EPISODE · Aug 18, 2025 · 11 MIN
Guy Debord: Society of the Spectacle in the Digital Age
from They Tried to Warn Us · host Ray Welling
Guy Debord was a Marxist filmmaker and founder of the Situationist International, a group of radical artists and thinkers who believed that modern life had been hijacked by appearances. Debord saw not just the rise of media, but the rise of mediation - and it terrified him. He died in 1994, just before the Internet fully absorbed us, so we brought him back to view an era where the spectacle is not a theory, but an operating system. He took one look at TikTok influencers livestreaming staged protests and muttered: "It's worse than I imagined."More information:They Tried to Warn Us, the book: More info on each podcast interview subject, along with 15 more interviews.They Tried to Warn Us, the newsletter: Follow the action on Ray's Substack.
What this episode covers
Guy Debord was a Marxist filmmaker and founder of the Situationist International, a group of radical artists and thinkers who believed that modern life had been hijacked by appearances. Debord saw not just the rise of media, but the rise of mediation - and it terrified him. He died in 1994, just before the Internet fully absorbed us, so we brought him back to view an era where the spectacle is not a theory, but an operating system. He took one look at TikTok influencers livestreaming staged protests and muttered: "It's worse than I imagined."More information:They Tried to Warn Us, the book: More info on each podcast interview subject, along with 15 more interviews.They Tried to Warn Us, the newsletter: Follow the action on Ray's Substack.
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Guy Debord: Society of the Spectacle in the Digital Age
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