The spectacle is the guardian of sleep,” Debord says. “The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessity. What then is the fleshy present? The mechanism of mediation is increasingly the “lived world.” When I returned, everyone was happy I’d “returned.” The virtual is increasingly the world in which we exist in. More anecdotally, (and prosaically), it has been somewhat disturbing to me of late that the few times I’ve been banned from Facebook (for posts which actually don’t violate their TOS), many people have ceased contact. It is the business of these platforms to set themselves up as the intermediary, the go-between when you engage anyone in this “topsy-turvy” world. It is the much more casual way that these technologies integrate with our lives that bears the most consideration. This is, after all, nothing but the type of marketing manipulation all companies attempt, with varying degrees of success. We need not call to mind the PR debacle of Facebook “emotionally manipulating” its users. If the social needs of the epoch in which such techniques are developed can only be satisfied through their mediation, if the administration of this society and all contact among men can no longer take place except through the intermediary of this power of instantaneous communication, it is because this "communication" is essentially unilateral. If the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of "mass media" which are its most glaring superficial manifestation seems to invade society as mere equipment, this equipment is in no way neutral but is the very means suited to its total self movement. The fetishistic, purely objective appearance of spectacular relations conceals the fact that they are relations among classes: a second ems to dominate our environment. The spectacle is the existing order's uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It says nothing more than "that which appears is good, that which is good appears." The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having to appearing, from which all actual "having" must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function. The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. In a world that is truly topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false. But this sense of an End of History is quite different from his. In fact, the virtual seems positioned to entirely replace the material in the course of history, a point at which we can truly say would be the end of history. Consider the world we live in today: a world where the mediated social media space is on equal footing with our lived experience. Pointing the finger clearly at those who benefit from the logic of domination, Debord’s Comments convey the revolutionary impulse at the heart of situationism.It's hard to believe Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle was first published in the 60s. Resolutely refusing to be reconciled to the system, Debord trenchantly slices through the doxa and mystification offered tip by journalists and pundits to show how aspects of reality as diverse as terrorism and the environment, the Mafia and the media, were caught up in the logic of the spectacular society. In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, published twenty years later, Debord returned to the themes of his previous analysis and demonstrated how they were all the more relevant in a period when the “integrated spectacle” was dominant. Credited by many as being the inspiration for the ideas generated by the events of May 1968 in France, Debord’s pitiless attack on commodity fetishism and its incrustation in the practices of everyday life continues to burn brightly in today's age of satellite televisionand the soundbite. First published in 1967, Guy Debord’s stinging revolutionary critique ofcontemporary society, The Society of the Spectacle has since acquired a cult status.