The Swift, integrated Spectacle.

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The integration of the Spectacle represents a point where the marketing messages of the corporate broadcast environment intersects and forms a grey zone with the detourned messages of independent thinkers…One might say that the Revolution will be televised. That’s definitely one way to look at it.

The spectacle rejects the value of real experience, by creating empty substitutes for that kind of experience. It’s the empty calories of a visual culture; and now we have developed additional terms to reflect this idea (with dismay). We are becoming a post-literate society.

But more about that later.

Don’t you think it’s about time you inspired your local community to REJECT life’s passive creations — those which are provided by forces of capitalist consumption, as alternatives for real experience.
Examples of these creations are those supplied as marketing messages to consumers like you, your family, and friends.
They, who would “buy or die”
Young, fresh minds are being exploited for their disposable income.

The messages created by “integrators” of the spectacle, are messages populated by waves and sensations of powerlessness

The consumer “buys” to avoid rejection by peers.
The messages urge buyers to feel less empty by consuming more empty calories.

They use the power of seduction to weaken the will, instead of strengthening it or inspiring.

They abuse the potential of any new (or current) medium, by forcing a trite message to a non-creative end.

They use a misdirected, or displaced “culture of cool” – yet another Mixed Message of a gentrified, yuppified underground culture that is no longer elitist.

The messages flatten, condition, and de-stimulate.

They are spells.

They condition new behaviours in people to not read, but to “skim” instead of reading and contemplating.
In such a case, everybody loses.

They are enablers for not thinking or forming opinions in favor of a consumable, quantitative hunt for options. They favor the external image: the lure of the politically correct soapbox — but the soapbox is almost six feet underwater, and our eyes are just peering above the waves. It is a last gasp of air. It is a popularity contest.

The right to deliberately experience a unique viewpoint — don’t we all still think we have this? How many would question this? That they are so accustomed to the unseen machinery, a metastructure that most can no longer see, is perhaps not a concern for some.

But to consume empty calories is also to fatten up, to get slow. There is little to say in favor of blinker the mind to accept the pop culture spectacle as reality. Remember — you don’t want your girlfriend or your wife, you really want Britney Spears and her contradictory messages. You want gangsta shit. You
MTV, VH1, E! — what are these channels about? If you asked for a manifesto, you’d probably get directed to a mission statement. It might even sound non-committedly noble, to “offer music fans what they want.” That’s what everybody says they are doing. Answering to market need. On-demand services.

So I propose this. Let’s do an experiment. Let’s create 999 more channels of boy bands, girl bands and vanity. Let’s manufacture music, and let’s enforce that all ideas we see are our own.

Let’s add about 240 more shopping channels. Let’s create additional infomercials where we position our reverse-engineered products.

Let’s “introduce a need” into the market, by showing a consumer struggling with pancakes. Let’s give the people what we say they want. Let’s put asses in the seats.

Let’s do reality television, it’s more real than reality — it’s a hyperreal substitute for experience, man, plus it lacks the huge time commitment of having friends. ALSO the hyper-real TV people are innately more beautiful, and what’s so AMAZING — is that they apparently have no idea they’re being filmed, so their problems are DEFINITELY interesting.

Let’s overstimulate children. They’re all Baby Mozarts, Baby Einsteins, Baby Da Vincis. Let’s put them in front of endless multimedia triggers — new parts of their brains will stimulate, plus — it even makes them better shoppers than we were.

Let’s not have an opinion. Let’s have a brand, but no attitude. We don’t stand for anything as designers of messages, but our opinions are those of our clients, whoever they might be. Let’s stand up for what the people who pay us stand for. Let’s not stand up to our beliefs, someone’s gotta pay the rent for this $2000/mo office!

Let’s continue to create stupidity and offer more options, more choice, so that others can feel outrage and offence at the short-sightedness of home-based entrepreneurs and their e-myth.

Let’s trade upon the lives of all young people, and keep them indoors more, it’s safer anyway and that way they won’t have sex or get into gangs.
Let’s exploit the spectacle by placing our own messages into the canons of meta-advertising. Let’s place message that say “consume this you dumb-ass fucker! You’re not smart enough to know the difference between Pepsi and RC, so this should fly by over your head.