We live in a neoliberalism economy where the most important think we can do is buy, so the best way we can turn the system around it by starting to think critically about your own consumerism. It's people thinking hard work alone will lead them anywhere they want because they've been told by people who haven't necessarily worked harder than them in order to become successful and who are very self-conscious about protecting the social order they prosper in. People crafting their identity around fictional characters (* ahem * Tyler Durden * ahem * ) and shunning their relationship to their real environment. It's people arguing over iPhones vs Androids. What is the spectacle, then? Debord has a great way of summarizing it: the colonization of human life by commodities. Everybody acknowledge we live in the society of spectacle, but either don't believe its rules apply to them or adopt a defeatist attitude towards it. The spectacle is a concept that's very swanky to talk about in dinner parties like George Orwell's 1984, but it is often simplified and, ironically enough, objectified by its debaters. It's Re-read this bad boy for research purposes. Re-read this bad boy for research purposes.

Society of the spectacle