A Spec Sheet

I spent years talking about how the society of the spectacle shapes a society. I never asked how it shaped me.

The question came late, which is how things come to me. I build first and understand afterward, sometimes years afterward. In 2012 I made a piece about the self we put on display online, and I knew it was a self-portrait. I brought my intimacy into the work on purpose. I rebuilt my room with its real objects, the dirty laundry, everything in view except the walls and the bed, of which I brought only the mattress. I thought the portrait was in the objects. It took me fourteen years to see that the subject was not the objects but me, the child the spectacle had made, and that I was not talking about the internet. I was talking about myself, much deeper than I knew while I was doing it.

I did not arrive at the spectacle as an adult, with a theory under my arm. I was born inside it. I was a child in front of a camera before I could read, and I grew up being watched, at the age when everything you are going to be is still forming. Then the spectacle did what it does with children who get older. It let me go. What came next was a whole life asking why I never made it back in, until one day, tired, I started to look at myself through the new shape of the spectacle, which was no longer television but the feed. The biography is not the point. The position is. Someone the apparatus built from the inside is now looking at the apparatus from the outside. It is the only credential I have, and it turns out to be a rare one.

In 2012 I gave the thing a name. Internércia. Inter, Net, Inertia: the inertia of the connected self, the drift that pushes you to build a perfect self in the broken mirror of the internet. The piece was a projection of public YouTube figures, many voices at once, simultaneous and unintelligible, pierced by a window the exact size of a video. Behind the window, invisible until someone came close with the instinct of a peeping eye, was me, living in my own space for forty-eight hours. Whoever found the window became a voyeur without having asked to be one.

I cited Guy Debord to hold it up. I will confess it at once, because the confession is stronger than the cover-up: I cited him a lot and I never finished him. I read more than half of The Society of the Spectacle, caught the idea, and built with intuition what the book described with theory. A complete reader would have written an essay about Debord. I made a self-portrait and put Debord's name on top of it. The half-read source and the question I never asked are the same gap, and the work came out of that gap. I did not build despite not finishing the book. I built because I did not finish it. What I left unread left the room for me to fill, without yet measuring how far it reached.

There was a time when information came out of the device and we received it. The day's news was watched on the couch, at a fixed hour, and discussed with the family. The device did not listen to us. Now it listens. Now we interact with the medium, and the medium decides to put a familiar character in another body for the next series because it knows it will draw hate, and the hate turns into money. The ritual of sitting down at an hour to learn about the world fell out of use. It is not that we know less; the rhythm at which we consume is astronomically faster and sits in the palm of the hand at any hour. What we still seem unable to do is tell information from knowledge, and that failure touches something primary: the wanting to know. We know the algorithm chooses for us. We all saw the Cambridge Analytica documentary. And still we get into political arguments and spread the truths that match the image we want to project.

For five years I moderated video for the Spanish-language market of the largest platform of attention. I saw up close how the policies, the ones on sexual content for instance, grew stricter or looser depending on who was in office. I watched the illusion of meaning in what I did fall apart. While I wore the company shirt and read the dog whistles of what creators wanted to say without saying it, I was accused of overthinking. That is where I understood it was a business.

But the real privilege was another one, and almost no one has it today. During those years, the algorithm did not choose the content for me. I had to watch opinions from many positions, ordinary people giving their channel to what they believe, and how many different beliefs there were. A normal person opens the phone and sees a feed full of people who think like them. I was exposed to so many that I stopped looking at the topics and started seeing the patterns. I started to see what we all have in common when we want to be seen.

And I learned the thing that holds all of this up. The truth of a video is not its subject. It is the fact that the video exists. Who made it, why, and what they gain from its existence. The truth is not in what they say or what they defend. It is in what they show, in what happens there, in that moment. That is the truth they wanted to show, and there is no other, because the other one is insignificant.

I watched an influencer go live crying because his mother had died. No one doubts that the mother died. But that is not the truth of the video. The truth is more painful: there is a person in grief, very successful and very alone, for whom the only thing left is his followers, and his grief only fully exists when it is broadcast. That is the truth. Not the subject. The fact.

Once I had to report a video I will not describe here. A real abuse, filmed by someone riding alongside it, titled in capital letters as a denunciation. The camera was not there to stop the abuse. It was there to cash it in views. The truth of that video was not the abuse, even with the abuse in front of your eyes. The truth was that the video existed thanks to a network of people who dressed as vigilantes and who also did not go to the police. The one abusing, the one filming, and the one who posted it: three forms of the same gesture.

Wearing the shirt, la franela. I wore the employee's, the company's, and from there I read the intentions of others. The men filming the abuse wore the shirt of the righteous. The same shirt, at both ends of the system. This is the part that is hard to say and it is the center of everything: complicity is not a flaw in the spectacle, not the exception that slips through. It is the structure. The one who looks completes the work. Without the look there is no display, and the look is never neutral, not mine behind a moderation screen and not yours now.

Let us go back to the window of 2012, because it was all there before I knew it. What the spectacle taught me as a child, at the age when everything forms, was to curate what I show. I learned that being loved depended on it. The window in the installation, the size of a video, was the monitor where a child kept performing to be watched. The only thing that changed in twenty-five years was the resolution.

The question I never asked now has an uncomfortable answer. The spectacle did not influence me the way it influences a society, from the outside, like weather. It made me. And this text, like everything I do, is the product looking at itself in the mirror and trying to name what it is made of. I write it, but I am not sure who has their hand on the pencil.