Times Square at night, its buildings covered in illuminated advertising signs, one of them for television appliances.
Times Square at night, 1953. Signs for whisky and television sets.Image: “New York City views (Times Square at night)”, Gottscho-Schleisner, 1953. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped and resized for this page.

Guy Debord published The Society of the Spectacle in Paris in 1967, as 221 numbered theses. His target was a society where people relate to each other through images, and where the image of an experience starts to stand in for the experience.

The book is hard going. Debord writes in compressed, aphoristic French, and the English translations keep the density. It rewards short sittings, a few theses at a time.

Synthetic media goes further

Debord was writing about advertising and television. A generated video of an event that never happened goes a step past anything he described, because no experience stands behind it at all.

The practical test I take from him is provenance. Follow a striking clip back toward its source and count how many hands it passed through. Each repost strips away context, and by the time the clip lands in a feed it carries more confidence than the person who first filmed it ever claimed.

Content credentials and watermarks help. They work only if people learn to look for them, which hands the problem back to the spectator Debord was writing for.