Reply #16: are we at the beginning of the end?..

[stillcool]

or, are we already through the new beginning? I'm calm today, so I'm thinking of universal laws...what goes up...for every action... the only thing certain is change...

http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id112/pg1/index.html
situationist internationale
by Richard Metzger - May 15, 2001
In society where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
~~ Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

Although little known outside of academic and anarchist circles in America and the UK at the time, the Situationist Internationale provided the philosophical underpinnings of the infamous May '68 worker and student riots in France. During the Seventies, English translations of various Situationist Theory texts became available for the first time and the radical ideas of Guy Debord and Raul Vaneigem reached a larger audience, but at such a late date, some have argued, as to have missed their historical moment.

But the full measure of the Situationist Internationale's influence has yet to be seen. The revolutionary ideas of the Situationists have spread throughout popular culture in unexpected ways (Adbusters magazine, punk rock, The Simpsons, political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow and Processed World magazine, to name a few). Thanks to the Internet, the once obscure Situationist texts which helped lead to the May '68 uprisings are only a click away. The seeds of unrest sown by Debord, Vaneigem and others may still bear more fruit. Remember, in the grand scheme of things, May 1968 is not ancient history: something similar can (and will) happen again . . .

For what once sounded so radical is now beginning to sound like common sense!