On New Year’s Eve the biggest fireworks display ever was launched off of the biggest tower in the world. Dubai’s fireworks show was, in terms less vulgar than the display itself, an undulating orgasm of global capital. The 500,000 fireworks mounted to Burj Khalifa Tower and the surrounding skyscrapers, were reportedly viewed live by over a million people on the ground and livestreamed to millions more around the world. I can’t find a price tag for the display (too gauche?) but given that your typical municipal fireworks display for proles can easily top six figures, lets just assume that you could measure the cost of this display in national GDPs. It was profane in the way Donald Trump’s continued existence is profane. The fireworks display was so huge —such an utterly perfect metaphor for capitalism itself— that no single person standing on the ground could witness the entire thing. It was a spectacle meant for camera lenses.
“The spectacle” is a well worn topic of critical social thought. Guy Debord, one of the better-known members of the Situationist International, wrote that modern society was a “society of the spectacle.” That is, modern society alienates individuals not only during the production of goods, services, and media (just as Marx said) but also during their consumption. “What was once directly lived” says Debord, “has become mere representation.
Part of the modern myth of capital is that things are continually getting bigger and better. That forward in time means ever-increasing improvement. New Year’s celebrations are always a moment of assessment. Not only are we hyper-aware of the passage of time, but we are also strongly encouraged to assess everything that we did last year and to make resolutions about what we will do next year. Any one of us might resolve to read more or eat less candy, but for those that control the means of production, the resolution is always the same: make bigger, make more. For the geographic and socio-cutural centers of industry, New Years celebrations are an opportunity to demonstrate and confirm that we are still on an upward trajectory. Debord writes:
“It is the omnipresent celebration of a choice already made in the sphere of production, and the consummate result of that choice. In form as in content the spectacle serves as total justification for the conditions and aims of the existing system. It further ensures the permanent presence of that justification, for it governs almost all time spent outside the production process itself.”
The spectacle is meant to make you feel good about decisions already made. How one should regard the passing of a new year, and the manner with which capital has decided to mark its continued successes (regardless of actual achievements) are difficult to separate out. The rituals we are used to, what we picture in our heads when we think of ringing in a new year, are shaped by the media representations of a new year. If Burj Khalifa Tower had never been built, you never could have known such abundance. World records would have never been broken. We would be stagnant. Imagine what would happen, how people would talk about, a time square celebration that was noticeably “less than” the previous year’s. There’d be talk about a languishing economy and wide-spread malaise. We’d probably sacrifice Ryan Seacrest to the god of sex scandal but nothing would work. The whole year would be fucked.
Time Square in all its opulence and unabashed advertising (if you decided to shout all the words on the screen during the ball drop, as someone I was with during new year’s eve opted to do, you would have shouted “Happy New Year Toshiba!”) is about as secular as rituals come. Thanksgiving is close, but whereas Thanksgiving has a flimsy but utterable origin story, celebrating a new year just seems so objective. Not celebrating the new year requires explanation. It also requires a lot of work, given that celebration is everywhere. Even if you just want to watch television, you are presented with one company or another’s effort to produce a profitable tradition.
Capitalism abhors a solved problem. If everyone seems satisfied, you’ve got a stagnating market on your hands. The ever-present demand of capital to make celebrations bigger as a simultaneous representation, demonstration, and celebration of increasing market indicators means you also have to find new ways of showing that celebration. As New Year’s Eve celebrations get larger and more elaborate, we run up against the very finite boundaries of human cognition and perception. No single person standing on the ground can see fireworks illuminating and outlining an entire human-made archipelago. So you fly helicopters with high definition cameras on pre-determined flight paths so that the fireworks display and its recording are one in the same choreography. Witnessing the fireworks requires an augmentation of the senses.
The millions that stood in Dubai and watched the display in person got a very entertaining display, but they did not get —for lack of a better term— the full picture. Perhaps not “less than” but their own smartphone cameras could not capture everything that happened. It is a display that is so large, so incompressible to the individual, that its totality can only be captured by the event coordinators themselves, or by the collective documentation of the presenters. Which is not to say the two are completely different. In fact the two exist in knowledge of one another and are produced as such. In the moments where the camera pans to the audience we see the moment of recording that will eventually end in hundreds of personal YouTube videos of the same event from different perspectives. Each will be different but they will all, in a sense, tell a similar story: That even something meant to entertain, under capitalism, must eventually graduate to the level of over one’s head and behind one’s back.
When The Simpsons were still good (1996) there was a 4th of July episode where Homer buys an enormous firecracker. The man selling it to him pitches the explosive device by saying “celebrate the birth of your country by blowing up a small part of it .” This contradiction —that true celebration of something requires you destroy a small piece of it— is at the heart of consumption. After all, what is consuming but the act of destroying something so that it may become a part of you? With every new year’s eve party comes a new production problem to be solved: how do we capture and curate a few moments of unrepentant excess so that everyone may sample a small bit of it? And yet, given that we have all consumed the spectacle at one point or another, to denounce the New Year’s Eve celebration as mere spectacle is to engage in the most obnoxious of moralizing behavior. Debord himself says, “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” For him, that social relationship is a process of alienation, but for me and many others, to write off these thoroughly corporate celebrations as just corporate, would be to disregard my own (albeit nonconsensual) participation in the creation of that event.
Whether it be through corporate research, for which I am a kind of boundless informant; or my own deep desire to watch the ball drop on New Year’s Eve (I always feel its absence if the party doesn’t have it playing somewhere), these displays are a part of me. Just as the camera-equipped helicopter is meant to fly around Dubai, I find myself at a party maneuvering to a screen at around 11:55. To discount this as some kind of false consciousness would be wrong. Instead, I want to find what about the celebration is meaningful to me and reclaim it as the property of my chosen community. What that actually looks like, however, is a complete mystery to me.