Debord described [..] in his 1961 lecture (delivered via tape recorder) on the “Prospects for Conscious Modifications in Everyday Life,” everyday life was “organized within the limits of a scandalous poverty,” a poverty defined by the “scarcity of free time and scarcity of possible uses of this free time.” And this condition was by no means accidental, but the necessary product of modern capitalist accumulation and industrialization. Such poverty, in Debord’s words, “is the expression of the fundamental need for the lack of consciousness and for mystification in an exploitative society, in a society of alienation.” If Lefebvre had first suggested that everyday life could be understood as the product of uneven development within capitalist society, Debord would extend this idea by further describing ordinary existence as “a colonized sector,” as “a kind of reservation for the good savages who (without realizing it) make modern society, with the rapid increase in its technological powers and the forced expansion of its market, work.” Everyday life, then, marked a border, the “frontier of the controlled and the uncontrolled sectors of life”—between, that is, the planned sector of production and the as yet unplanned sector of lived experience, consumption, leisure. The situationist goal was “to substitute an always moving frontier for the present ghetto, to work continuously for the organization of new opportunities”—in other words, to put uncertainty to work through the rational control of productive forces, to institute a regime devoted to eliminating the irrational, mythical holdovers still present in everyday life. No longer a colony, this sphere was to be fully integrated into the logical functioning of society, a complete planification of the future.

Guy Debord and The Situationist international: Texts and Documents