Situationism today

In a recent visit to a splendid exhibition of Mario Schifano’s work at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, I found myself once again deeply immersed in reflections and comparisons regarding the Situationist movement. This inspired me to read some of its foundational texts and weigh them against our current reality. Those magnetic moments when you feel intensely alive…

Guy Debord wrote The Society of the Spectacle in 1967. It was the manifesto of a radical group of Parisian intellectuals. At the time, it seemed like a niche cultural critique.
Today, it reads like a map of the world.
Debord was right. It’s just that nobody was listening.

The point almost everyone misses

When we talk about geopolitics, we are still largely speaking the language of the twentieth century. Territories. Resources. Alliances. Deterrence.
This is correct. But it is incomplete.
Because there is a variable that the twentieth century had never seen in this form: the systematic management of perception as a tool of power.
And this is where Debord becomes eerie.

What Debord was actually saying

The most common mistake is reducing Situationism to a mere critique of television or consumerism. It is much more than that.
The central thesis is this:
Modern power governs through representations, not through direct force. Through the construction of reality itself.
The spectacle is not just a media circus. It is the very form in which advanced capitalism organizes social experience.
Translated to the present day: whoever controls the narrative, controls consent. And whoever controls consent, controls power.

Contemporary wars aren’t just fought where you think

Think of Ukraine. Think of Gaza. Think of Taiwan, Iran, or hybrid conflicts.
Every conflict exists simultaneously on two levels:

• The physical level: Territory. Casualties. Missiles. Diplomacy.
• The spectacular level: TikTok clips. Memes. Narratives. Engagement. Algorithms.

These are not two separate levels; they are interdependent.
A battle won on the ground can be lost in the global imagination. A tactical defeat can become a narrative victory.
This is profoundly Debordian. War has become a competitive stream of images. And often, that stream matters more than the underlying reality.

Power has changed. Most analyses haven’t noticed.

In the twentieth century, power was industrial, military, and bureaucratic. These things still matter. But today, power is also—and in some cases primarily—cognitive, narrative, and algorithmic. Nation-states are fighting to:

• Control platforms;

• Steer the emotions of entire populations;

• Influence the algorithms that filter reality;

• Build alternative interpretative frameworks.

Russian disinformation isn’t twentieth-century propaganda. It is distributed cognitive engineering. The US-China narrative war isn’t just public diplomacy. It is a battle over which version of the world feels most plausible to billions of people. Digital psyops, AI-generated influence campaigns, and decentralized propaganda are weapons. You just won’t find them in IISS reports.

The geopolitical question of the 21st century

Debord wrote that the spectacle does not hide reality; it replaces it.
For decades, this sounded like a provocative hyperbole.
Today, we see deepfakes, synthetic realities, generative AI, persuasive simulations, and industrially decontextualized viral content.
The central geopolitical question is no longer just: “What happened?”
It is: “Which version of reality will win?”
This changes everything. It changes how strategy is crafted, how power is measured, and what it even means to win a conflict.

HyperNormalisation—Living inside a narrative you know is false

Adam Curtis documented this phenomenon brilliantly. We live in systems where complexity is genuinely unmanageable. Therefore, politics produces simplified narratives, and the media constructs emotional realities. Everyone knows these narratives are incomplete, distorted, and self-serving. And yet, people keep right on living inside them anyway.

Not out of stupidity, but out of cognitive necessity. Because the human brain cannot process raw reality without narrative filters.
This is Debord applied to global geopolitics. And it explains many things that traditional analyses fail to grasp.

Social media isn’t a collection of platforms. It’s power infrastructure.

TikTok, X, YouTube, Telegram.

They don’t just distribute content; they organize our perception of the world.

They are cognitive territories. Cultural weapons. Infrastructures of geopolitical influence.

Debord already sensed that whoever controls representation controls social experience. But he could never have imagined the sheer scale. Today, we are talking about algorithms shaping the reality of billions of people in real time. Simultaneously. And without anyone ever voting for it.

Trump, Putin, Zelensky, Musk: situationist figures.

In very different ways, yes.

Not because they are consciously Debordian, but because they objectively embody politics as permanent symbolic management.

It’s not just about what they do. It’s about how they appear, how they circulate, how they are memed, and how they dominate the narrative flow.

• Zelensky is the cleanest example. A former actor. Direct, social-first communication. Real-time global narrative building. He turned a war of survival into a global media production of resistance, making it more effective at capturing international attention than any traditional diplomacy ever could.

• Trump is different but equally Debordian: he systematically spectacularizes conflict. Every move is engineered to generate a reaction, engagement, and coverage. Politics as a continuous performance.

• Musk controls global communication infrastructures. He is, himself, a spectacle. The two things are inseparable.

AI is the point of no return.

With generative artificial intelligence, we are entering a phase Debord did not foresee. Because now, we can produce:

• Synthetic images indistinguishable from reality;

• Automated propaganda at an industrial scale;

• Political avatars;

• Personalized persuasive simulations;

• Infinite content tailored to every single cognitive segment.

The risk is not just disinformation. It is the shared dissolution of reality. Debord spoke of spectacular alienation. The problem looming on the horizon might be even more radical: a computational, algorithmically constructed reality where the boundary between experience and simulation becomes operationally irrelevant.