The Great Sonic War of 2019: Why Debord and Baudrillard Were Right
It’s like Angry Joe said, “We got ‘em!” We did it! We won! We got those rotten fucks at Paramount to change the way our beloved icon of pop culture will look in his upcoming movie. Welcome to our gangsta’s paradise, assholes! For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with important world news, a major event recently took place. The first trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog hit YouTube on April 30th and the fans of everyone’s favorite spiny mammal lost their collective shit over his revolting appearance. Outrage over this blatant sacrilege exploded all throughout the internet. My immediate, spontaneous reaction to CGI Sonic was like those of many others: “Why the fuck does Sonic look like a little rape monster?” In the name of all that is cool, good and decent, I command thee to keep that abomination away from the children! Kill him, Eggman, kill him! The CGI was fucking horrible. CGI Sonic is what you’d get if you mixed a Sonic drawn by Dr. Seuss with HIV and Sade’s novel The 120 Days of Sodom. See for yourself. And don’t worry if you need to cover your eyes. I won’t blame you. It’s the stuff that nightmares are made of.
Did you make it through? Are you still with me? Are you okay? If you need to take a moment to collect yourself, then, by all means, take all the time you need. . . . That’s right, cry it out. That’s right, punch it out. Try thinking of pretty flowers and beautiful sunsets. Think of all the fun you had playing Sonic games when you were a kid. Think about that part in “No Woman, No Cry” where Bob Marley keeps on singing “everything’s gonna be alright”. I know it’s tough but it’s best if we just move on as fast as we can. I mean, that’s literally what the Sonic we know and love would do. Remember, we won. All the backlash caused the director of the movie to announce the following on Twitter:
Wave goodbye to the tears and rage. Embrace the feels of the Great Triumph! We should be celebrating our glorious victory! Fandom 1, Paramount 0. I feel like dancing. Nah, fuck that! I’m in the mood for something better than a dance. I’m feeling like John Travolta at the end of Staying Alive — I want to strut! Cue the Bees Gees!
Alright, I’m done. I got that out of my system. Now let’s get serious for a moment. This whole situation is depressing as fuck and only serves to confirm the fact that we’re all doomed. Look, I’m a total pop culture junkie. Movies, TV shows, albums and video games have been at the center of my life since day one, but I have zero fucks to give about Sonic’s CGI design at a time like this. Think about the shit we’re facing: climate change, economic stagnation, automation, a broken political system, reactionary ideology, student loan debt crisis, health care, etc. Oh, but crumby CGI is what really matters. And, yeah, I have just as much nostalgia for playing Sonic the Hedgehog on Sega Genesis as you do. I was born in ’82, so do the math. But it’s time to wake up and see how all this shit is used against us. Can you imagine what we could accomplish if we weren’t totally enslaved to the spectacles of pop culture?
Ever since the postwar era, we have all been groomed to devote our attention to the images produced by the culture industry. This is precisely what Guy Debord was concerned with in his book The Society of the Spectacle. In it, Debord shows how capitalism has taken on a new approach that pacifies disgruntled workers by flooding them with entertaining images (TV shows, films, magazines, comic books, advertisements, etc.). These images in and of themselves are not the problem. The problem is how they’re structured and utilized for the sole purpose of aiding in the capital accumulation and the reproduction of shitty material conditions, that is, they keep us distracted from all the ways capitalist society makes our lives suck. These images serve to shape, protect and reproduce certain types of social relations. As Debord put it, “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” Capitalism cannot make the vast majority of lives meaningful, passionate and life-affirming, so, instead, it gives us a bunch of images of people living their best lives for us to identify with. We “live” vicariously through Spock, Luke Skywalker, Batman, Blade, Neo, Frodo, Harry Potter, Iron Man, Wonder Woman, Black Panther, etc. Have you ever thought about the fact that observing is not living? Every time you’re sitting on the couch watching your favorite characters live their lives is also when you are not directly living your own life. I’m on a rant. Deal with it.
Debord wrote, “The whole of life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” At this point in capitalism, everything has become about appearances and images. All facets of people’s lives are mediated by spectacles. In the past, people used to relate themselves directly to others and to things, but now everything is mediated through representations (images of lifestyles, advertising, mass media, movies, self-images, etc.). These spectacles serve to keep us distracted, stupid, mildly amused and aloof. They keep us from focusing on the material (real) conditions that force us into alienated and exploited existences based around shitty jobs. In other words, reality (concrete things) used to be more primary than images (representations, appearances), but now the opposite is true. We live in a society where images are primary and real things are secondary. We’re all like Eleven on Stranger Things — stuck inside the Upside Down.
Video games were a step forward for the spectacle, since they simulate activity. You don’t just sit back and passively observe images on the screen. Now you get to have an active role in them. You play as Sonic. You get to control Sonic but the trick is to realize how Sonic really controls you. Of course, video games are just pseudo-activity. You’re not really living your life when you’re playing a video game (however, Žižek is right to highlight how they do give expression to our deepest fantasies). This type of pseudo-activity, the simulation of life, gets carried over from video games to social media. The whole history of the consumer society is that of manufactured consent, to talk like Noam Chomsky, and this bullshit pseudo-activity has become an essential part of it.
The Great Sonic War of 2019 is merely a symptom of the underlying disease of the spectacle. More than ever before, we are faced with real problems. Problems that aggressive tweets and YouTube dislikes will not be able to solve. What must find new ways to challenge capitalism though collective action. Do not let the fact that Paramount announced that they’ll be redoing Sonic’s design fool you into thinking that this counts as an authentic challenge. This is not what Baudrillard called symbolic exchange. Capitalism thrives on unilaterality, but it simulates ways for us to appear to be opposing it. In fact, the whole “exchange”, the “dialogue”, between ourselves and Paramount Pictures Corporation is merely a simulation of symbolic exchange. We didn’t provide any countergift (something that fundamentally challenges the other). Not at all! We simply served to help them refine their commodity. Our “feedback” didn’t actually challenge the gift, but, rather, affirmed it by making it more marketable. We just did their work for them.
Spectacles and simulations prevent us from creating new modes of collective organization and from focusing on the crucial issues that define our times. Enough with the escapism of pop culture! What we need now more than ever is some good ol’ class consciousness. And, no, this isn’t some holier than thou shit. I speak from within the fold. I’m a retro gamer. My two biggest accomplishments so far are kill-screening Donkey Kong and rolling-over Joust. I spent my childhood at the video store, the mall and the arcade. It’s not a matter of learning to hate all the cool shit we’ve grown up loving. Lightsabers are fucking cool. That’s an axiomatic truth. However, we have to see how all of this stuff was produced with a secret purpose in mind. Your love for pop culture might be innocent, but pop culture itself is not. Capital gave pop culture to us for a reason and that reason was self-interested on its part. Shitty jobs ruin lives. Industrial wage laborers knew this all too well. So capital decided to trick us into believing that shitty jobs aren’t that shitty by providing us with all types of entertainment that keep us from focusing on how shitty these shitty jobs really are. Yes, we live in an age of pessimism and irony, but I say that we have to find it in ourselves to seriously care about what deserves serious care. Regularly scheduled capitalism has cancelled our future, so let’s cancel capitalism and regularly schedule the future. Dare to have the revolutionary naiveté of a child! This gamer dares to say it: fighting for the future is more important than some shitty movie destined for the clearance bin at Walmart. Besides, Jim Carrey is gonna kill it as Eggman.
