Degradation of human life: Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation: "All that

Degradation of human life: Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation: "All that once was directly lived has become mere representation."[2] Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing."[3] This condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life."[4] The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which "passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity". "The spectacle is not a collection of images," Debord writes, "rather, it is a social relation among people, mediated by images."[5] Reading those first two paragraphs I thought he was talking about instagram. It's written in 1967. It's amazing how these French theorists could see so clearly what was happening at their time and also see the future of what we would become. I wonder what people are theorizing about now who could be in the same class? and what they say about society and what things they say about our future that will become? amazing and interesting.