I've read quite a bit of this book, and situationalism is awesome - though I do find this writing style quite...fatiguing. Part of me can't work out whether it's written like this to fit a huge amount of meaning into one paragraph or whether it's just being flash or whether it's also a postmodernist nod to postmodernism itself (which...isn't all postmodernism?).
A key text that helped lay the foundations for the social changes of the 1960s and 70s.
See _Lipstick Traces_ by Greil Marcus for an introduction to Debord and Situationism.
Aggressively anti-intellectual. And.. tortured? It reads like a literary version of [The Scream](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream ), where it aggressively rejects reality as a monster, grasping at straws in the process in a manner that suggests severe psychological disturbance.
The author seems to be begging for a simpler world -- to go back to an ancient golden age, before things got so complex (before "The Spectacle"). Before science, before economics, before industrialization, before mass-education, before the human knowledge-pool got bigger, and even before people recorded years (the author makes a big point of how only seasons, and not years, should be observed).
This is the actual text of most EULA.
I don’t think the author is surprised about the success of NFTs
Really happy to see this thread. Its pretty impressive and inspiring that these kinds of conversations happen at all in a community where it's not considered that big of a deal to make over 200k a year. Especially inspiring given how influential the developer community seems to be.
i'm a fan of these introduction videos by Tom Nicholas:
Society of the Spectacle: WTF? Guy Debord, Situationism and the Spectacle Explained - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGJr08N-auM
Donald Trump and the Society of the Spectacle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HAII7QWr_c
discussed earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800216
If you are in interested in this stuff at all, can't recommend enough McKenzie Wark's books on the subject, both The Spectacle of Disintegration and The Beach Beneath Street. They had a profound effect upon me.
Wark also, fwiw, wrote the Hacker Manifesto [1]. Although, ironically, I can't imagine her views there would be that well received on HN.
1. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674015432