Class struggles used to be located in the factories, now they would have to be fought at home. Early on, Henri Lefebvre, a liberal Marxist sociologist, had warned against the invasion of everyday life by the "commodity". Now, reaching its "final stage", capital was reinventing itself from scratch as a benevolent, even an exciting system. With the help of developing technologies, like domestic appliances, it was now trading its repressive antics for more "humane" and attractive form of exploitation. Those it used to enslave as workers now were being reinvented as consumers. The nature and scope of "alienation", as a result, was changing drastically. What mattered most at this point was to instill in workers desires that the industry itself would satisfy. Flooded with material signs, the population at large was quickly shedding class distinctions and political ideologies and turning into a resilient, newly mobile class of consumers..

..For the situationists, "integration" and "separation" were the major features of the "alienation" that was now affecting the entire society. Integration, because it homogenized social relations by means of images precluding any direct experience of life; separation, because everything that capital was making available through the technological breakthrough and justified in the name of progress-automobile, television, travel, etc.- merely reinforced the conditions of social isolation. The "spectacle" was both the primary feature of contemporary society and its main instrument, an active force of integration which precluded any real form of dialogue or participation...

...like the body itself, the entire society was now being permeated by a flow of signs that substituted for things, as artificial respiration takes over patients' breathing in a coma. In the studio reality, politics was turned into a "motion picture". And yet even Guy Debord hadn't really grasped what was so powerful about the pictures he denounced. It wasn't their sheer accumulation that mattered most in the spectacle, but their motion. Hyperreality wasn't an ideological manipulation, as conspiracy theory would have it, it was the product of speed, of the dizzying instantaneity and interactivity of images...