Amusing Ourselves to Death
A latter-day prophet predicted the triumph of trivia.
In pursuit of moderation, I’ve concluded that anyone desirous to be on TV is indelibly insane, devious, and in desperate need of psychiatric intervention or a humane, entertaining form of euthanasia.
Indeed, the only reality TV for which I conceal a mild craving would resemble the movie, The Running Man. (For Millennials and Gen Z: Before Arnold Schwarzenegger became a professional Californian, he was an actor in something called the moving pictures.)
In Running Man’s dystopian America, convicts are forced into a gameshow to battle psychopathic hunters in a lopsided bid for their freedom. The contestants on my utopian redux would not be mere criminals, but influencers.
I’d pluck other hopefuls from the ranks of LinkedIn, along with anyone entitled ‘thought leader,’ and anyone who drops into conversation their ‘EV.’ I’d condemn too the peddlers of falafel, and those irredeemables who like always uplift like every sentence as if it were a question?
In this just world of mine, vocal fry and vocal uplift would constitute crimes against humanity. The punishment, (for them, at least) would be an appearance on Running Man. (Sorry, scolds, Running Person Assigned Male at Birth didn’t fit on the billboard, nor roll off the tongue.)
Contestants would earn their freedom by escaping the clutches of a cadre of palpably gleeful justice-seekers armed with advanced, and often prototype weaponry.
For the time being, my modest proposal is probably a touch too out there. No doubt, Running Man would improve the condition of the twerking class by dissolving many rivals within the twerking class. A kind of creative destruction. It’s a win-win, and all gravy. After all, the contestants crave nothing more than fame and the worship of strangers.
For influencers, appearing on Running Man would be their pilgrimage to Mecca. Just think of the likes and the follows and the retweets they’d absorb, as a justice-seeker immortalises them into a pile of Instagrammable ash. Everyone’s a winner.
Recently on the New York subway, the tannoy for once occasioned legible noises. Usually, the speaker tends toward pharmaceutical extremes.
When sponsored by Xanax™ the speaker drawls like a Walkman running out of battery: ‘This… is… Parkside… Av… nyoo.’ When sponsored by Adderall™: ‘The next stop is Parkside Avenue! Stand-clear-the-closing-doors! Bing-bong!’
The speaker then announced the three most loathsome words in the English language: replacement bus service.
Corralled off the train, we assembled onto the waiting bus like cattle en route to the slaughterhouse. A surreal spectacle ensued. Seemingly, the bus driver had that morning considered spraying hollow-point bullets into pedestrians and suicide-by-cop, before instead trudging into work for the ten-thousandth time. You won’t believe what happened next!
A young girl, no older than seventeen, mutated from a quiet blank slate into a sentient epileptic fit. She angled her phone above her head.
“Oh-my-gawd! You guys! Guys! I’m totally lost in New York! I cannot—believe—this—is—happening!”
Above the strain and drudgery of the heaving bus, above the whine of the tires, for forty-five minutes she beamed to her flock an inch-by-inch account of her personal apocalypse. The driver wondered whether he’d made the right call: ‘I’d be on the motherf—ing news about now.’
In that steel sarcophagus, the deboning of all that was civilised reminded me of another old movie, Alive, in which a plane crashes into the Andes, and the survivors live their best lives by eating each other’s thawing backsides.
I don’t mean to disparage the young girl. To her credit, she has expertly calculated the monstrous arithmetic of her teens.
To the younger generations, content is indeed king. Every slither of their offline lives is ‘content’ for their online lives. The logic of social media demands sensationalism. Every whim dressed up, served up, chewed up and spewed up. And subsumed by the next new thing.
In this strange death of the ordinary, she and millions of others feel the need to embellish and sensationalise, to crazy-make and contrive the humdrum occurrences like that of a replacement bus service. Never have we documented ourselves so intimately revealing so little.
Unnervingly, eighty-six per cent of young Americans want to be influencers. More young people wish to be YouTube stars than astronauts.
The great irony: this era of content creation creates little content worthy of creation. Twitter and TikTok talk into cot death more novels, dramas, paintings, essays, symphonies, and films than Savonarola’s Bonfire of the Vanities turned to ashes.
Not so long ago, Neil Postman suggested the shift from the printed word to the TV screen would dement our culture into a theatre of narcissism and trivia, empty-headed sloganeering, and fame-seeking.
In his work, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman feared that abandoning the printed word for the pixelated screen would trivialise the serious and the thoughtful into the unserious and the sensational. Postman foresaw a time in which technologies wrenched away our capacity—or indeed the very necessity—to think.
“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when a cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainment, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility,” he wrote.
Today, a presidential candidate’s chances perch largely upon whether they’re ‘good on TV.’ Do they exude the charisma of a gameshow host? Talking heads humour a candidate’s ideas as if those ideas were some charming moribund quirk from some vanished, peculiar age.
Postman foresaw social media’s rising sea of anti-clever drivel.
This week, an Irish pop duo named Jedward perfectly illustrated this trivial culture when they waded into Queen Elizabeth II’s death.
An entity so loathsome the mere fact they are twins discredits the case for a benevolent Creator, Jedward first got famous after debasing themselves during the early rounds of a reality ‘talent’ show. Now they say anything for the attention they so crave.
After Prince Charles became King Charles, the Irish twins tweeted in defiance: ‘Not My King!’. Reader, they’re Irish, not British. King Charles is not nor never will be their king.
The triumph of trivia will end in a civilisation like that of satire, Idiocracy. A population so, like, dumb, they like live in like garbage and like totally talk like this.
In Idiocracy, the stupid swamp the intelligent until everyone is stupid. The future a mountain of garbage where dying crops wither on Gatorade. Citizens never miss their favourite TV show, ‘Ow! My Balls!’ Their highest art? A ninety-minute fart movie called ‘Ass.’
Neil Postman had a point. Back when the printed word was king, even the local nutter had to be literate. In old newspaper letters, (the favoured vessel of oddballs and attention-seekers,) nutters had to formulate an argument lest their letters end up in the bin.
Now oddballs publish their demented visions on their very own YouTube channels.
The loss is palpable. The local nutter is no longer the local nutter but a global nutter. Once handicapped by their oddness, nutters now network with other nutters. Naturally, nutters fall in love with other nutters. Their children—raised by nutters—are exposed daily to other nutters, then too become nutters. Like the Buddhist samsara, the cycle of nuttery is an endless one.
A few years back, you’d encounter such people rarely. Perhaps at a rave, or in one of those weird-smelling health food shops. They’d toddle away their days away writing letters, making papier-mâché cats in the local institution, or by joining the Green Party.
Before social media, nutters struggled to reproduce. Whoever may or may not have designed us slipped the Nutter Loophole into evolution.
Social media has bypassed this evolutionary loophole. Soon, our civilisation will be one endless TikTok.
Mankind peaked in Ancient Greece. We’ve wasted 2,500 years since, amusing ourselves to death.
The peak of civilization keeps getting pushed back further and further. :)
And yet, I still crave electrolytes.