In 1978, the French writer Guy Debord made his sixth film. “I will make no concessions to the public,” he says in voice-over at the start. That public was made of “spectators”—of the cinema and of life itself, a life so ravaged by market forces that it had been torn from its own experience. France’s postwar boom was really an impoverishment, a mass deadening. And most pathetic were the pleasures of the expanded middle classes. Stupefied by their amusements and in love with their pointless work, these “low-level skilled employees” in “management, control, maintenance, research, teaching, propaganda, entertainment, and pseudocritique” were proud to toil in a system that mashed their minds to paste. “How harshly the mode of production has treated them!” Debord marveled. “With all their ‘upward mobility’ they have lost the little they had and gained what no one wanted.”
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