Many corporations follow Disney to become purposefully theatrical. In the latest Las Vegas spectacle, the "World of Coca-Cola Las Vegas" features the world’s largest (1000 foot, four-story) Coke bottle in a global storytelling theater, where twenty-fou r rotating, heartwarming Coke-stories are reenacted in digital and folkloric storytelling (McIntosh, 1997).

Afterwards, the audience interacts with the performance as it fills out pop-quiz forms identifying celebrities they recall from the storylines. The exhibit is also designed to be interactive, by brining the audience into the storytelling process, allow ing them to type their own favorite Coke-stories into computer terminals. "Digital Storytelling" is an emerging art form pioneered by San Francisco-based multimedia developer Dana Atchley, and founder of the annual digital storytelling festival. I am very interested in Global Storytelling Theater as a spectacular organization.

Digital re-mastering allows spectacle production to distribute to fragmented spectral audiences. The spectators may be fragmented, but the message is the standard: Buy these images and your family, work, and sex life will be fantastic. In happy storyte lling, narratives of progress through image consumption displace the global theaters of absurdity and cruelty. Yet in fifty years the spectacle has consumed more of the planet than in the last millennium. Our spectacle narratives invoke theatrics that cha nge the planet in apocalyptic collapse. The third world is narrated in ways that allow the first world to confiscate their native resources. Digital storytelling theater is the latest allure in selling the consumption dream.

Guy Debord (1967) proposes that we change spectacles to be more self-managed by workers and by consumers. Best and Kellner (1999b), for example, assert that spectacle is going through a transformation, from passive spectators in highly structured a nd massive spectacles to a stage of interactive spectacle in which spectators are actively producing and consuming their own spectacle in self-designed experiences. Yet, the marketeers are also working to make spectacle more interactive.

Spectacle, says Debord, is an opium, that allows us to sleep walk, as if drugged, stumbling blindfolded through a devolving landscape of ecological and human horror; while cocooned in artificiality and illusion; mind-numbed by cyber media into passive stupefied spectators. This is why it is not easy for people socialized in spectacles and consumption images of the good life through consumption to step outside of its mechanisms of persuasion. Can we walk out of the Digital Storytelling Theater and see i ts impact on nature, social systems, and the manipulation of our own desires. Our life is just too "saturated with spectacles" and we are too pacified in their "permanent opium war" (Debord, 1967: #44).