In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.
— Guy Debord from The Society of the Spectacle
The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second
― Jean Luc Godard
Is this a pipe?
Is this Coca-Cola?
Which is the chair?
The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
Is this how to be a wife?
Can friends sleep together and still love each other in the morning?
A peek behind the spectacle
To show is big business
To show is big business
To show is big business
Commodification
Tourism—human circulation packaged for consumption, a by-product of the circulation of commodities—is the opportunity to go and see what has been banalized.
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
Commodification
Clothing
The spectacle's social function is the concrete manufacture of alienation. Economic expansion consists primarily of the expansion of this particular sector of industrial production. The "growth" generated by an economy developing for its own sake can be nothing other than a growth of the very alienation that was at its origin.
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
Now everybody can be an image
But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence, ... truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be seen as the highest degree of sacredness.
— Feuerbach, Preface to the Second Edition of The Essence of Christianity. Used to preface chapter 1 of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle