The Unbearable Lightness of Entertainment

Entertainment has become indispensable to the necrosystem both as a distraction and a buffer against truth.  Making light of disasters is the most effective way to normalise crises and deflect from any serious conversation attempting to zoom in on culprits.  Fortunately for the ruling classes, people desperate for distraction love to be entertained and it has been the longtime interest of leaders to keep their audiences perpetually laughing into oblivion.  Amusement is one of the most powerful anaesthetics, which is why entertainment long ago escaped the curtains of circuses and theatres and invaded every living moment of human existence.  The invasion of sponsored entertainment into our lives is not simply a symptom of the necrocapitalist consumaverse.  It is an instrument of desensitisation to reality and truth.  We live in a suffocating dystopia where dopamine has become our only oxygen and entertainment is a gleeful gateway into indoctrination.  The interchangeable use of humour and fact, fiction and reality by the entertainment dystopia has rendered both truth and fact effectively irrelevant.  It is a miracle how this world has not nuked itself already during one of its frothy hallucinations.

Previously a separate side dish, entertainment is now a condiment liberally applied on anything and everything we are exposed to.  Whereas entertainment used to come with a clear warning on the package indicating it is to be consumed only as amusement, it has now become a nasty, hidden ingredient in every piece of our news diet.  Whereas it used to have a straightforward purpose, entertainment has become a vehicle for dishing out brand propaganda, sales pitches and political rhetoric that have nothing to do with entertainment.  

Although entertainment has always been weaponized, in the digital age it achieved terrifying new capabilities for distraction, intrusion, collusion, gaslighting and manipulation – courtesy of the collaboration between digital advertising and good old “bread and circuses” practices.  Because of its potential to distract, normalise and quickly seize attention within the psychonomy’s crowded cacophony, entertainment has become a devastating weapon.

Nowhere has the unbearable lightness of entertainment been more damaging than in the areas of our lives that we know should not be taken lightly.  Entertainment has merged with news so much so that the two are becoming indistinguishable: newscasts have been filled with light humour and morning variety shows with normalised news to the point where we confuse what is real with what is funny.  This is the fascist wet dream of both leaders and brands: to keep everyone confused about what they are seeing while they get away with murder.  Even news and political campaigns now follow the golden rule of entertainment borrowed from marketing and advertising:  you have to “hook” your audience in the first two seconds with something utterly dumb and stupid, otherwise you’ve lost them.  This two-second approach leaves no room for processing, digesting and analysing the information let alone take it seriously in the first place, which is exactly what the messengers want.  Entertainment has become the all-purpose sugar sprayed on the news to make it more palatable.  All this achieves is to condition society into an aversion for facts, and an affinity towards five-second TikTok videos.  Entertainment has integrated itself so seamlessly into everything, that people watch morning gossip shows expecting to be informed, and evening news expecting to be entertained.  At some point as a spectator, you just give up on the truth altogether and become as much a vegetable as the popcorn you’re eating. 

Transitioning into this dystopia was an easy game.  Given that most of us only understand the world through products, brands and entertainment, news and political rhetoric simply followed suit: becoming a branded consumable to be quickly discarded as soon as the next product on the list crosses our field of vision.  We became passive consumers of information whose role was reduced from critiquing and debating to bringing out the popcorn during the news, and the credit card during commercial breaks. It is hard to pay attention to the news when what you are being shown isn’t facts anymore, but a pre-digested version of reality sprinkled with so many sweeteners on top that you can’t make out what’s underneath: a journalist’s lunchtime puke.

There is no better example of this than how the climate crisis is being covered in the news.  The climate crisis is given the popcorn treatment whereby lethal heatwave reports are routinely accompanied by archive footage of people in fountains and beaches, while natural disasters are glossed over by reporting on search-and-rescue stories of survival and bravery through what is an unsurvivable crisis for the human species.

The collapse of civilisations is always preceded by the collapse of reality itself. Most damaging is the way in which serious news is mixed with “light” content.  When news presenters can casually switch back and forth between weather disasters, genocide and announcing raffle winners to a celebrity concert, then this is effectively the humiliation of reality.  Yet our media dystopia has mixed facts with opinion and real news with entertainment so seamlessly that, everything has effectively become humour.  This civilisation may just end up laughing itself all the way to the edge of the cliff.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist.

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