Guy Debord, who died in 1994, undoubtedly belonged to the second, nobler, breed. An architect of conceptual ruins. His name, today swallowed by the academic black hole that devours everything and spits it back out as merchandise, still echoes like a gunshot in the night. His major work, “The Society of the Spectacle,” is not a book. It is an indictment. A weapon. Written in 1967, it still smells of gunpowder and that inconvenient truth which the world, today more than ever, insists on burying under a mountain of chatter.

His thesis, simple and terrible as an axe, nails us to our condition. All that was once directly lived has moved away into a representation . Authentic life, made of concrete gestures and carnal relationships, has been replaced by its image. The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images . It is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image . Look around you. It is the advertisement promising happiness in a can, the news packaging reality into reassuring formulas, politics reduced to stadium cheering, the screen of your phone staring at you with its hypnotic grin. It is separation perfected . Man, a spectator of his own existence, is no longer its actor. He passively contemplates the flow of a world that slips past without touching him. The more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires . A sleepwalker who believes he is awake.

Debord and the Situationists, that band of die-hards who elected psychogeographic drift and détournement as their weapons of guerrilla warfare, did not just diagnose the illness. They attempted a cure. Construct situations, they said . Moments of life concretely and deliberately constructed through the collective organization of a unified ambience and the play of events. It was not about interpreting the world, but changing it. Immediately. Without waiting for the revolution. Art need no longer be an account of past sensations; it can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations . It was a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us . A walk without aim through the drifts of the city, a gratuitous gesture, the mocking alteration of an advertising slogan: these were the seeds of a revolt that would never erect barricades, but was undermining the very foundations of the palace.

Then, the betrayal. The most atrocious. The system, the very one Debord wanted to blow up, demonstrated a monstrous capacity for absorption . Capital does not just crush antagonism; it buys it, digests it, and sells it back as merchandise. Radical critique became a t-shirt slogan, the drift an organized tour, détournement the basic technique of viral marketing. The counterculture became the dominant culture, emptied of its explosive charge and recycled into a new, more insidious, opium for the masses. Integration is complete . The diffuse spectacle of the opulent democracies and the concentrated spectacle of authoritarian regimes have merged into a single, indistinct integrated spectacle, which today even feeds on our desire for authenticity to sell us the latest “ethical” smartphone model . The system constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism, to make us accept everything else . And we, hypnotized, take the bait.

And yet. And yet, in this night that seems endless, Debord’s work retains a spark of raw fire. His prophecy has come true with frightening precision in the age of Instagram and TikTok, where identity is nothing but a meticulous collection of signs, a museum of appearances built for the anonymous gaze of the Other . Life has entirely moved into representation. Having has definitively given way to appearing . The question then becomes urgent, burning: in a world that has reduced everything to a commodity, including our dreams of rebellion, is an authentic gesture still possible? The answer lies not in books, nor in theories. It lies in the daily, obstinate choice to withdraw from the monologue of the existing. By ceasing to be spectators. Refusing passivity. Starting, perhaps, to live one’s own life as a work of art, not as a product. Debord, somewhere, is still drinking and sneering. Because he knew his ideas would outlive him. The reason is simple: I understand the things that make up the spectacle.