Ken Knabb

Translator of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, available at the Bureau of Public Secrets website.

Guy Debord

Self-proclaimed leader of the Situationist International, Guy Debord was certainly responsible for the longevity and high profile of Situationist ideas, although the equation of the SI with Guy Debord would be misleading. Brilliant but autocratic, Debord helped both unify situationist praxis and destroy its expansion into areas not explicitly in line with his own ideas. His text The Society of the Spectacle remains today one of the great theoretical works on modern-day capital, cultural imperialism, and the role of mediation in social relationships.

• Debord,
• spectacle,
• situationists

The Society of the Spectacle @ Bureau of Public Secrets 

Translator's Note to the 2002 translation

There have been several previous English translations of The Society of the Spectacle. I have gone through them all and have retained whatever seemed already to be adequate. In particular, I have adopted quite a few of Donald Nicholson-Smith's renderings, though I have diverged from him in many other cases. His translation (Zone Books, 1994) and the earlier one by Fredy Perlman and John Supak (Black and Red, 1977) are both in print, and both can also be found at the Situationist International Online website.

• Debord,
• situationists

Media, Activism and Society of the Spectacle 

Our ability to move into a collectively imagined future has been trapped in an ever-present now, composed of continually transmitted images. The spectacle accompanies us throughout our lives. News, propaganda, advertising, entertainment and social media present a continuous stream of imagery, projecting a constant justification for how our culture is formulated. When Guy Debord first published The Society of the Spectacle in 1967, the digital revolution was still decades away and the technological capacity to project images into every corner of our lives was far less developed than it is today. The spectacle is no longer simply all of the time; it is also everywhere. More than ever before, Debord's words apply: "Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation."

• activism,
• diy media,
• spectacle,
• media criticism

Antisocial Media 

“Antisocial Media” is a remix/cut-up/utopian-plagiarism of Guy Debord’s 1967 “The Society of the Spectacle” that reflects on the role of the network and (anti)social media in political, economic, and everyday life.

• media,
• media theory,
• Debord,
• spectacle,
• media criticism

The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Art and Politics 

The Situationist Movement can be seen as an artistic avant-garde, as an experimental investigation of possible ways for freely constructing everyday life, and as a contribution to the theoretical and practical development of a new revolutionary contestation. From now on, any fundamental cultural creation, as well as any qualitative transformation of society, is contingent on the continued development of this sort of interrelated approach.

• art,
• Debord,
• spectacle,
• situationists

We Demand The Impossible: 

An Interview with John Jordan and Gavin Grindon

Furtherfield interview with Gavin Grindon and John Jordan from the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination about the User's Guide to (Demanding) the Impossible. Published by Minor Compositions.

• art,
• participatory media,
• austerity

The XYZ of Net Activism 

It's time to create the pop stars of activism,
the idoru of communication guerrilla,
it's time to threaten and charm the
masses by the ghosts coming from the
 net, to play the myth against the myth,
to be more nihilist than infoteinment!
                                  - etoy -

• art,
• activism

What is Meme Warfare? 

Unshackle the Human Spirit!

The most precious natural resource is human spirit. A close second is human imagination. Spirit and imagination will do more than oil, gold and guns to determine the fate of the human experiment on Earth, an experiment that has never been as precarious as it is today.

• tactical reality,
• culture jamming,
• meme wars

Tactical Media and the End of the End of History 

As a playful, do-it-yourself approach to media activism and new technologies, tactical media (TM) seemed to have some critical bite when it emerged in the mid-1990s. But is it still radical today?

• art,
• tactical media,
• activism

The revolution WILL be broadcast - at least locally 

This essay provides a short and insightful overview of alternative television projects in the Italy of Berlusconi.

• tactical television,
• telestreet,
• Italy