Two Hundred Pharaohs Five Billion Slaves - Adrian Peacock

Situationist-inspired book originally published in London in 1999. This is the republished edition from 2001.

Contents

Introduction by Gavin Turk

Them
The Struggle
Us
The Stalemate
The Hamster Wheel
Faster!!
Shopping
Contesting Uncle George's Will
Fairy Tales
Let's Build A Rocket
Carpet Baggers
Superstars

Back cover blurb:

This massively researched underground classic was first published in 1999 and has been plagiarised by would-be youth-movement leaders ever since. Predating the wave of corporately contrived ‘anti-globalisation’ books cobbled together to exploit disquiet at the growing disparity between the megawealthy and the rest of us, it offers a profoundly hopeful view of human progress.

Launching itself from the point at which the Situationist International of the 1960s left off, Two Hundred Pharaohs, Five Billion Slaves examines the rise of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of their world of intense leisure shopping.

Starting from the thesis that the whole of capitalist society can be viewed as nothing more sophisticated than a vast unstable network of constantly rising and tumbling pyramid schemes, it highlights the fact that only a handful of socially isolated and insecure billionaires (or ‘pharaohs’) can hope to benefit from a system that squanders the immense potential of modern technology.

Avowedly ‘post-Utopian’ in outlook. Two Hundred Pharaohs, Five Billion Slaves represents one of the very few attempts in literature to describe what daily life would be like in a communistic world society.

Mail-art artist, City of London analyst and Libyan Embassy squatter in the 1980s, researcher specialising in property and leisure, and anti-Criminal Justice Act activist in the early 1990s, Adrian Peacock published Two Hundred Pharaohs, Five Billion Slaves in 1999. Inspired by the Albanian Revolution, it was written in a call centre.

A critic writes:

‘During the investigation large amounts of personal material, of an anarchist nature, were found on your PC … Some of the documents in question were of 40 sides of A4 in length … It was determined that this was, potentially, a serious disciplinary matter …’