The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. the sheer fad item perfectly expresses the fact that, as the mass of commodities becomes more and more absurd, absurdity becomes a commodity in its own right. a film sparks a fashion craze, or a magazine launches a chain of clubs that in turn spins off a line of products. waves of enthusiasm for particular products, fueled and boosted by the communications media, are propagated with lightning speed. a use of the commodity arises that is sufficient unto itself what this means for the consumer is an outpouring of religious zeal in honor of the commodity's sovereign freedom. Even our dirtiest excesses are fed their daily fix of filth by the market as long as our kinks imply some sort of purchase, we'll always find an industry willing to satisfy them. What Debord clearly points out is indeed the fake sense of freedom in our choices, the great lie presiding over our lives as consumers-a surrogate freedom that was bestowed upon us as yet another commodity.
Modern society can't afford to accept the concept of 'strictly necessary' though, not after its very existence became anachronistic and even threatening to a world ruled by the market-a world that needs buyers and consumers in order to survive. As a matter of fact, it doesn't take much for a human being to survive. The list of our natural needs is indeed quite short: only a few biological functions and a couple of psychophysical drives to be satisfied when necessary, such as sex and sociality. The creation of artificial needs requires a distorted perception of inherent threshold values otherwise, Debord says, we wouldn't be the well-oiled cogs we're expected to be in the machinery of the system. Any sort of tribal, theocratic, feudal, political dimension in the history of our civilisation has indeed shaped reality according to its peculiar needs and aims, by means of a system of thought that could justify its permanence in time.
The foundation of every society is the result of an arbitrary act: one of its parts takes control over the rest and (re)makes the world in its own image.
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