The Part of You That Wants to Wake Up Is the Part Still Dreaming
Your search for a way out is the very dream that keeps you asleep
Sotheby’s auction house, 2018.
Banksy’s painting Girl with Balloon had just sold for £1.1 million. The moment the gavel fell, a shredder built into the bottom of the frame activated, and the canvas began to slowly feed itself through, inch by inch.
The room erupted. This was his long-planned act of defiance — a deliberate destruction of the absurd logic of capitalist art auctions.
But the shredder malfunctioned. Only half the painting was destroyed.
Then something even more absurd happened: the half-shredded work was renamed Love Is in the Bin and returned to the market. This time, it sold for £18.5 million.
Banksy’s most radical act of rebellion became the most iconic spectacle in auction history.
The spectacle was not destroyed. That force — the one that makes a certain way of living feel like “normal,” a certain set of desires feel like “of course” — caught the knife. Then sold it.
We’ve always held one assumption about control: that it’s external, visible. If you can see it, you can resist it.
So you start reading. Start critiquing consumerism. Start feeling like you’ve seen through the map, the cycle, the purchased self. You feel a clarity — a sense of distance, like you’ve stepped offstage and are watching from outside.
That feeling is real.
But the spectacle Debord described runs deeper than that.
It doesn’t control what you do. It controls what reality looks like inside your eyes — including what “clear-eyed reality” looks like.
“The person who sees through things” is an identity.
Like “the person with taste,” “the successful one,” “the curator of a refined life” — it is a self-image that can be packaged, priced, and consumed.
You buy those books, take those courses, follow those “deep” accounts, start posting things that signal you’re “different” — you think this is awakening. It’s another form of consumption. The product you’re consuming is called the feeling of being awake.
You think you’ve stepped offstage. You’ve only changed costumes. You’re still on it.
But you might say: I don’t consume those things. I’m genuinely reflecting. I’m genuinely resisting.
Fine. Then look at Che Guevara.
He fought capitalism with his life, without compromise. Today, his face is printed on T-shirts sold in markets around the world, bought and sold within the capitalist system. The people buying those shirts are consuming the symbol of a rebel — and that act of consumption is capitalism’s.
Guevara didn’t cooperate. The spectacle didn’t need him to.
It only needed to turn his rebellion into a new spectacle, reprice it, reabsorb it. The more total the rebellion, the higher its spectacle value. That painting sold for £18.5 million precisely because the knife was real.
So here is a question you may have never actually faced:
If even rebellion can be reabsorbed — if even waking up can be a designed exit — where do you stand that is actually real?
I don’t have an answer. This essay doesn’t offer one.
Because offering an answer would be repeating the mechanism — feeding you one more ready-made “exit,” letting you feel satisfied, feel like you’ve arrived, and then stop thinking any further.
The only thing I can say is this:
That uncomfortable place — where nothing is certain, where you can’t fully trust even your own clarity, where no one is telling you what to do — that place is real.
Not because there are answers there. But because it’s the first place where you haven’t been handed one.
Real clarity is uncomfortable. It can’t be posted. It can’t become an identity. It can’t be priced.
It’s just you, standing there, not knowing what to do — but knowing:
This time, no one arranged this scene for you.