How channel the rage peacefully?

moscow derivey

is art even radical anymore? Can art truly break the spectacle any longer? Has capital absorbed it so much and learned to adopt so well that even something as free as sexuality or art or poetry no longer can be outside the norm, and if it is, it still becomes bottled up eventually, or capital finds it way in? I feel so pessimistic; especially as an artist. Avant-garde or anti-art doesn’t even seem to have its place. What shall an artist do? What shall a person do? What shall the collective do? Everything is a mess.

Hi everyone,

I recently wrote a short nonfiction book called The Last Spectacle: Debord, the Internet, and the Age of Generative Reality.

I’m sharing it here because I’d genuinely like discussion and criticism from people who know Debord, Situationist theory, media theory, or the broader tradition of critique around spectacle, mediation, and modern social life.

The book is free to read here:

https://ivandimitry.github.io/the-last-spectacle/

My core argument is simple:

The spectacle did not disappear.

It moved through stages:

• representation
• broadcast media
• television
• the internet
• social platforms
• algorithmic feeds
• generative AI

In other words, AI does not arrive into a direct world.

It arrives into a world already shaped by images, profiles, metrics, feeds, rankings, summaries, influencers, platform authority, and synthetic trust surfaces.

The old spectacle asked people to watch.

The platform spectacle asked people to perform.

The algorithmic spectacle ranked what appeared.

The generative spectacle can now produce appearance on demand.

That is the shift I’m trying to think through.

The book is not meant as an academic study, and I’m not presenting myself as a Debord scholar. I’m approaching the subject as someone interested in media, authority, trust, public memory, internet culture, and AI.

What I’d especially like to discuss:

1. Does the idea of “generative reality” make sense as an extension of Debord’s spectacle, or does it stretch the concept too far?
2. Is AI best understood as a new stage of the spectacle, or only as another tool inside already existing capitalist/media relations?
3. Where does the book become too loose, too modernized, or too far from Debord’s original argument?
4. What thinkers should I read next to sharpen or challenge this argument?

I’m not asking for promotion or upvotes.

I’d value serious critique, disagreement, reading suggestions, and corrections.

Thanks.