The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.

The social group is broken down into atomized individuals who fight for their right to fulfillment via professional advancement or personal consumption. This system is often sold to us as freedom. Those competing individuals never find true autonomy, however, because they lack the social fabric in which to exercise it.

Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle: “Debord introduced the concept of recuperation: the process by which subcultural ideas and images become commodified and reincorporated into mainstream society,” she writes. In other words, ideas that subvert the establishment tend to get adapted by the establishment in their most docile forms, and are thu... See more