegraph and the “news” industry played a leading role in the debasement of this society and our mental information space. There’s a reason why everyone in the news business loves the Epstein story…
Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, discusses how the telegraph transformed people’s relationship with information.