The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord

We live in a neoliberalism economy where the most important think we can do is buy, so the best way we can turn the system around it by starting to think critically about your own consumerism. It's people thinking hard work alone will lead them anywhere they want because they've been told by people who haven't necessarily worked harder than them in order to become successful and who are very self-conscious about protecting the social order they prosper in. People crafting their identity around fictional characters (* ahem * Tyler Durden * ahem * ) and shunning their relationship to their real environment.

It's people arguing over iPhones vs Androids. What is the spectacle, then? Debord has a great way of summarizing it: the colonization of human life by commodities. Everybody acknowledge we live in the society of spectacle, but either don't believe its rules apply to them or adopt a defeatist attitude towards it. The spectacle is a concept that's very swanky to talk about in dinner parties like George Orwell's 1984, but it is often simplified and, ironically enough, objectified by its debaters. The extraordinary new conditions in which this entire generation has lived constitute a comprehensive summary of all that, henceforth, the spectacle will forbid and also all that it will permit.Re-read this bad boy for research purposes. Quite simply, the spectacle’s domination has succeeded in raising a whole generation moulded to its laws. “In all that has happened in the last twenty years, the most important change lies in the very continuity of the spectacle.

Now finally available in a superb English translation approved by the author, Debord’s text remains as crucial as ever for understanding the contemporary effects of power, which are increasingly inseparable from the new virtual worlds of our rapidly changing image / information culture.

From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960s to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late twentieth century. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative as Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.

The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord