Automation, Which Is Both The Most Advanced Sector Of Modern Industry And The Epitome Of Its Practice,

 Automation, which is both the most advanced sector of modern industry and the epitome of its practice, obliges the commodity system to resolve the following contradiction: The technological developments that objectively tend to eliminate work must at the same time preserve labour as a commodity, because labour is the only creator of commodities. The only way to prevent automation (or any other less extreme method of increasing labour productivity) from reducing society’s total necessary labour time is to create new jobs. To this end the reserve army of the unemployed is enlisted into the tertiary or “service” sector, reinforcing the troops responsible for distributing and glorifying the latest commodities; and in this it is serving a real need, in the sense that increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary to convince people to buy increasingly unnecessary commodities.

Guy Debord, from Society of the Spectacle (tr. Ken Knabb)

Bruno Samorì "Uccello bianco con Ramo di Neve" montages Japanese Masterpieces and photography

Dieter Rams, Braun TG 60 Tape Recorder, 1965.

Kosztolányi Dezső Square bus station, Budapest, 1963. From the Budapest Municipal Photography Company archive.

R.D. Laing, Knots

andrew garfield for gq, 2022