The origin of many of our most elaborate models of corporatism, advertising, and how these things…

The origin of many of our most elaborate models of corporatism, advertising, and how these things infiltrate culture is — ironically enough — also the proximate origin of the very practices that theme parks embody: the situationist movement in Paris. They were equally concerned with modeling advertising and its subversion and with imagining a future urbanism where a post-scarcity city would see its primary goal as providing citizens with interesting and entertaining experiences.

The situationists would say that we can only ever win temporarily: the spectacle sees those things that subvert it, consumes them, and allows the defanged and sanitized symbols of that very subversion to become a part of itself. Just as punk was stripped of its ethos, just as Apple took an anti-consumerist minimalism and turned it into a reason to buy more things, Disney and its cohorts will find anything that opposes them and wear its skin. Nevertheless, we can continue to subvert. The situationists were marxists — they believed that capitalism would collapse under its own weight, and (presaging accelerationism) believed that constant subversion would quicken the fall of the spectacle by bloating it.