“In his book COMMENTS ON THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE (1988), Guy Debord presents a meditation on what I would call ““misinformation.”” He begins by calling it ““unanswerable lies.”” He also associate it with ““disinformation”” and goes to ““the fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.”” It is filled with extraordinary insights: Because so many ecological elements–the ozone layer, a population of starfish that suddenly begin to tear themselves to pieces in the presence of one or another pollutant, or a plant that goes extinct somewhere in South America–have no attested market value, ““it is highly dangerous to base an industrial strategy on environmental imperatives.”” Climate change deniers do have market value–which is why we will go on manufacturing them, all over the world. ““Where disinformation is named, it does not exist. Where it exists, it is not named.”” Considering it was written when it was, it is an uncanny analysis of what has produced much of our present problems, in terms of isolation, and terrorism, and general malaise. With its 1967 prequel, THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE, a consideration of the defuse and concentrated forms of ““spectacular power,”” these are two extraordinary performances.”

Facebook Post on De Bord’s Society of the Spectacle, 2016