ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?
1. Eiffel Tower (Paris Las Vegas)
2. Arc De Triomphe (Paris Las Vegas)
3. An Egyptian Pyramid (Luxor Las Vegas)
4. San Marco Campanile (The Venetian and The Palazzo)
5. The Grand Canal (The Venetian and The Palazzo)
6. Rialto Bridge (The Venetian and The Palazzo)
7. The Colosseum (Caesars Palace)
8. Pantheon Ceiling (Forum Shops)
9. The Statue of Liberty (New York-New York Las Vegas)
10. Brooklyn Bridge (New York-New York Las Vegas)
11. Statue of David (Caesars Palace)
12. Trevi Fountain (Forum Shops)
13. New York City Skyline (New York-New York Las Vegas)
14. Egyptian Sphinx (Luxor)
"Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea."[23] “This society which eliminates geographical distance reproduces distance internally as spectacular separation.”—Guy Debord
Intellectual property and plagiarism define our social reproduction.
A heartwarming Cetaphil commercial that first aired in the lead-up to the 2024 Super Bowl has drawn both praise and criticism. In the ad, called #GameTimeGlow, a father's attempts to connect with his daughter finally take hold when the daughter, a Swiftie (who is also into skincare), takes an interest in watching football after Taylor Swift’s appearances at the Chiefs games. As they sit on the couch together, his wrist, adorned with friendship bracelets, is featured prominently.
When the commercial debuted on Friday, many Swifties and others remarked on its tear-jerking qualities and the improbability of being moved to cry by an ad for a cleanser.
Swifties praised the commercial for reflecting their own relationships with their dads. “This is exactly me and my father's situation,” one person wrote in the YouTube comments. “I'm a huge swiftie, and he is a huge NFL fan, and I can't even explain how much we bonded over those games.”
Over the weekend, however, some criticized the ad, with some saying the dad only connected with his daughter when she took an interest in his hobby. But the main criticism arrived when a TikTok creator made a video claiming that the skincare company stole the idea for the advertisement from her content. In Sharon Mbabazi’s original video, shared in September, the creator is doing her makeup as her stepdad reads off stats about Taylor Swift’s impact on the NFL. The creator took to TikTok to call the company out and posted videos aimed at the skincare brand.
In the 1920-30’s there were scores of German citizens who said “ohh, that’s just Adolph saying crazy things” after reading or hearing Hitler’s hateful, racist, vile & ultranationalist rhetoric. We know how that turned out. 100 years later, let’s NOT be the Germans.
from thesis 60: "The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Being a star means specializing in the seemingly lived; the star is the object of identification with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations which are actually lived."
Guy Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation: "All that once was directly lived has become mere representation."[2] Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing."[3] This condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life."[4]
The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which "passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity". "The spectacle is not a collection of images," Debord writes, "rather, it is a social relation among people, mediated by images."[5]
In his analysis of the spectacular society, Debord notes that the quality of life is impoverished,[6] with such a lack of authenticity that human perceptions are affected; and an attendant degradation of knowledge, which in turn hinders critical thought.[7] Debord analyzes the use of knowledge to assuage reality: the spectacle obfuscates the past, imploding it with the future into an undifferentiated mass, a type of never-ending present. In this way, the spectacle prevents individuals from realizing that the society of spectacle is only a moment in history, one that can be overturned through revolution.[8][9]
In the Situationist view, situations are actively constructed and characterized by "a sense of self-consciousness of existence within a particular environment or ambience".[10]
Debord encouraged the use of détournement, "which involves using spectacular images and language to disrupt the flow of the spectacle."
