Watcher (image) © Proxy Proxy Museum, 2025
DISPATCH–09
A WORLD THAT NEVER BLINKS
“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles.” — Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967)
l. THE SPECTACLE WATCHES BACK
In the late 1960s, French theorist Guy Debord published The Society of the Spectacle, a landmark critique of modern life under capitalism. Debord argued that as societies became more industrialized and media-saturated, authentic experience would be replaced by its image — that the representation of life would come to dominate life itself. What he called the spectacle was not simply media or entertainment, but an entire social order organized around appearance, consumption, and passive observation.
The spectacle, once an abstraction, has become incarnate. It no longer sits on the screen; it breathes through us. In Debord’s century, the spectacle described a system where authentic life was displaced by its image: being was replaced by having, and having by appearing. Today, the spectacle has evolved into an organism — an always-on, networked consciousness that feeds on attention, transaction, and confession.
The influencer, the content creator, the livestreamer — these are not deviations from Debord’s vision but its perfected form. They are proxies of the spectacle, intermediaries who transform the act of living into the act of broadcasting. As Jean Baudrillard later warned in Simulacra and Simulation (1981), the image has devoured the real — the world no longer represents, it performs.
Every post is a mirror held up to the void. Every confession a sacrifice to an algorithmic god that hungers for engagement. The self becomes a brand, the brand becomes a mirror, and the mirror becomes infinite.
Il. ARCHAEOLOGY OF WATCHING
Debord’s critique was not moral panic but prophecy. He foresaw the shift from participation to spectatorship — from collective action to mediated perception. In his schema, the spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relationship mediated by images.
Today’s digital architectures have refined this mediation to microscopic precision. What Debord saw in televised consumerism, we now live through biometric capitalism: each click, blink, and hesitation recorded. The gaze, once symbolic of divine or state surveillance, now belongs to everyone and no one.
Michel Foucault’s panopticon has been inverted; we have become the watchtowers of ourselves. The influencer performs under the illusion of freedom but is bound by the invisible hand of visibility itself. The algorithm whispers: be seen or disappear.
IlI. NEW PRIESTS OF WATCHING
The influencer is the priest of a new metaphysics — the intermediary between flesh and feed. Every story becomes a sacrament, every product a relic of belonging. What was once the village oracle is now the viral post — a revelation optimized for reach.
We are witnessing the transfiguration of spirituality into spectacle mysticism: a theology of aesthetics where salvation is found through the lens, not beyond it. Walter Benjamin’s notion of the aura — that unique presence of the original artwork — has been inverted. In the digital age, the aura attaches not to the object but to the self as object. The person becomes the artwork, endlessly replicated, flattened, reformatted.
What we lose in this transaction is not privacy but mystery. When every gesture is documented, the soul evaporates into pixels. To be unseen is now a threat; to withdraw is heresy.
IV. ETHICS OF BEING WATCHED
Ethically, the spectacle produces complicity. We are no longer merely spectators — we are participants in the machinery that erodes our interiority. Spirituality fragments into performance. Intimacy becomes currency. Presence dissolves into metrics.
The mental toll is evident. Clinical psychologists like Sherry Turkle (Alone Together, 2011) and Jonathan Haidt (The Anxious Generation, 2024) document the psychic disintegration produced by perpetual performance — anxiety, derealization, attention collapse. Yet the system persists because it rewards what it consumes.
Debord called this “the moment when the commodity completes its colonization of social life.” The influencer economy is that colonization perfected — a hyperreality where the self is the commodity and authenticity the marketing strategy.
V. BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS
To resist the spectacle is not to disappear but to reclaim opacity. Édouard Glissant, in Poetics of Relation (1990), defends the “right to opacity” — the right to exist beyond comprehension and surveillance. In this light, withdrawal is not defeat but defiance.
To practice opacity is to remember what cannot be rendered. It is to speak in symbols, to resist full translation, to preserve an interior sacredness against the flattening glare of exposure.
Debord wrote that “the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.” Today, it is the self accumulated to the point where it becomes content.
The only escape is not deletion but transfiguration — to live as witness, not as brand; to create as conduit, not as perfomer or product. The spectacle watches back, yes — but the soul, unrecorded, escapes the frame.
This article features computer generated content. AI technology, specifically a large language model, has been utilized to generate both image and video. We chose this approach deliberately, not to undermine our message, but to strengthen it by demonstrating the complex relationship between humans and technology. Our use of AI serves as a practical example of leveraging its strengths while maintaining human oversight and critical thought.