A stunning and prophetic little book....
I really have to really the person who brought this material to my attention. Though I have to say that nearly the whole of Debord's and Plant's critique, including and especially its objective standpoint... apart, perhaps, from a certain particularly modernizing element of virtuality -- though that, too, in fact -- is contained in Plato's critique of Heraclitus, rhetoric, and the sophist in
Gorgias,
Republic,
Phaedrus,
Sophist, and throughout the corpus.
This may be surprising to some. But if you reread the texts of Plato, you will see it.
(I'm not talking, obviously, about Plato's politics -- which could not be more dissimilar - but of a point in metaphysics.... and it is a central point.)
There is a nice reference in this volume to the Baudrillards of the world on p. 60: "The demi-elite is content to know that almost everything is obscure, ambivalent, 'constructed' by unknown codes. A more exclusive elite would like to know what is true, hard as it is to distinguish in each particular case...."