The spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life. Commodification is not only visible, we no longer see anything else; the world we see is the world of the commodity.

Consumable survival must constantly expand because it never ceases to include privation.

Several key figures in the history of computation lived and died centuries or decades ago. I call these people, renowned in scientific circles but less known to the public, the patriarchs. Other co-creators of personal computer technology are still at work today, continuing to explore the frontiers of mind-machine interaction. I call them the pioneers. The youngest generation, the ones who are exploring the cognitive domains we will all soon experience, I call the Infonauts.

For the immediate future, the issue of whether machines can become intelligent is less important than learning to deal with a device that can become whatever we clearly imagine it to be.

Once you have created a general-purpose machine that can imitate any other machine, the future development of the tool depends only on what tasks you can think to do with it.

In societies where actual commodities were few and far between, money was the apparent master, serving as plenipotentiary representative of the greater power that remained unknown. With the Industrial Revolution’s manufactural division of labor and mass production for a global market, the commodity finally became fully visible as a power that was colonizing all social life. It was at that point that political economy established itself as the dominant science, and as the science of domination.

Whereas during the primitive stage of capitalist accumulation “political economy considers the proletarian only as a worker,” who only needs to be allotted the indispensable minimum for maintaining his labor power, and never considers him “in his leisure and humanity,” this ruling-class perspective is revised as soon as commodity abundance reaches a level that requires an additional collaboration from him. Once his workday is over, the worker is suddenly redeemed from the total contempt toward him that is so clearly implied by every aspect of the organization and surveillance of production, and finds himself seemingly treated like a grown-up, with a great show of politeness, in his new role as a consumer. At this point the humanism of the commodity takes charge of the worker’s “leisure and humanity” simply because political economy now can and must dominate those spheres as political economy. The “total denial of man” has thus taken charge of all human existence.

The spectacle is the modern complement of money: a representation of the commodity world as a whole which serves as a general equivalent for what the entire society can be and can do.