The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Or Streamed.
One chill night, I was sitting in an old recording studio lounge in the middle of London. The guy who owned the building was using the back half as storage and had all sorts of random stuff piled up. Sitting there, I saw a poster of Gil Scott-Heron poking out, and I had always heard the name but had no clue who or what he did. So I did what any modern human would do and got to Googling. The first thing that popped up was his famous line, “The revolution will not be televised.” I’d heard it before but didn’t know its origin or meaning. I read a little bit about him and kept it moving, but not without thinking for a second how I didn’t agree with that specific statement. Hell, I thought the revolution would be on YouTube in HD. Now, if you are familiar with his work, you’ll realize I was a young, naive idiot to think that, and if you are not familiar with his work, you’ll eventually realize why I say that.
Revolutions are weird things, a manifestation of the crowd mind. People get upset for any number of reasons, then some organizing force appears and suddenly, voilà, viva la revolution. Ask the Chinese or the French. Their histories are littered with revolt.
Revolutions are costly because they begin with the realization that one entity has to die. Either literally or metaphorically, and sometimes both. The governing authority being revolted against, or the people doing the revolting. The state or the revoltees. I made that word up, but it fits. More on that later.
When I was in college, it was not uncommon to see people wearing Che Guevara shirts on campus. I thought it was cool until I actually learnt about Che Guevara. If you are unfamiliar with Che, he was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary who became a global symbol of armed anti-imperialist rebellion after helping Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution. So, long story short, he was a communist, and not a literary communist who likes to argue the concepts of the bourgeois and proletariat’s in Parisian cafés, but one out in the jungle fighting actual regimes. Now, after learning this, I looked at the shirts weirdly. Mind you, I went to a liberal arts college which, at the time, was top three most expensive in the country and filled with kids from the wealthiest region of the wealthiest nation. Now, being a kid fresh from Africa, I didn’t get it. How are these wealthy kids with expensive cars, all the latest tech, holiday homes in Cape Cod, wrapped in every comfort capitalism has ever produced, with jobs lined up in the Mecca of capitalism that is Wall Street, walking around with a communist on their shirts? I had no prior judgment on capitalism or communism. I grew up in the land of coups d’état and military dictatorship, so I didn’t really care to be honest. Politics was not some clean theory people wore on a shirt. It was something that could cancel an election, hang a man, or change a government over lunch. So I had trouble reconciling how people could exist so comfortably inside that dichotomy.
What I have come to realize is that the revolution will not be televised, but it will and has been packaged and sold. What do I mean by that? Before I explain, let me paraphrase by saying this is not capitalistic bashing. I believe Winston Churchill’s paraphrased quote about democracy can be swapped with capitalism. “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” This rings true for capitalism. Now back to revolutions.
Revolution is packaged and sold because the system eats said revolution before it can get going, and people are programmed to consume culture in neat packages. Sometimes quite literally. So Che and his radical ideas get turned into a cool shirt, hippie counterculture becomes wealthy wellness centers, and Banksy’s anti-establishment art sells at the most establishment-esque institution to the very people the art is critiquing. Revolutions contain very addictive ingredients like power, purpose, dignity, the promise of transformation, and the dopamine hit of group dynamics.
With the way we have structured society now, capitalism incentivizes the conversion of revolt into market value. What could have been genuine change gets packaged neatly and sold back to the people.
The examples are endless. We have become revoltee employees. It is the only way to explain someone sitting in a coffee shop owned by a giant corporation, drinking an overpriced beverage made from ingredients farmed by underpaid workers in the third World, typing on a laptop containing components mined by children in the Congo, while that same laptop is covered in stickers that say peace, resist, and eat the rich.
The system has learnt, either by design or natural evolution, that fighting revolution directly is not always the right choice. Ask the French kings, or, most recently, leaders during the Arab Spring. What instead works better is absorption. Let the revolt speak for a bit, let it make symbols and slogans, then slowly turn those into products, content, and institutional language. Let people buy the identity and feeling of resistance. It’s quite brilliant if you zoom out and look at it. The original merchants of desire, those Madison Avenue advertising men, would be very proud, and the French kings who got their heads chopped off will be looking down like, why the hell didn’t we think of this?
Juvenal, the Roman satirist, once wrote “panem et circenses,” which translates to “bread and circuses.” Meaning, keep the people fed and entertained and they will not revolt. The modern system has added a third layer: bread, circuses, and virtue consumption. You don’t just get gladiators fighting and some wheat. You get the feeling of moral participation. You can watch documentaries about injustice and hit like, wear anti-system slogans, post revolutionary language, buy “ethical” products, stream protest music, attend branded cultural events, and feel awake.
But structurally, you remain very much part of the machine.
That’s why idiot young me thought Gil Scott-Heron was wrong. I took “televised” literally. I thought, of course the revolution will be televised. It’ll be on YouTube in HD, chopped into clips, reposted, and argued about by idiots in comment sections. But after actually listening properly, I realized he was talking about exactly that. If you are looking to the media and the system for the revolution, it is like looking to the prison guard for the escape route. The real revolution will not arrive as content you can sit back and watch safely between ads.
The first reaction might be to stop consuming, but unless you want to go live in a cabin in the woods somewhere, that would be dishonest. We are all inside the machine. The point is to notice when the machine starts selling you the feeling of being outside it. That is the trick. And that is usually the moment the revolution has already been eaten.
Because the revolution will not be televised.
Or streamed.