Through spectacle the philosphy becomes reality. The risks must be taken because they are risks. To do what is bold affirms reality. only within the shadow of the spectacle, where a collective consious shows itself, do people believe descisions matter.
Without the spectacle there are no values, there is only lip service and vauge political sense twoards the events fractured throughout a society. When the course of history is fractured from being a spectacle that matches the scale of the insitutions into the small experiences meant to match the scale of an individual- it pacifies and erases itself.
The institutions of power within a society spread themselves thin to blend into the background noise. These institutions and any force that changes society still maintains an endless hubris as they always have, more than ever before society is changing beyond recognition, but any force at play fears to express this through a monumentality.
The world's fair has fallen out of favor as a means of publicity for the institutions of power within society.
Public relations is not a matter of grandeur and action- of showmanship and ambition- but of invisibility. The company, the politician, promises not to exist. In the lack of spectacle, the individuality of tragedy removes us from history, removed from the conditions and course of all things outside ourselves.
Apple is a formidable company on all sides, an extremely influential institution in the heirarchy of power within society, but it has no head, it is an empty hole with nothing inside. Where in this building do the people who control everyone else reside?
Without spectacle there is no outside world, with no outside world we lack any individuation of the self. Within any person's experiential world there is nothing but the self, in a direct link to only their own consumption and production, every person is given an individual world which is nothing but a mirror, this isolation ironically means lack of individuality. Without the outside world, the individual is socially engineered to become part of a closed loop. The individual consumes and produces themselves and nothing else and their leader does not exist in this cycle but he controls it all the same.
The wealthy and aristocratic used to wear jewelry, fine clothes. If this decedance threatened the image of the upper class, it was done anyway. If the wealthly didnt wish for the image of wealth, they would not be wealthy. An ancient king could hide from assasins and revolutionaries by wearing humble sackcloth, but who would recognize him as king without his gold? what was to differentiate him from anyone else? Differentiate him both in the sense that his legitimacy was differentiated by physical means, but also that his literal identity as king and not an imposter could not be confirmed unless he was in possesion of something only a king could own. Nobody knew what the king looked like, not every subject of the nation could see their king's face up close or in person, they could not distribute photos or expensive paintings.
" And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!- Nothing beside remains. "
A king could have a statue of himslef standing on the public street, but again this made him a target, a statue bargans for legitimacy. A statue waits to be torn down, and the strength of a government comes from the fact it's statues are not. And down through the heirarchy of a society, when someone needed authority, they needed to own something which displayed and proved it. The annexed rural village far from Rome had no idea what the nearest tax collector would look like, they did not have any paperwork to check, they simply knew that a man with servants and guards and an engraved silver chest certainly had enough power that he was to be heeded even if he was lying, and for that reason they knew he had no reason to lie.
The destruction of the dictator's statue materializes his loss of power, would the destruction of abstract art outside blackrock bank represent or accomplish anything?
But through technology like always, reality can be erased, immaterialized. The tech millionare can work without showing his face, he can live just the same a thousand miles away from his company. Verify his identity through an encrypted credit card which does not give away his wealth even to a cashier. He can walk the streets in casual clothing and command the same power while wearing those clothes to a meeting of investors. The company is no longer named after it's founder, because if anything went wrong it would be bad publicity for the name. Instead, companies are given a quippy depersonalized buzzword for a name instead. The purpouse of technology is to erase reality. Nobody knows who anyone is, nobody knows anything. History is made an inperceptable background noise, spectacle is hidden.
But spectacle always exists beyond intention, it lies in wait to become an overwhelming inevitability- anywhere there is hubris.