Yves Scherer. The Last of the English Roses

"The whole life (…) announces itself as an immense accumulation of shows. Everything that was directly experienced has turned away into a representation. The show is not a set of images, but a social relationship between people, mediated by images." These words are the beginning of Guy Debord's book The show society, which in 1967 interpreted the modern society of images as a mystification aimed at legitimizing existing production systems. Beyond the Marxist inspiration that animated it, the text describes the artificial process of objectification that transforms an originally partial and politicized vision of the world into a univocal perspective presented as a reference model. The reflections of the French philosopher analyzed the birth of consumerism, in reference to which the author coined the definition of "augmented survival", and stigmatized the transformation of the worker into a consumer of illusions in a prophetic intuition of the tyranny of images that the explosion of social media has made today more than ever capillary.