Reading the Jean Baudrillard excerpt reminded me how much his work draws on Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, published in 1967. The Society of the Spectacle, in turn, extended Marx's commodity fetishism to contemporary society, where people express their individualism by buying the same products as millions of other people. Commodities thus supplant relations among people. Here is Debord's definition of the spectacle.

4
The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.

5
The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual deception produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective.

6
Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle also represents the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the production process.

In 1988 (4 years before his death in 1992), Debord revisited his book and argued that the spectacle had become even more pervasive, correctly predicting that Soviet-style communism was being overrun. It's worth reading the first nine sections of Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. In thesis 5, he describes the integrated spectacle as the combined effect of five principal features: incessant technological renewal; fusion of State and economy; generalized secrecy; forgeries without reply; a perpetual present.

Think about these for a moment:
1. incessant technological renewal. e.g. We require electricity for most of our daily functions, yet none of us has the means to produce it or distribute it. Hence much of our day is controlled by technical-industrial elites.
2. fusion of state and economy. e.g. A major activity of government is to maintain a thriving stock market. Yet the majority of workers have not benefited since 1974.
3. generalized secrecy. e.g. We have little access to extensive electronic dossiers maintained on all of us.
4. forgeries without reply. e.g. The press is no longer a public watchdog. Big lies like those that justified invading Iraq are not repudiated.
5. perpetual present. e.g. Trivial information is continually recycled.

Here's what Debord foresaw:

IX.
This perfect democracy fabricates its own inconceivable enemy, terrorism. It wants, actually, to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The history of terrorism is written by the State and it is thus instructive. The spectating populations must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else seems rather acceptable, in any case more rational and democratic.