I want to learn more about "the spectacle" and how society is almost certainly manipulating how I feel...

Well thanks you shat something that was somewhat useful. I think I'll read the fucking book sometime but you know I have to read everything I'm very poor on theory

Use spicy memes to disrupt the spectacle

It's an update of Marxist philosophy from the 1890s to the 1960s, which I think is enough to appeal to any communist. Marx wrote a critique of political economy, while largely leaving out detailed work about other topics (such as the state) in his most fundamental works. The Situationists tried to combine everything Marxists laid out in the 70 years since Engels passed and to analyze society on their own and combine everything all of this entails into a single framework that can serve as an understanding of the capitalist system back then. Doing stuff like that is very complicated and it doesn't seem like anyone made it accessible to all of us in the meantime, meaning it is mostly left to the very educated and well read folks.

Spectacle? The Spectacle is the undisturbed flow of modern capitalism. It's capitalist alienation (mandatory separation of one's produces towards exchange and valorization) and commodity fetishism (the valorizing of commodities beyond their actual exchange values) driven to the extreme. It's social relations mediated by images, obscured as relations between commodities. It's life reduced to a passive meditation about commodities.

In modern capitalism commodities require advertisement to compete, therfore the decision to consume the commodity you do has already been made for you:
Thus, because your wants and needs are transmitted via media (advertisements, TV shows, etc.) you are never doing anything but acting out the choices already made in the productive sphere (next year's fashion trends are decided when this year's line enters production, the movie you watch has been approved by movie execs to already prototype the next, etc.), therfore you never "live" in the market. It's the natural progression of evergrowing alienated production following capital's trajectory. The images which surround commodities have overtaken the commodities themselves in importance for capital.
(What I put between square brackets here are some excerpts from SotS, within which a lot of points are presented like this in numbered bullet points.)

It's worth noting to everyone not aware that the Situationists were left communists, developing their own form of externally political Marxism by borrowing from e.g. Bordiga (even if they weren't Leninists) and Pannekoek (even if they were not particularly council communist), much like within post-Situationism, where lie the autonomists, anarchist side of communization and Marxist side of communization. Post-Situationism is most of left communism now because Situationism, much like what on its sat inside the historical left, rather conclusively hit its own theoretical limits quickly after giving us a new potential beginning point to look at modern capitalism again, understanding that this development has in a rough sense domesticated the proletariat to capital and has rendered the bourgeois almost superfluous in relevance.

The proletariat as domesticated because no longer does the worker sit in the traditional factory unit, clearly identifying his exploiter in the high room in a top hat, and wherever this productive relation does exist the spectacle has managed to sufficiently recuperate the relation between capital's functions, breeding what Zizek would aptly call the impotent postmodern father figure (nice western Buddhist boss man treating you like your equal). The bourgeoisie as superfluous because productive developments no longer necessarily require a personified capital (bourgeoisie) in order to redress productivity and plan the next move on the market, largely to do with this confluence and automation.

One such post-Situationist is Gilles Dauvé, who wrote a pretty good critique of them you can read here: libcom.org/library/critique-situationist-international-gilles-dauve.

To expand on this, in most Situationist theory, and this is because the Situationists were directly a part of it, May '68 is seen as the death bed of workers' movements in their traditional form: the final breath; the last ditch attempt at confronting capital with proletarian militancy. Trotskyists, revolutionary trade unionists/syndicalists and most other types of primarily activistic and workerist types of socialists are a prime example of the utter impotence of this strategy today, and slowly but surely they too will either realize their contemporary futility and develop or will completely dissolve as factions within the left.

Another thing I think we should praise the Situationists on is that they started the critique of the cadre. The cadre is the name given to the group of intellectuals that fancy themselves revolutionary. To this group belong types like militant academia and others that believe in the inculcating mode of "building class consciousness". They in every way stand outside of the class struggle but see themselves as its highest expression. The Situationists say that these are if anything the biggest stumbling block for any future workers' movement because unlike even the Leninists who will look for spontaneity and coalesce it into a revolutionary programme in the vanguard, the cadre already premeditate their revolutionary programmes and conclusions and exist already as vanguard, ready to push through what they want and have concluded is to be done at all costs rather than, at least to the credit of the Leninists, taking the desire as it exists in worker militancy and weaponizing it in that form. Urgent and orgasmic viewing material: youtu.be/JeSx0g-PnaE?t=21m54s.

Oh shit! The lottery, the game shows, reality TV.

Oh Shit! Again that's like 90% of everything on TV. Sedentary people looking down on obese people. Comfortably poor looking down on welfare recipients.

The spectacle truly is the key to understanding society.

Some of his concepts are interesting and could be plugged into another system of thought, but that guy saw theory as a pleasurable game of no more value to him than playing checkers, he didn't even really care about practical application or validity.
He's too far up his own ass, but some cool stuff could come out of it; like hegel and the young hegelians.

Found another good one: Lefebvre (based structuralist Marxist in the ranks of Ranciere, Althuser, Lacan, etc.) analyzing the Situationist movement: notbored.org/lefebvre-interview.html. I really like reading constructive takedowns of the Situs because the Situs in opening up pandora's box with their realizations in their historical position started drawing their own conclusions and stances from them immediately that were obviously bound to be really underdeveloped, nihilistic or even shit. Any critique thus effectively immediately gives us a new answer of where better to look.

Basically. You have to keep in mind though and develop a view of this that doesn't just the superficial expression of these things as such, but the mechanistic workings of wage-labor and value that generate and valorize it all. The spectacle truly is but the capitalist mode of production as it dawned upon mankind but in complete confluence.