No it isn't, it's been around a lot longer than that. I love the Illumintus books, but they're a rehash of existing concepts. I suggest you check out Guy Debord's Society of the spectacle; as well as the book, there's a film which is available in full on Youtube and narrated by Debord himself. Of course such ideas had been floating around in philosophy for longer than that, but Debord's work was very current when the first Illuminatus trilogy was written around 1975.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle

I loved They Live before the pervert's guide to ideology, but you're right that this post is probably derivative of the latter. It's just a daily blog post that we're doing as part of Winter Break Of Code, and wasn't really "meant" for the front page of HN, so I'm surprised to see it in a place like this.

For what it's worth, I wasn't trying to write an analysis of They Live, and was just using it as a tongue-in-cheek back drop for a different question.

I doubt Marlinspike needed Zizek to discover They Live.

Attribution for the premise of They Live?