The Society of the Spectacle

""I read The Society of the Spectacle again and I thought, 'This is a fucking amazing book!' I had forgotten how terrific it was, and it was actually quite different to how I remembered it. I insist that the key chapter is not the first one, on the spectacle itself, but the second to last--the chapter on détournement. To me, that concept is the great gift of the Situationists. They realized that one can exploit this critically--one can copy and correct in the direction of hope."" --McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto in Los Angeles Review of Books ""We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab Spring recently, we are students of the Situationist movement. Those are the people who gave birth to what many people think was the first global revolution back in 1968 when some uprisings in Paris suddenly inspired uprisings all over the world. All of a sudden universities and cities were exploding. This was done by a small group of people, the Situationists, who were like the philosophical backbone of the movement. One of the key guys was Guy Debord, who wrote The Society of the Spectacle. The idea is that if you have a very powerful meme--a very powerful idea--and the moment is ripe, then that is enough to ignite a revolution."" --Adbusters (explaining the origins of the ""Occupy"" movement in 2011) ""In Society of the Spectacle, Debord sets out his best-known statement of how the categories of capitalism colonize everyday life to such an extent that we can barely imagine an existence beyond them."" --Sydney Review of Books ""Never before has Debord's work seemed quite as relevant as it does now, in the permanent present that he so accurately foretold? Open his book, read it, be amazed, pour yourself a glass of supermarket wine--as he would wish--and then forget all about it, which is what the Spectacle wants."" --Will Self, professor of Modern Thought at Brunel University London